The Curse Of Bordeaux
by Andy Neather
We splashed in the Saint Emilion lavoir, desperate to cool off on a 39-degree day in August. Yet this wasn’t when the weirdness of this broiling year really hit me....
Andy Neather
Andy Neather was the London Evening Standard’s wine critic between 2005 and 2012. He now blogs at https://aviewfrommytable.substack.com. Twitter: @hernehillandy
Articles by Andy Neather
Wine’s Next Big Thing
by Andy Neather
Not long after the Millennium, I lifted a glass of sparkling wine to toast the wedding of two good friends in London. They were both Italophiles and had somewhere managed...
Offensively Inoffensive
by Andy Neather
It was an easy target. A recent Twitter flurry over the by-the-glass wine list at Gordon Ramsay’s Michelin-starred London restaurant Pétrus focused on the punchy prices. And it’s true: charging...
New Wine In Old Bottles
by Andy Neather
I should have expected it in a temple of Tuscan kitsch: Chianti in fiasco, the bulbous bottles wrapped in straw that were a symbol of Italian eateries in 1970s Britain....
The Noise And The Reality
by Andy Neather
So much coverage of Brexit has been noise about symbols. Brexiteers obsessed over a return to “blue” British passports and an end to the “humiliation” of Burgundy-coloured ones. In fact,...
Humanising The New Normal
by Andy Neather
There are places in Europe where crowds gather to watch cows being let out of their barns after a winter shut up eating hay. It’s a gladdening sight: the beasts...
Why Brits Love Laughing At Wine Experts
by Andy Neather
It is heartening that even under lockdown, the first signs of Christmas appear just as always: the Oxford Street lights, mince pies in the shops, and earlier this month the...
Lebanon: memorable wines in memorable times
by Andy Neather
As a former Evening Standard hack, I’m hardened to bad news stories, but I gasped in shock when the news broke on August 4 of the huge explosion in the...
Côtes de Grantham might cost the earth
by Andy Neather
As a dramatisation of climate change and crisis, it felt like a moment. I was in the Putney car park of the PR company R&R Teamwork, talking to Oz Clarke...
Splendid isolation
by Andy Neather
For a supposedly fusty corner of modern life, the wine world has adapted to virtual life faster than Boris Johnson changing the subject when asked how many kids he has....
Wine and writing in the time of Coronavirus
by Andy Neather
Shoreditch looked almost handsome in the late-winter sunlight filtering through the big windows of the Ace Hotel’s top floor. As I chatted to Jim Clendenen and tasted his crystalline Au...