Tasting is an inexact science. Conveying aromas and flavours in words is akin to trying to describe a beautiful piece of music or a great painting: almost impossible. That’s why...
I’ve given up drinking tea on airlines. Sitting at the back of the plane in economy, I’m invariably served last and, by the time the tea gets to me, it...
Sicily is a paradox. The largest island in the Mediterranean is the most familiar of Italy’s 20 regions, thanks to Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, horse’s heads, Marlon...
Buenos Aires may be the capital of Argentina, but the hub of its wine business lies nearly 750 miles to the west in Mendoza. Dominated to spectacular effect by the...
Wine scribes couldn’t survive without fruit. I don’t mean this in a physical sense, although I’m as conscientious as the next person when it comes to slicing a banana on...
Scatological tasting terms are comparatively rare in wine. Fearful of offending their readers’ sensibilities, writers tend to employ euphemisms: farmyard, cheesy, goaty, vegetal, rustic or sweaty. The French use the...
Wine tasting is full of anomalies and paradoxes. How can a liquid that has been aged in oak taste of cedarwood, for example? Yet cedarwood is a perfectly legitimate description...
Every day in the world of wine is the Glorious Twelfth. The hunting season may be restricted in Britain – to the relief of thousands of birds and animals, who’d...
An Aussie friend of mine once regaled me with a tale about his first day at work in the 1980s. Fresh out of agricultural college and as green as an...
What would persuade anyone to throw themselves off a bridge, 43 metres above a tumbling torrent of cold water with a cord around their ankles? You can imagine the raised...
Wine without alcohol is a little like Bonnie without Clyde. If you don’t believe me I suggest you buy one of those feeble low-alcohol ‘wines’ (preferably wearing a balaclava in...
One of my favourite Monty Python sketches is the All England Summarise Proust Competition, where contestant are required to précis all seven volumes of the French novelist’s masterpiece, “A la...
