Traitor or patriot? Whistleblower or scoundrel? Depending on your point of view, Edward Snowden, the man behind the recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance techniques, is either a...
More often than not, when I attend a wine tasting at a private home it’s disastrous. And not just because I was invited. A wine tasting seems like an easy...
There can’t be many world-famous wineries founded by teetotalers, but d’Arenberg in McLaren Vale is one of them. Despite working in the industry as company secretary at Thomas Hardy &...
How conservative is the wine business? Less than it once was is the obvious answer, at least in the UK. When I started writing about the subject in the mid-1980s,...
In a parallel universe 1 (in which there is an Empress of Wine.) The most influential voice in the parallel wine world is Roberta Parker who regularly appears on television demonstrating...
When the London International Wine Fair closes its doors at ExCel next Wednesday evening it will mark the end of a short and not particularly distinguished era in the show’s...
Lately, my mailbox has been filling up with new books about wine and the wine business. It’s a seemingly inexhaustible subject, and the flurry of new books represents a wide...
Stroll through the vineyards at Il Paradiso di Frassina in Montalcino and the sound of Mozart soothes your ears. If you like Beethoven, Bach or Boulez, not to mention Miles...
Moaning about the weather is practically a national sport in England. There’s a bit of me that thinks that we enjoy being grumpy, “coveting disappointment” as the comedian Bill Bailey...
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore once did a very funny sketch about what they considered the worst job in the world. From memory, their choice involved working for Jayne Mansfield...
The finalists for the James Beard Awards were announced recently to great fanfare. The James Beard Awards are often referred to, mostly by dolts, as the Oscars© of the food...
On February 15th, I published a column in OLN entitled Flogging a dead horse about what I saw as the potential similarities between the horsemeat scandal, then at its height, and what...