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...
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....