Like his fellow Athenian New Comedy playwrights, Menander is not a household name today, but there is one saying of his that his modern compatriots still use: “After the oak...
An English acquaintance of a certain age, likes to bring up Nana Mouskouri every time we meet. He appears to find her not only an endless source of amusement, but...
You can find the original review here. In a world where feedback is quantifiable, instant, and direct, there is no worse sensation for a writer, even one as frivolous as...
Nobody actually says Make America Great Again during the 103 agonising minutes of Wine Country, but one suspects it’s mostly because the writers are not self-aware enough to have a...
My favourite wine bar, La Lune Sous L’Eau, is tucked away on a small side-street of a little French town, yet it is near enough a major airport so I...
It was a quiet summer afternoon in Florence. Some tourists in Belgian shirts were nursing pints and wounds, averting their gaze from the TV showing last night’s highlights. Their English...
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen of the Institute, It is with pleasure and trepidation that I am applying for the position of Head of Strategy at the Institute [1]. While this...
A scenic market town in South England. A gang of rowdy wine writers have ambushed a party of innocent wine sellers. The leading seller, a jovial, portly man in his...
A staple of wine lore is how much better wine tastes at the place of its production. The bottle of Chianti at a villa in the Tuscan hills; the Provencal...
We are all men and women of the world, us. We know that wine is poetry in a bottle, a marriage of art and craft, its enjoyment the result of...
A short time after the Brexit Referendum, I wrote a piece for a Wine Writing Competition [1]. Those were the heady times of the Birmingham conference, with their Citizens of...
Wine is a many-maligned thing. The punters are snobs and bores; the servers are sycophants or stuck-up; the vendors dress the emperor in the finest invisible silk. None, however, is...
