On a cold, bright Saturday afternoon in January, a student couple entered my Cambridge wine shop-bar, Amphora. It was early and the venue was empty. After glancing at the extensive...
One of the first challenges of knowing any subject is learning to speak its language. Key terms allow aficionados to rapidly convey the gist of a wine in short-hand, and...
Most wines are diminished by food. Discuss, writing on both sides of the paper at once, preferably in green ink. How could it not be so? Wines today are intended...
Have you met your vinous soulmate? No, not your drinking partner, though we all need one of those, but the wine or wines with which you have connected to such...
A recent article in Punch argued that we must re-inject politics into wine: “Without politics, terroir is just soil.” The article’s pretext was that some sort of ideological power play...
It bothers me that wine drinkers frequently choose wine based on colour, or indeed dismiss those of the “wrong” colour. I have encountered this discrimination most overtly in the rosé...
There is something vaguely onanistic in two contributors to the same website taking opposing views in back-to-back columns. As a reader, you are left with the sensation that instead of...
When I came into the wine industry 20 years ago, my impression was that, politically, it was broadly right-leaning. Certainly the upper echelons of the UK’s fine-wine fraternity were the...
I couldn’t find the right polish for my tan suede shoes that morning, so they’re looking a bit unloved as they sink into the expensive taupe carpet. Nobody is sitting...
I had begun to think I would never write anything again. No harm done other than to my inner peace. My word inertia has felt a little like chronic jetlag,...
Another day, another outlandish claim about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will transform our lives. Last week the BBC News website claimed breathlessly that “AI… is now increasingly helping people buy...
My friend Matt likes to confuse algorithms. “Every now and then, I type the first thing that comes into my head into Google, Facebook or Instagram” he told me. “Emperor...