As a former Evening Standard hack, I’m hardened to bad news stories, but I gasped in shock when the news broke on August 4 of the huge explosion in the...
Read More
Who holds the balance of power in Champagne?
The fierce dispute about the level of yield for the 2020 harvest to be agreed in Champagne has been widely, if not always entirely accurately, reported in the press. National...
Read More
A Virtual Tour of Greece
Let me invite you to a concert for the world’s smallest bouzouki. Rationally, I know full well that whining about not being able to travel in these circumstances is akin...
Read More
Lost in Translation?
Edmund Penning-Rowsell’s vast The Wines of Bordeaux (1969) is more textbook than billet-doux, though you won’t come away from it knowing how to make wine or grow grapes any better than...
Read More
Going off the radar
I am dreading a big COVID cull when my next NYC’s Best Wine Bars and Best Restaurant Wine Lists are published. In some cases, the establishments will be gone for good....
Read More
To drink wine is to travel
After months of lockdown and the return to a palimpsest of normality – who would have guessed six months ago that weekend supplements would run features on how to choose...
Read More
Looking at wine like an artist
My husband, who is a painter, says that the more colours you can describe, the more you can see. You could put it the other way round and it would...
Read More
Remembering Mr Lebanon
There aren’t many winemakers who get an obituary in the Daily Mail. But then there was no one in wine quite like Serge Hochar. Even the manner of his death,...
Read More
Côtes de Grantham might cost the earth
As a dramatisation of climate change and crisis, it felt like a moment. I was in the Putney car park of the PR company R&R Teamwork, talking to Oz Clarke...
Read More
Whither Bordeaux 2019?
Why on earth would anyone spend €370 for a bottle of Cheval Blanc when you can buy Figeac for €120? Both seem likely to score around the 98-100 point range...
Read More
What do consumers owe wine producers?
There is an old joke, of somewhat dubious taste, that has an elegant lady of a certain age approach a handsome young man in a café. She proceeds to make...
Read More
Changing the wine business for the better
It’s been a week of toppled statues and Premiership footballers taking the knee at Villa Park. It’s been a week in which the world has faced up to what history...
Read More