One of the hardest things in life is to admit that you’ve made a mistake. Whatever we choose to call it – a blunder, a cock up or an error...
Sainsbury’s is offering a 25% discount on six bottles of wine until midnight on 1st November, both online and in store. This includes fine wines, Ports and Champagnes. There is...
Hands up who watched, let alone attended, any of the party conferences this autumn? Yup, I thought so. You have to be a serious political wonk (or a paid lobbyist...
The death of the Nouvelle Vague film director Claude Chabrol earlier this week has prompted a spate of national mourning in France, with president Sarkozy comparing the great man to...
“Buy on an apple, sell on a piece of cheese,” runs an old wine trade saw. It’s good advice for consumers, too. If a wine, especially a red wine, can...
What’s the most insulting thing you can do to a grape? Mixing it with cola, lemonade or tonic water is a slap in the face, but the lowest of low...
The wine style I want to promote doesn’t come from a specific region, although most of its exponents are French and Italian. More frustratingly still, it has no legal definition...
Walk into any wine shop and you can see the bottles that sell, placed strategically in the fridge or in attention-grabbing piles close to the till. The wall flowers are...
It’s been a mixed month for Gallic gastronomy. If the French were insulted by the fact that their country didn’t feature once in Restaurant Magazine’s list of the top 10...
It was a Life on Mars moment. Hearing about the imminent relaunch of Black Tower made me feel like Sam Tyler, the detective in the BBC television series who gets...
If “Sex change bishop in mercy dash to Palace” is the funniest fictitious headline ever written, then “Small earthquake in Chile: not many dead” is surely the dullest. Claud Cockburn’s...
Pedro Parra is crouching in a hole with a small hammer in his hand, chipping away at the soil like a demented sculptor. “Granitic, pure grantic,” he says, lifting a...