I hope you’ll forgive this column for being somewhat nostalgic. I want to begin by giving a picture of the wine-drinking habits and economics of a particular middle-class English family...
Read More
Raising Standards
Joy is unconfined, one assumes, in the Languedoc village of Montpeyroux: last week it became the 369th French Appellation d’Origine Controlée. This will mean stricter controls on the red grapes...
Read More
Palliative Measures
Things can only get worse was a mantra of student life in the 1980s. Thatcherism was dystopic, a priori. Graduation was just a blip. We were all back in our...
Read More
A Performance Art
Susannah Cibber was a terrific singer, by all accounts. Handel gave her the contralto solos in Messiah, and she had a great acting career as well: she became the highest...
Read More
Hand In Hand
Rowan Hooper’s new book, Togetherness, is a fascinating study of symbiosis, what he calls a “neglected silo” of scientific research. The subject might sound a bit geeky and pointy-headed, but...
Read More
Michelin And The Death Of The Wine Guide
It was entirely predictable that Michelin’s new venture into wine would trigger huffy French recriminations. Its Wine Selection Burgundy 2026, launched this month, awarded nine producers the top accolade of...
Read More
The Yang Of Greek Wine
By now this is so well-known that repeating it enters broken record territory. The biggest story for Greek wine the past 20 years has been the rise of Assyrtiko. From...
Read More
Marketing Natural Wine
I recall a conversation I had with one of the new people I met when I first moved to Madrid. She’d found out that I worked in wine. “In wine?”...
Read More
Too Difficult?
Yeats entitled one of his mid-life poems ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’. The poem is mainly a complaint, about the tangled business of running a theatre (the Abbey in Dublin)...
Read More
The Manipulation of Nature
Why are there so many exclamation marks in the world, and so few hyphens? What spurred this reflection was a menu: a dish featuring ‘Grilled line caught John Dory fillet’....
Read More
The Judgment of Paris Revisited
Even for opera lovers, it promises to be an odd show. Next month’s Napa Valley Festival stages the premiere of a work bringing Bacchus and Venus to 1970s Paris and...
Read More
Looking Back
Twice a year, I help to organise a wine dinner for a group of friends. For the most recent one, in Paris, my job was to bring the sweet wines...
Read More