St James: home of Top 100 SA Wines I’ve just got back from the Cape, where I’ve been judging some of South Africa’s best wines for a competition called Top...
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Pinot Central by Alan Brady
A friend of mine in the south of France runs a business advising people who want to buy vineyards. Some of them have lots of money, refugees from the city...
Read MoreThe UK’s culture of cheapness
Anyone who still believes the UK is the centre of the wine world should pay a visit to ProWein, the annual trade fair in Düsseldorf. The place has a self-confidence...
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Hitchin, mon amour
Hitching in Hitchin Travelling in Burgundy earlier this year, I came across a sign outside the town of Nuits St Georges. “Jumelée avec Hitchin”, it proclaimed. It all seemed rather...
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The Chancellor prepares to clobber wine drinkers (again)
The Palace of Westminster Tomorrow is budget day in the UK. Like the Grand National, the Baftas or the last night of the Proms, it’s something of a national ritual....
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2010 Rhônes: still time to flash the plastic
“They are both for sale.” The response of the Bordeaux château owner to my question about the relative merits of the 2009 and 2010 vintages was delivered with tongue lodged...
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Is this the best value Pinot in the world?
Germany? Are you sure? Drinkable cheap Pinot Noir is almost an oxymoron. We Pinotphiles are all too aware that we need to pay over the odds to get a fix...
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Drinkers versus investors
Listening to people discussing their claret portfolios has become as boring as the house price conversations we Brits used to have to endure in the 1990s. For “I bought this...
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In search of “ordinary” wine consumers
Imagine a wine column that began with the following sentence: “Now since there is much to be written on wine, let us discuss briefly some points of special interest after...
Read MoreRobert Parker, Nigel Tufnel and the 2009 Bordeaux
There’s a famous moment in This is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner’s spoof “rockumentary” about an ageing English heavy metal band, when the lead guitarist, Nigel Tufnel, is showing off his...
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Argentina: full speed ahead?
The recent arrival of HMS Dauntless in the south Atlantic, complete with Prince William in his role as a search and rescue helicopter pilot, hasn’t done much for Anglo-Argentine relations....
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My Dream Cellar
Imagine, just for one minute, that you were richer than Bill Gates: more loaded than a Hollywood film star, Warren Buffett and a Russian oligarch put together. Which wines would...
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