You don’t need a lot of money to create a great wine cellar. Any more than you need teeth to recite Shakespeare. Or fingers to go bowling. They just help...
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Keeping it in the family?
The front room at the Domaine Launay-Horiot in Pommard looks like something out of Miss Havisham’s mansion in Dickens’ Great Expectations. It’s dusty, cobwebbed and, on first acquaintance, more than...
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Where are all the wine stories?
German rehabilitation hospitals are pretty nice. My room had a view into the Black Forest, and there was a bar on the next floor. So when I opened my work...
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Antonini versus Rolland: wine’s stylistic battleground
In the early 1990s I was commissioned to write a story about Esme Johnstone, a former director of Majestic who’d bought Château de Sours in the unglamorous Entre-Deux-Mers region of...
Read MoreWhich wine goes with erectile dysfunction?
There’s an annoying trend in wine writing to recommend wines to accompany experiences other than dining. Specific wines with specific music, for example. How much sense does that make? Though...
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English wine: too much of a good thing?
Sitting in the October sunshine, chewing on the corner of my baguette, I wonder how many others have witnessed this timeless scene: pickers working their way up rows of vines,...
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South Africa’s New Wave
When was the last time you entered a wine tasting through a record shop? It was certainly a first for me. But walking past racks of LPs at The Vinyl...
Read MoreRejected Entries for “The Oxford Companion to Wine”
I’m feeling a bit disappointed. I just opened the Fourth Edition of “The Oxford Companion to Wine” and not a single one of my entries was published. Admittedly, Jancis Robinson...
Read MoreTop 50 Italian Wines – Classifica 2015
Giuseppe Mascarello e Figlio – Monprivato Barolo DOCG 2010 – Piemonte Giuseppe Rinaldi – Brunate Barolo DOCG 2011 – Piemonte Duemani – Duemani Costa Toscana – IGP Cabernet Franc 2012...
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Breathable drinks
Like most kids of my generation, I was obsessed with Star Wars. My favourite scene was the Mos Eisley Cantina, where Luke Skywalker meets Han Solo in a violent dive...
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Rioja’s vineyard revolution
Juan Carlos López de Lacalle doesn’t look like a man who storms barricades. Skinny, bespectacled and bald, he’s more academic than action man. But appearances can be deceptive. The owner...
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The Wine Time Capsule from 2015
I’m not sure what motivated my ancestor to bury a wine time capsule back in 2015, but I felt that after two hundred years it was time to dig it...
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