I have noticed on Instagram that there is almost an obsession with ancient bottles with crumbling corks and rotting labels. Time and...

Haut Brion. It is perhaps the wine I most love to hate or is it I most hate to love? For me it encapsulates everything that is best about...

Lockdowns, travel bans, R numbers, partial deconfinement, vaccine passports. Time to let the windmills of your mind turn and take your...

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves...

When I arrived in France in 1991, visitors to my Paris apartment joked that the furniture was mainly made up of wooden wine cases. They...

In the last decade, demand for top wines has skyrocketed and so, inevitably, have prices. We have seen the emergence of cult domaines...

It was about 25 years ago that I finally began to appreciate the beauty of Burgundian chardonnay, and it started in Meursault. At the...

I don’t ‘do’ scores and I don’t usually like to post about a single bottle I’ve drunk, as it seems to lack enough reader interest and...

1976. I was a school kid in England, and I can still remember the cricket pitch going from lush green to a faded fatigue to frazzled...

It is definitely the season to be fed up. The days are short, dark, cold and miserable; the politics is a mess of strutting egos; the...

What was it, the third Thursday of November? Some stupid day like that. I’d get off the commuter train in the morning in London and...

When I first flew down to Buenos Aires, on business, in the late 90’s it was a very different world. The peso was still pegged to the US$...

It was in the twelfth century that the Ricasoli family took over the castle in Gaiole in Chianti. It has weathered the centuries of...

It’s not often that we talk about art in the wine world unless it be the art of the winemaker, or the various domaines that hire an...

Castelnuovo Beradegna. It sits perched on top of a hill, the last outpost of Chianti on the southern border looking towards Siena and the...

You can forget the hyberbole, this is a literal use of words. This wine really is unique. It only happened once and will not be repeated....

It’s pouring with rain, a howling gale, branches down everywhere, bins blown over and anyway if you go out you get arrested, fined or...

It is, covid apart, the festive season, time to be merry, drink well and eat luxuriantly. In France it’s black truffle season and of...

The alarm seemed painfully loud, but by the time I had dragged myself out to the car, in the pitch dark wetness of a December morning, I...

Wines so often come with a story and a history. In 2016 we were staying in Ireland with my wife’s family and on the way back we stopped...