Talk about negative publicity. No wine industry would welcome headlines about the “dismal, dangerous lives” of its agricultural workers, but for South Africa, still keen to persuade the world that...
You can drive from the southern end of the Napa Valley to Lodi at the northern end of the Central Valley in just over an hour, but the two regions...
Maybe no one should be surprised that when looters took to the streets in Clapham Junction last week, one of the few shops they left untouched was Waterstone’s. They were...
What would a neo-Prohibitionist make of the International Pinot Noir Celebration in McMinnville, Oregon? There’s enough wine consumed over the course of the three day festival to stock a chain...
For anyone interested in South African wine, London has been as exciting a place to be as Cape Town over the last month. First we were treated to an audience...
As Bordeaux packs up the tents, ice buckets and traffic barriers for another year at Vinexpo, the region’s biennial trade fair, its focus has returned to the 2010 en primeur...
There’s nothing like a tasting of old wines to give you a sense of perspective. Sipping from bottles that were made before you were born (increasingly rare in my case...
In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the middle of National Wine Month, an initiative launched by the admirable Wine & Spirit Education Trust. I may have missed the road...
They may not be as unpopular as estate agents, traffic wardens or international bankers, but wine tasters are generally regarded with suspicion and even derision by the general public. I...
At a drinks party during the Masters of Wine Symposium in Bordeaux last June I was talking to Jean-Guillaume Prats, the general manager of Château Cos d’Estournel. What would the...
RIP, Odbins. When the Wimbledon-based chain was in its award-winning pomp writing those words would have been unimaginable, like predicting that the sun wouldn’t rise tomorrow. But after yesterday’s vote...
It was George Bernard Shaw who described England and the United States as “two nations divided by a common language.” The famous quote kept coming back to me on a...