Deconstructing Wine Descriptions
by Harry Eyres
Near the beginning of the heroically rambling recollections of a lifetime’s passion for wine which he assembled and published as Notes on a Cellar Book, the Victorian literary critic George...
Harry Eyres
Harry Eyres has been writing the weekly wine column in Country Life magazine since 2015. He also writes a regular column – L’Ame du Vin – in The World of Fine Wine. Before that he was for eleven years the Slow Lane columnist in FT Weekend, a Times theatre critic and arts writer, the European Arts columnist for Newsweek, wine columnist for the Spectator and The London Daily News and wine editor of Harpers Bazaar. He has written several books, including Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet (Bloomsbury), Seeing Our Planet Whole: A Cultural and Ethical View of Earth Observation (Springer), Wine Dynasties of Europe (Lennard), The Viking Guide to Cabernet Sauvignon and Hotel Eliseo, a poetry collection.
Articles by Harry Eyres
The Convivial Human Flow
by Harry Eyres
I’m in awe of the dexterity and organisational skills of those who tap tasting notes directly into laptops at wine tastings. I count some of these individuals among my friends,...
Do We Need Smart Wines?
by Harry Eyres
I overheard the comment at one of my favourite spring wine tastings, and it set my teeth on edge. “Yes, it’s a really smart wine,” said a young man, who...
Wines That Stop You In Your Tracks
by Harry Eyres
There are pieces of music that stop me in my tracks. I mean that quite literally, as I do a lot of my listening to music while driving. I recall...
Back In Barnes
by Harry Eyres
“That little country wine we found in the backwoods of [fill in the blank with a region of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Bulgaria not especially renowned for quality...
The Myth Of Aristocracy
by Harry Eyres
I have not yet been to the cinema to see the latest despatch from that castellated stately home where half the inhabitants speak in a strange strangulated drawl and wear...
Something Beyond Ourselves
by Harry Eyres
As I write we’re experiencing again what the Belfast-born poet Louis MacNeice recorded in Autumn Journal, composed in 1938: “the heavy panic that cramps the lungs and presses/ The collar...
The Molton Centre Of The Earth
by Harry Eyres
A weekend or two ago I attended a gathering where a small bunch of people who like to write poetry, some of whose efforts had been gathered into a series...
How to enjoy the ephemeral pleasures of wine
by Harry Eyres
Among all the bottles in what I somewhat pretentiously call my “cellar”, this one had followed me most faithfully. It must have rested briefly in the flat I shared with...
The Joys of Serendipity
by Harry Eyres
Bottles of wine don’t usually carry a sell-by date, though supermarket staples may come with advice to drink in the next six to 12 months (in actual fact they’re likely...
What Heidegger teaches us about drinking and thinking
by Harry Eyres
In Monty Python’s immortal “Bruces’ Philosophers Song”, the controversial German thinker Martin Heidegger – for many one of the two greatest philosophers of the 20thcentury but tainted by his association...
The Taste of Smoke
by Harry Eyres
I write in a time of ashes. Not only have certain political dreams and projects recently gone up in smoke; the destructive fires have been raging more literally, all across...