I love Australia, because it shows you what California would look like if the South had won the Civil War. You get so few good counterfactuals in history. And I love...
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A Natural Solution?
Considering we have the good fortune to deal with one of mankind’s greatest creations, we wine people spend a lot of time worrying. Our industry is inextricably linked to nature...
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The Disenfranchised
If you search in Google for “countries without a wine culture,” it returns an entry for “What countries are dry?”: “Pakistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Mauritania, Libya, the Maldives, Iran,...
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The Stage And The Actor
I had to buy some more wine glasses the other day. I’ve always used Spiegelau ones at home – good quality, but not so expensive that breaking them induces a...
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Insider Talk
“When art critics get together,” Picasso is meant to have said, “they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy...
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Rethinking Fine Wine
It was a noble, if ultimately inconclusive exercise. Maybe that’s true of anything that involves an indigestible dose of subjectivity. But you can’t fault Areni Global for attempting to define...
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Wine After Dry January
Dry January is over, for those quixotic enough to try it – but the shiver it provokes in the French wine industry continues. Ever since the battle over the first...
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Burrowing
A confession: I’m pretty sure I used the term ‘Kafkaesque’ before I’d read any Kafka. In itself this could count as faintly Kafkaesque in its admission that authenticity and the...
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The Tale of the Angelo Petri
In 1966, the US Senator and presidential candidate John McCain’s father, Admiral John S. McCain, Jr. spoke about wine in congressional testimony: Gallo’s “Thunderbird,” to be exact. Yes, that “fortified”...
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Wine Cultures
I think it was the bottle filled with urine that did it in the end. I felt bad for my friend. This was meant to be the evening of a...
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Can Wine Beat The Odds In 2023?
As wine-world knockabout, it was hard to beat. On BBC Newsnight last month, Conservative right-winger Jacob Rees-Mogg, perhaps the most arrogant British politician of his generation in a tough field,...
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Christmas Wine
You can tell a lot about a business by the film it chooses as representative of its customers. In the case of wine, the everlasting popularity of Sideways among professionals...
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