HEALTH WARNING: Contains sweeping generalisations, use of stereotypes, and half-believed opinions dressed up as facts. If you feel agitated, apply “not everyone, but some…” liberally throughout. Abandon reading if agitation...
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Picking The Right Moment
Pharrell Williams, Kate Moss, and a soil expert walk into a bar… and share a bottle of Moët. Not my wittiest opening, but that’s because it isn’t really a joke....
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Drinking Together
Patrick McGovern was sometimes described as the Indiana Jones of wine, but this always struck me as wide of the mark. It was hard to imagine him wielding a bullwhip,...
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The Lost Domain
Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, published the year before the author died in action in 1914, is one of the most haunting and haunted novels ever written. Meaulnes, the restless, rebellious,...
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The Death Of Nostalgia
Something was eating away at me; had I written this piece before? Or had somebody else? The only result that came up after a hasty sanity check was an obscure...
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Where Next For Appellations?
Massive hailstones ravaged Chablis last year and fires consumed thousands of hectares in Galicia last month: climate change is accelerating. Grape-growing conditions in classic regions simply aren’t the same as...
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Wine Mismatching
The news came as no surprise, but it is welcome to have confirmation of one’s opinions nonetheless. If you have even a passing interest in the glorious pantomime that is...
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The Narrowing Of Choice
I picked up a book the other day which almost everybody knows about but which most, I suspect, have not actually read: Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England. It was published...
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What’s The Point Of Bolgheri?
I started writing this as a piece about Bolgheri, and ended up writing about myself, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. As in, we talk about...
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The Rewards of Patience
If anything teaches you patience, humility and a degree of circumspection, it’s making wine. However much of a hurry you may be in, a vineyard takes three years to produce...
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Spain’s Wine Revolution
Marta Labanda led me up the steep, black slopes of Barranca del Obispo. Here in Lanzarote, growers cultivate vines in hollows dug out of the granular black volcanic ash. It’s...
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Wines Without Borders
Climate change, with its pattern of extreme weather, has produced complex chains of events and decisions. One of them has led many producers in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, among Canada’s...
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