“Take my hand, tenez, trust me, leap, I won’t let go.” A favourite memory in rain-soaked Chablis, flood waters rising, taking a supplier’s outstretched hand as his courtyard began to...
Many qualifications have rocks and reefs rousing calm surfaces. Learner drivers are undone by parallel parking. Philosophy undergraduates discover The Spice-Box of Life isn’t a primer for formal logic. The...
Most of the time, for most of history, people have wanted wine to taste other than how it does. That’s normal: raw beef straight off the bullock is a lot...
If consumers cannot taste “terroir” should the wine world put so much value on place of origin? Margaret Rand raised the issue, on this very site, in an article titled...
“Don’t trust them,” says Leon Panetta, a rueful former US Defense Secretary interviewed in the BBC’s three-part documentary China: A New World Order, “that’s the bottom line.” It’s advice that...
‘What pages are the sex scenes on, so that I don’t waste any time?’ Oz Clarke asked me. I’d sent him my novel, Tasting Notes, and explained, in person first,...
In June last year Rio Tinto destroyed a cave in the Jukaan gorge in Western Australia. With it went 46,000 years of Aboriginal history and one of the most sacred...
Sometimes I struggle to keep up. I was only just getting used to the idea of every brand needing to have a “story” and every business a “purpose”. Now, the...
For the last two decades, I have been anchored in Lebanon. I have also been an anchor for people who have left: the friend you could moor your boat to,...
It was a comment by a South African producer a few weeks ago that set me thinking. He said, in effect, that South Africa isn’t making enough Chardonnay. It should,...
My mum is a gardener and sometimes works with a friend and fellow gardener called Don who takes care of hard landscaping, hedges and tree felling. As you’d expect given...
Noble Rot Magazine recently ran a blind ‘Champagne vs English Sparkling Wine’tasting in which Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label placed higher than a number of fêted smaller producers(the first iteration of...