Drinking Quite Well
by Harry Eyres
I hope you’ll forgive this column for being somewhat nostalgic. I want to begin by giving a picture of the wine-drinking habits and economics of a particular middle-class English family...
Topic: wine
Palliative Measures
by John Atkinson MW
Things can only get worse was a mantra of student life in the 1980s. Thatcherism was dystopic, a priori. Graduation was just a blip. We were all back in our...
A Performance Art
by Margaret Rand
Susannah Cibber was a terrific singer, by all accounts. Handel gave her the contralto solos in Messiah, and she had a great acting career as well: she became the highest...
Too Difficult?
by Harry Eyres
Yeats entitled one of his mid-life poems ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’. The poem is mainly a complaint, about the tangled business of running a theatre (the Abbey in Dublin)...
Grapes of Wrath
by Kate Lofthouse
Riding the overground to The Wine Society’s latest panel on labour standards recently, I finished the final pages of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. If you’re yet to read it,...
Let’s Keep Wine Democratic
by Andy Neather
The wine market’s extremes are getting more extreme. Late last month Yellow Tail owner Casella Wines plunged to a AU$5.5 million [£2.9 million] loss, against a background of contraction in...
The Bare Canvas
by John Atkinson MW
The psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, observed of creative life that, “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.” Van Gogh’s work was unappreciated for most...
The Perfect Gift
by Clare Tooley MW
I remember the first time I saw a four-leaf clover. I was five. It was gifted to me by a kind lady called June, a childhood friend of my mother....
Wine’s Third Wave
by Andy Neather
We may surmise that the Iran war’s impact on the wine trade is unlikely to be uppermost in the minds of Tehran or Dubai residents. Nevertheless, this economic shock will...
What You Want It To Be
by Peter Pharos
It feels odd today, but there was a time when science was considered an aristocratic pursuit. Tycho Brahe was a nexus of Danish noble lineage, Lavoisier was the intellectual face...
Travelling Light
by Margaret Rand
‘Trouble is,’ said my old friend, ‘that’s just not what I want to drink any more.’ He was referring to the cellar he’d built up over 30 years and more:...
Wine, Liberty And The Birth Of Economics
by Charlie Leary
Wine shaped the earliest debates about trade, taxation and political authority far more than we usually admit. As the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether a president can impose sweeping global...