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...
Drinking Quite Well
Raising Standards
Joy is unconfined, one assumes, in the Languedoc village of Montpeyroux: last week it became the 369th French Appellation d’Origine Controlée. This will mean stricter controls on the red grapes...
Palliative Measures
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
