The Clay Sea
by John Atkinson MW
In discussions of terroir rocks have exalted status. The journey downwards through the geological record is mostly a search for hard boundaries – chalk, basalt, slate – while the overlying...
John Atkinson MW
Rutland resident John entered the wine trade in the 1990s, and has worked with some of its most thoughtful characters, including Paul Draper, Charles Rousseau, Alvaro Espinosa and Francois Billecart.
John became an MW in 1999, picking up various prizes along the way, including the Bollinger Tasting Medal.
He has written and lectured on wine and terroir, and is the author of several scholarly papers.
Articles by John Atkinson MW
Forks In The Road
by John Atkinson MW
For Ulysses, Dorothy Gale and Neil Armstrong there was no place like home. Dorothy left the Emerald City yearning for Kansas. After walking on the moon, Neil Armstrong wanted nothing more...
Luxury Bandits
by John Atkinson MW
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...
Burgundy’s Benevolent Haunting
by John Atkinson MW
Something is said to be resilient if it maintains its form and structure under pressure. In the context of Burgundy, form and structure translate as character and hierarchy. Thus, Pinot...
Lost in Translation?
by John Atkinson MW
Edmund Penning-Rowsell’s vast The Wines of Bordeaux (1969) is more textbook than billet-doux, though you won’t come away from it knowing how to make wine or grow grapes any better than...
Remaking Burgundy
by John Atkinson MW
“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the...
Has the shift to consumerism broken the wine world?
by John Atkinson MW
“All our hands are dirty, but some are dirtier than others” – Frédéric Neyrat Climate, for so long a remote ledger of mankind’s bid to unshackle itself from the brutishness...