If you want to understand the modern science of wine, you must eventually study carbon dioxide and the mechanics of alcoholic fermentation. To do that, it helps to look to...
Read More
Take Five
Commercially, the wine world’s problems continue. Young people are drinking less or not at all. Those who are drinking are largely not taking up drinking wine. It remains quite unfathomable...
Read More
Let’s Keep Wine Democratic
The wine market’s extremes are getting more extreme. Late last month Yellow Tail owner Casella Wines plunged to a AU$5.5 million [£2.9 million] loss, against a background of contraction in...
Read More
Nostalgia Isn’t Dead
The era that defined my youth is cool again. After years of gentle roasting from Gen Z, Millennials everywhere are finally having a reprieve: the 1990s and 2000s are enjoying...
Read More
The Bare Canvas
The psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, observed of creative life that, “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.” Van Gogh’s work was unappreciated for most...
Read More
Role Models
At a recent Pinot tasting, a leading South African producer long known for elegant wines firmly denied that they had ever copied Burgundy. Fair enough. We all want to be...
Read More
The Perfect Gift
I remember the first time I saw a four-leaf clover. I was five. It was gifted to me by a kind lady called June, a childhood friend of my mother....
Read More
Au Revoir, Michel
Twenty-five years ago, when Michel Rolland was in his pomp, I was lucky enough to have dinner with him at the Cinnamon Club in London. I arrived early and was...
Read More
Sliding Into Grace
The myth goes as follows. A venerable wine (most probably a red Bordeaux, and likely from the Left Bank) is brought up from the cellar, with all due reverence. It...
Read More
Wine’s Third Wave
We may surmise that the Iran war’s impact on the wine trade is unlikely to be uppermost in the minds of Tehran or Dubai residents. Nevertheless, this economic shock will...
Read More
The Ghost In The Glass
Anyone following wine discourse remembers what happened in early 2023. That was when ChatGPT appeared, seemingly threatening the jobs of wine writers: an “extinction level event,” some declared. Soon after,...
Read More
What You Want It To Be
It feels odd today, but there was a time when science was considered an aristocratic pursuit. Tycho Brahe was a nexus of Danish noble lineage, Lavoisier was the intellectual face...
Read More