Is marriage a matter of the head or the heart? Driving back from my godson’s wedding in Nottingham recently, I heard an interview with Baroness Fiona Shackleton, Britain’s leading divorce...
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Natural Disaster Wines
Natural Wines are so last year. Oh, there’s the usual set of One Trick Phonies out there who will never stop evangelizing for Natural Wines. What else do they have?...
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Rock wine: the dry whites of Santorini
A staple of wine lore is how much better wine tastes at the place of its production. The bottle of Chianti at a villa in the Tuscan hills; the Provencal...
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Wine’s Magic Sauce
With the country sweltering through a heatwave, work sludges onwards towards August. Through an endless relay of ‘Out Of Office’ auto-responses, there’s only one thing everyone’s mind: holidays, and all...
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On Parker and Parkerisation
Robert Parker is one of the most talked about and divisive individuals in the world of wine. Now into his seventies and the twilight of his career, he still has...
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Do icon wines undermine typicity?
When I was studying for the Master of Wine exam, the running joke (and reality) about my study group’s wines was that the Institute couldn’t afford the very best wines....
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The HoseMaster of Wine™ Sits for the Master of Wine Exam
I recently sat for the Master of Wine exam. I was in my own apartment, alone, and I was wearing only a bath robe and a Donald Trump merkin, which...
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Undeniable class
Imagine trying to buy a bottle of Burgundy if appellations didn’t exist. You’d have the producer, the vintage, maybe a brand name. But with no agreed village boundaries, let alone...
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Score Settling
We are all men and women of the world, us. We know that wine is poetry in a bottle, a marriage of art and craft, its enjoyment the result of...
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Sparkling English Wine Writing
A short time after the Brexit Referendum, I wrote a piece for a Wine Writing Competition [1]. Those were the heady times of the Birmingham conference, with their Citizens of...
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Does somewhereness matter in wine?
I’ve never been to the Phantom River in New Zealand’s South Island, but a quick search on line shows that it rises in the Ben McLeod Range and joins the...
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A day at the Napa Valley Old Wine Critics Home
“You want to know what really drives me nuts?” Sam Euthanasia, World’s Oldest Wine Critic, tells me, “The whole place smells like pee. It’s like spending the day judging goddam...
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