2011 may have eased stiff-limbed out of the starting blocks, but it’s stumbled such a short way down the track that I hope you won’t mind me making a wine...
Read MoreTowards a new Chile (Part Two)
I had an unprecedented number of exciting wines on my recent trip to Chile, several of them made from Carmenère, a grape I once described as a “second division variety”....
Read MoreTowards a new Chile (Part One)
How would you like to be remembered? I have a horrible suspicion that when my spittoon is emptied for the last time I will for ever be associated with an...
Read MoreThe world beyond Bordeaux
Here we go again. The high octane excitement surrounding the 2009 Bordeaux vintage has only just abated, but four months before the next en primeur campaign kicks off, 2010 is...
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Which wine region could you live without?
Jancis Robinson MW My esteemed colleague, Jancis Robinson MW, recently published an interesting article on her website about the expanding world of wine. She referred to a number of eyebrow-raising...
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The rebirth of Lebanese wine
A five hour flight to Lebanon coupled with a lengthy, fog-bound delay at Heathrow is a good time to do some reading about this most complex of Middle Eastern countries....
Read MoreOdds-on winner
Why don’t off-licence managers look out of the window in the morning? The answer, according to a joke that’s doing the rounds in the booze trade, is that they’d have...
Read MoreThe Outsiders come to London
Getting to grips with terroir “Have you ever thought about making your own wine?” If you write about fermented grape juice for a living it doesn’t take long before someone...
Read MoreTime to learn Mandarin?
David Cameron’s visit to Beijing this week at the head of the biggest-ever British trade delegation acknowledged a simple, if slightly uncomfortable fact. For the foreseeable future, the world’s economy...
Read MoreWhy is Asia in love with Lafite?
A long face is almost de rigueur for anyone working in the London wine trade right now. There was a brief outbreak of optimism in the late spring and early...
Read MoreWrangles at Wine Australia
What’s happening to the Australian wine industry at the moment reminds me of the famous line from Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest: “To lose one parent may...
Read MoreBurgundy 2009: first impressions
Dominique Lafon “Hey, guys, great choice of time to visit.” Dominique Lafon of Domaine des Comtes Lafon in Meursault was only voicing the views of many of the Burgundian growers...
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