In praise of Retsina
by Peter Pharos
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...
Peter Pharos
Peter Pharos likes to drink, talk and write about the wines of Greece and Italy.
He writes a bimonthly column, either covering Greek and Italian wine or discussing vinous matters from an oenophile’s perspective.
Articles by Peter Pharos
Sideways in Trump Country – An Addendum
by Peter Pharos
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...
Sideways in Trump Country
by Peter Pharos
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...
La Lune Sous L’Eau
by Peter Pharos
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...
For Nemea and Saint George – Agiorgitiko Today
by Peter Pharos
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...
Cover letter for the post of Head of Strategy of the Institute of Masters of Wine
by Peter Pharos
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...
The Wine Writers of Penzance
by Peter Pharos
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...
Rock wine: the dry whites of Santorini
by Peter Pharos
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...
Score Settling
by Peter Pharos
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...
Sparkling English Wine Writing
by Peter Pharos
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...
What have wine critics ever done for us?
by Peter Pharos
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...
Accented French – the red wines of north-eastern Greece
by Peter Pharos
Every oenophile probably has that one moment of public blind tasting when it All Goes Right. Mine came sometime in the mid-noughties at the rooftop bar of the Athens Hilton....