As oxymorons go, they may not be as absurd as “French resistance”, “amicable divorce” and “camping holiday”, but there’s still something fundamentally silly about Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Spaghetti Bolognese,...
When the package tour operator Goldtrail Travel collapsed last week, cancelling the summer holidays of some 50,000 customers, bar owners in Greece and Turkey must have had mixed feelings. Goldtrail’s...
Oh to have been in Rioja when Spain clinched the World Cup on Sunday. The spot I would have chosen is Los Caños, one of my favourite tapas bars, which...
The sommelier’s eyebrows arched like circumflex accents as he spat the words back at me, Gallic steam hissing from his ears. “Vous voulez un seau à glace?” he demanded incredulously,...
Some grapes are born great, some achieve greatness, while others have greatness thrust upon them. But what about the supporting actors: the spear carriers, the chorus, the walk-on parts? There...
Delegates at the first ever conference dedicated to Grenache were handed a bag celebrating “G-Day” upon arrival, a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the Normandy landings in June sixty-six years earlier. To...
Co-operation may be fashionable in political circles at the moment, but in the wine business it’s increasingly regarded as the equivalent of a tweed skirt: frumpy, moth-eaten and distinctly old-fashioned....
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...
If his diaries are to be believed, the late Alan Clark always went to bed early on New Year’s Eve, avoiding noisy parties to get a good night’s kip in...
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...
When I first heard about a French government proposal to hold wine tastings on university campuses, I assumed it was a belated April Fool. But the more you think about...
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...