Twice a year, I help to organise a wine dinner for a group of friends. For the most recent one, in Paris, my job was to bring the sweet wines...
Looking Back
Grapes of Wrath
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
