Every year, after an overindulgent Christmas, the wine trade books an appointment with me for its annual health check. Though most of its vital signs are entirely typical for a...
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Talking Terroir
“Soil is dirt.” I’m sure the Californian producer Bill Jekel was being deliberately provocative when he entered into a well-publicised debate about terroir with Bruno Prats of Château Cos d’Estournel...
Read MoreWine Trends for 2016
What will be the most important, most newsworthy trends in the wine business in 2016? What trends and events will trigger every idea-less wine blogger to take to his keyboard...
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The truth about Christmas wine columns
Elizabeth David’s spiced beef recipe is one of my Christmas traditions. It involves rubbing a piece of beef every day for up to four weeks with a selection of spices,...
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How to build a great wine cellar
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...
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