A wine, like a short story, should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Nobody would disagree with that. But how many do? How many start, toddle along for...
Read More
The Passing
Hard not to crave and seek, magpie-like, the shiny brightness and vigorous fruit burst of a brand-new wine. We open our bottles within hours of purchase and revel in instant...
Read More
A Sensorial Symphony
Vibrant. Rich. Exciting. Layered. Powerful. Complex. These words describe the third movement of Johannes Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Major. They also describe a vintage Champagne of excellent quality. In...
Read More
On Marginality
In the early 1990s, I tried growing wine grapes in Louisiana, near the Mississippi border. As I recall, Ruby Cabernet, the cross developed in 1936, was among the selected varieties....
Read More
Wines That Stop You In Your Tracks
There are pieces of music that stop me in my tracks. I mean that quite literally, as I do a lot of my listening to music while driving. I recall...
Read More
Dreadful Weather, Decent Wine
“Excuse me sir, would you like to try this wine? It’s from a crap vintage.” Hardly a selling point, if you as a waiter want to keep your job. Wine...
Read More
The Good Old Days
The past is a foreign country we get to rule as we wish. It is as we say it was and as we sit back to have some wine, talk...
Read More
Faith In Fakes
A good friend of mine turned 80 recently. To celebrate, he invited a few of us round for dinner and opened a bottle of 1942 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Grands...
Read More
Mistreating Wine
First of all, I should apologise to Lilian Barton. All I can say is that it wasn’t altogether my fault. A friend brought a bottle of Léoville-Barton 2014 to dinner...
Read More
The Curse Of Bordeaux
We splashed in the Saint Emilion lavoir, desperate to cool off on a 39-degree day in August. Yet this wasn’t when the weirdness of this broiling year really hit me....
Read More
What Are Americans Drinking?
For close to a year, I’ve been working as the self-proclaimed Ancient World specialist in a wine shop. In the process of spitting samples into a sink with various salesmen,...
Read More
The Tale of Two Château Palmers
What would Major General Charles Palmer think of Château Palmer being turned into a public cinema in 2022? This is a different Chíateau Palmer from the one most wine lovers...
Read More