New Wine In Old Bottles
by Andy Neather
I should have expected it in a temple of Tuscan kitsch: Chianti in fiasco, the bulbous bottles wrapped in straw that were a symbol of Italian eateries in 1970s Britain....
Topic: wine
Something Beyond Ourselves
by Harry Eyres
As I write we’re experiencing again what the Belfast-born poet Louis MacNeice recorded in Autumn Journal, composed in 1938: “the heavy panic that cramps the lungs and presses/ The collar...
Wine: Craft Item or Commodity?
by Peter Pharos
The festive season always reminds me what an absolute hold wine has over the public imagination. It is the time of the year when everything wants to be fermented grape...
Cutting Through The Babble
by Margaret Rand
It struck me, watching Katya Kabanova at Glyndebourne this last summer, that opera has terroir. It also has directors, who fulfil the same role as winemakers, either expressing the terroir...
The Great British Restaurant Review
by Peter Pharos
The biggest difference between the two sides of the pond isn’t a few redundant ues or a disagreement on the geometry of a football. It is that Americans are, well,...
Challenging The Old Order
by Tim Atkin
Are some Olympic sports more serious than others? To listen to purists, harrumphing about the inclusion of skateboarding, surfing and BMX freestyle in the Tokyo games, you’d conclude that there’s...
The Molton Centre Of The Earth
by Harry Eyres
A weekend or two ago I attended a gathering where a small bunch of people who like to write poetry, some of whose efforts had been gathered into a series...
Perfume And Wine
by Luca Turin
I fell in love with both perfume and Sauternes at roughly the same time, when I moved to the Côte d’Azur for work in 1982. As it happens, neither had...
The Whisper Of Umami
by Donald Edwards
I chip into the hard yellow wax over the cork and it shatters; a frustrating rain over my station. Domaine Raveneau’s 2008 Chablis Premier Cru Vaillons is initially tight, mineral...
Voor-Paardeberg: The Birth of the Revolution
by Jono Le Feuvre
South Africa has been experiencing renewed international interest for its wines of genuine quality, thanks in part to The Swartland Revolution; a winemaking movement that took root in the hot...
How to enjoy the ephemeral pleasures of wine
by Harry Eyres
Among all the bottles in what I somewhat pretentiously call my “cellar”, this one had followed me most faithfully. It must have rested briefly in the flat I shared with...
The Trouble With China
by Tim Atkin
“Don’t trust them,” says Leon Panetta, a rueful former US Defense Secretary interviewed in the BBC’s three-part documentary China: A New World Order, “that’s the bottom line.” It’s advice that...