My local wine merchant was in conspiratorial mood. ‘I have a couple of bottles under the counter. I can let you have them but, for goodness’ sake, don’t tell anyone...
Getting carried away is easy when you’ve wandering among the vines. Many are the tasters who claim to have identified aspects of the local flora in the character of a...
Can wine taste of the soil? The French, who set great store by such things, are always going on about ‘le goût de terroir’. They mean this quite literally on...
Wine tasting is an inexact science. We professional slurpers talk in generalities rather than specifics. That’s why terms like ‘nutty’ crop up so often in tasting notes. The same goes...
The satirical columnist, Simon Hoggart, once ran an occasional series of disgusting-sounding tasting notes which, as he put it, ‘would make you decide never ever to buy, still less open,...
‘And where were you born?’ someone asked me at a dinner party recently. ‘In an orchard or a hedgerow?’ It’s easy to smile at wine writers. We will happily spend...
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...
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...
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...
