Burrowing
by Tom Hewson
A confession: I’m pretty sure I used the term ‘Kafkaesque’ before I’d read any Kafka. In itself this could count as faintly Kafkaesque in its admission that authenticity and the...
Topic: wine
Can Wine Beat The Odds In 2023?
by Andy Neather
As wine-world knockabout, it was hard to beat. On BBC Newsnight last month, Conservative right-winger Jacob Rees-Mogg, perhaps the most arrogant British politician of his generation in a tough field,...
A Sensorial Symphony
by Susan Lin MW
Vibrant. Rich. Exciting. Layered. Powerful. Complex. These words describe the third movement of Johannes Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Major. They also describe a vintage Champagne of excellent quality. In...
Sommeliers In Body Armour
by Sergey Panov
Each of them had other plans for this summer. Back in February, Anastasia didn’t think she’d be saving other people’s lives on a battlefield. Anatoly didn’t imagine he’d voluntarily swap...
A Dachshund’s Ear
by Margaret Rand
My school coat was made of Harris Tweed. This is not relevant to anything, except that the other day I came across a wine with Harris Tweed tannins. They were...
Back In Barnes
by Harry Eyres
“That little country wine we found in the backwoods of [fill in the blank with a region of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Bulgaria not especially renowned for quality...
Offensively Inoffensive
by Andy Neather
It was an easy target. A recent Twitter flurry over the by-the-glass wine list at Gordon Ramsay’s Michelin-starred London restaurant Pétrus focused on the punchy prices. And it’s true: charging...
The Myth Of Aristocracy
by Harry Eyres
I have not yet been to the cinema to see the latest despatch from that castellated stately home where half the inhabitants speak in a strange strangulated drawl and wear...
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....
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...