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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Chasing chimeras
‘No, I don’t agree with this Kate’, award-winning wine writer Andrew Jefford replied to my question: are tasting notes a form of poetry? As I write this, cringing, I know...
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Where Is Greek Wine Today?
An old wine professional I occasionally engage with on social media is not very impressed with Greek wine. He claims he has never had one he would describe as world...
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Why Wine Is Good For Us
Sometimes it seems as if the entire wine industry is braced in a defensive crouch. We have been browbeaten with dire warnings about health risks; we are terrified of Gen...
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Nicolas Potel: An Appreciation
The charismatic, warm and fiercely-loved Nicolas Potel left the world stage on Friday afternoon, June 27, 2025. His warm smile, boisterous sense of humor and affinity for a good time...
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In Praise of Mystique
Every generation of wine writers declares that it wants to remove the mystique from wine: to demystify it. I say, enough. Demystify by all means; but I will stand up...
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Mastering Wine Exams
Wine exam week. The long MW one. Close to 22 hours of high-level performance over four days. It’s intense. I sat six weeks’ worth of MW exams. Enough I decided,...
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Who’s Bashing Bordeaux?
Americans call it putting lipstick on a pig. I was listening to one of Corney & Barrow’s Bordeaux Unpicked podcasts the other day. Yes, that’s right, podcasts plural. There are...
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The Dirty Stuff
When you imagine the grape harvest, what do you see? Green vines jewelled with clusters of plump golden grapes, planted in long rows bordered with grasses and wildflowers? Perhaps the...
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The Point of Equilibrium
Someone recently told me that my saying “a bottle of wine is worth whatever the consumer is willing to pay for it” was a lazy, throwaway comment. But it’s the reality! I protest....
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