The Institute of Masters of Wine is pleased to announce its new program, Masters of Wine Lite©. Tired of being the only person in your wine tasting group without initials...
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Some like it cool
At the first wine course I ever took the tutor explained that Syrah and Shiraz are actually the same grape but under different names. It felt like an illuminating nugget...
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Alice’s Adventures in Naturaland, and Through the Isinglass
Chapter One: Down the Rabbit Hole Alice was getting very tired of sitting by herself on the bank. Though she was usually by herself, unless she was at a wine...
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Hey, big spender: wine on the high street
Failing the emergence of a last minute saviour, BHS looks set to slide into administration this month, joining a list of major high street casualties that includes Comet, Woolworths and...
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En primeur: the other side of Bordeaux
The ‘primeur’ show is over for another year and the dust has settled here in Bordeaux. The journalists and buyers of the wine world with their brimming laptops and stained...
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Chapoutier 2015 Sélections Parcellaires: the best vintage since 1990?
Every spring, Rhône ringleader Michel Chapoutier comes to London to unveil the new vintage of his top single vineyard wines, the Sélections Parcellaires. It’s a hotly anticipated tasting for a...
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The Climate Change Paradox
You don’t have to be meteorologist to appreciate that something very unusual is happening to the world’s weather right now. I’ve just got back from South Africa, where dams were...
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The truth about the 1976 Judgment of Paris
Forty years later, it’s time to finally reveal that the Paris Tasting of 1976 was staged, much like Neal Armstrong’s phony moon landing, Elvis Presley’s death and auction wines. Furthermore,...
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South Africa triumphs at the Lismore Chardonnay tasting
Way back in 1992, so long ago that it’s even disappeared from remaindered bookshelves, I wrote a tome about Chardonnay. It was a tour d’horizon of the world’s most popular...
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In your glass in sixty minutes
Whizzing home in my driverless car, I zip past yet another boarded-up wine shop. I suspected this one wouldn’t last much past 2020. You couldn’t sample the wines or buy...
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Bordeaux 2015: one big if
You might not have noticed, but the annual Bordeaux en primeur campaign is almost upon us. After a quartet of poor to decent vintages, when the very raison d’être of...
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A visit to the World’s Greatest Wine Library
Here it is 2095, and I’m only now visiting the World’s Greatest Wine Library. Its vastness is daunting, its resources unparalleled. On that shelf, the first wine book ever published....
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