The dangers of nostalgia

by Celia Bryan-Brown
My first memories of drinking involve no-name bottles; the greasy, Crayola-funk of MaxFactor kohl; the fusty basement sitting room of a friend’s Wandsworth semi. I drank Kentish vodka, before that...

Future Forward

by Celia Bryan-Brown
What we’ll be drinking in 2029 In my grandmother’s kitchen there’s a cover of The Sunday Times Magazine stuck on one of the cupboards. It’s the final edition from 2009,...

The Wedding Wine Tasting

by Celia Bryan-Brown
Caroline’s laugh tinkled, hollow; like the second pint hitting the urinal. Harry squeezed her thigh under the table. Last night, they’d had a serious discussion about whether elopement was a...

One woman and her corkscrew

by Celia Bryan-Brown
Like antlers on the wall, old Punch cartoons in the downstairs loo or a second-hand copy of Catch-22 in a student’s bedroom, the corkscrew in my handbag has been the...

Wine Country Redux

by Celia Bryan-Brown
The plot of Wine Country is non-specific: look at the poster and you pretty much have it down. It’s a classic of the SNL Poehler-Fay-Rudolph-Dratch school of femcentric comedy. Not...

How to make a hangover work for you

by Celia Bryan-Brown
I saw Christmas decorations in the supermarket today. Admittedly, they were tucked behind ranks of lurid Halloween costumes – but still. Between these and the inexplicable (and surely eternally unused)...

Wine’s Magic Sauce

by Celia Bryan-Brown
With the country sweltering through a heatwave, work sludges onwards towards August. Through an endless relay of ‘Out Of Office’ auto-responses, there’s only one thing everyone’s mind: holidays, and all...

Is sobriety a feminist issue?

by Celia Bryan-Brown
Feminism is the watch-word du jour, and not just among women of a certain age and political inclination. The drive for gender equality, and, more saliently, accountability, had ‘feminism’ named...