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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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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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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Is sobriety a feminist issue?
Feminism is the watch-word du jour, and not just among women of a certain age and political inclination. The drive for gender equality, and, more saliently, accountability, had ‘feminism’ named...
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What have wine critics ever done for us?
Wine is a many-maligned thing. The punters are snobs and bores; the servers are sycophants or stuck-up; the vendors dress the emperor in the finest invisible silk. None, however, is...
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Wine’s race to the bottom
Does anyone remember Safeway? In its day, it had one of the best supermarket wine ranges in the UK: diverse, daring and invariably well selected. When the chain was taken...
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Erotica for the Natural Wine Lover
He was the most handsome man in the bar. I knew he was the one when he walked over to the jukebox and selected my favorite song — The Police’s...
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Wine and Opera: Traveling Down Parallel Roads?
The opening text incensed me. It was The New York Times review of The Metropolitan Opera’s Elektra by Anthony Tommasini. “The Metropolitan Opera is struggling right now, facing longstanding challenges...
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Accented French – the red wines of north-eastern Greece
Every oenophile probably has that one moment of public blind tasting when it All Goes Right. Mine came sometime in the mid-noughties at the rooftop bar of the Athens Hilton....
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Missing link
The UK is home to over 400 branches of Nando’s. Greene King runs over 3,100 pubs and restaurants. There are over 2,300 Costa cafes; 12 in Chelmsford alone. We British...
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