Do icon wines undermine typicity?
by Christy Canterbury MW
When I was studying for the Master of Wine exam, the running joke (and reality) about my study group’s wines was that the Institute couldn’t afford the very best wines....
Topic: Column
The HoseMaster of Wine™ Sits for the Master of Wine Exam
by Ron Washam
I recently sat for the Master of Wine exam. I was in my own apartment, alone, and I was wearing only a bath robe and a Donald Trump merkin, which...
Score Settling
by Peter Pharos
We are all men and women of the world, us. We know that wine is poetry in a bottle, a marriage of art and craft, its enjoyment the result of...
Sparkling English Wine Writing
by Peter Pharos
A short time after the Brexit Referendum, I wrote a piece for a Wine Writing Competition [1]. Those were the heady times of the Birmingham conference, with their Citizens of...
Does somewhereness matter in wine?
by Tim Atkin
I’ve never been to the Phantom River in New Zealand’s South Island, but a quick search on line shows that it rises in the Ben McLeod Range and joins the...
A day at the Napa Valley Old Wine Critics Home
by Ron Washam
“You want to know what really drives me nuts?” Sam Euthanasia, World’s Oldest Wine Critic, tells me, “The whole place smells like pee. It’s like spending the day judging goddam...
Is sobriety a feminist issue?
by Celia Bryan-Brown
Feminism is the watch-word du jour, and not just among women of a certain age and political inclination. The drive for gender equality, and, more saliently, accountability, had ‘feminism’ named...
What have wine critics ever done for us?
by Peter Pharos
Wine is a many-maligned thing. The punters are snobs and bores; the servers are sycophants or stuck-up; the vendors dress the emperor in the finest invisible silk. None, however, is...
Wine’s race to the bottom
by Tim Atkin
Does anyone remember Safeway? In its day, it had one of the best supermarket wine ranges in the UK: diverse, daring and invariably well selected. When the chain was taken...
Erotica for the Natural Wine Lover
by Ron Washam
He was the most handsome man in the bar. I knew he was the one when he walked over to the jukebox and selected my favorite song — The Police’s...
Accented French – the red wines of north-eastern Greece
by Peter Pharos
Every oenophile probably has that one moment of public blind tasting when it All Goes Right. Mine came sometime in the mid-noughties at the rooftop bar of the Athens Hilton....
Protecting the global spirit of wine
by Tim Atkin
Anyone who thinks that wine and politics inhabit different worlds might like to have a word with some Californian producers right now. As part of the escalating trade war between...