The COVID Lockdown of 2020 has affected all of us in different ways. For starters, that pesky commute we were resenting…doesn’t seem so bad now, does it? And that overly...
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Why I love Pinot Noir
I have two big loves. Pinot Noir the variety, and that is an unconditional love. And Pinot Noir the wine, which is a conditional love. As a variety, Pinot Noir...
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Identifying your inner Dionysus
Lately, I’ve developed a fascination for cabbage. It started innocently enough, as an attempt to recreate a salad I had at a friend’s place, a simple affair pairing it with...
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Why I love Chenin Blanc
Chenin Blanc truly is the Cinderella of the wine industry, a shy grape, with no immediately outstanding features. If you’ve ever seen a bunch on the vine – a medium...
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Rosa Kruger: the queen of the Cape’s old vines
The air inside Rosa Kruger’s 4×4 is turning blue with expletives. Somehow the swear words sound even more forceful in Afrikaans, spat at the windscreen in disgust. This is road...
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Remaking Burgundy
“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the...
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A variety of small pleasures
Uncorked, Netflix’s newest addition to the cinematic wine canon, is a film you have already seen many times, and often you didn’t even make it to the end. The screenplay...
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Burgundy’s high flyer
“Where’s the Fourrier?” is an increasingly common question at Burgundy tastings these days. Just as closing time visitors to the Louvre are loath to tarry in the Etruscan collection on...
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Why rosé is a wine for all seasons
We – the wine trade – convinced wine lovers around the globe that sparkling wine isn’t just for celebrations. (Or, maybe wine drinkers just fell in love with Prosecco and...
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When is a gimmick a genuine innovation?
The most improbable things can turn out to have lasting value. Who would have thought, back in the day, that changing the old vats in Bordeaux, those ancient wooden barrels...
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Wine and writing in the time of Coronavirus
Shoreditch looked almost handsome in the late-winter sunlight filtering through the big windows of the Ace Hotel’s top floor. As I chatted to Jim Clendenen and tasted his crystalline Au...
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Hammer and cycle
No one, as far as Michael Broadbent knows, has ever died in one of his auctions. But in twenty years at the Christie’s rostrum, just about everything else seems to...
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