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,...
Grapes of Wrath
Is The Customer Always Right?
Though technically I have an account, I have steered clear of Substack, which gives me the vibe of a methadone clinic for recovering Twitter addicts. The vertiginous dopamine highs of...
A Storm In A Wine Glass
After a decade of social media hype, beautiful packaging and expensive publicity, is it time to call last orders on no-low? Pick up a trade magazine, open your emails or...
Collecting Flavour
Every trade has its sartorial call-signs. The wine trade plays host to the fraternity-of-the-red-trouser, its membership made up of legs that appear to have filled, loafer-to-belt, with decades of luncheon...
Future Forward
What we’ll be drinking in 2029 In my grandmother’s kitchen there’s a cover of The Sunday Times Magazine stuck on one of the cupboards. It’s the final edition from 2009,...
Back to the future
Fine wines are timeless – that elusive combination of elegance, complexity and gravitas, plus ageing potential in spades. Their prices unfortunately are not. Top rank Bordeaux, Burgundy or mature Barolos...
A Fruity Number
I know we’ve just come through the silly season, when tales of killer chipmunks and dolphin sign language deputise for what’s normally classed as news in the British media, but...
Drink Promiscuously
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...
