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...

A couple of friends, Richard and Tiffany, came to supper and gave us a bottle. It was filthy, covered in thick dust with a rather grimy...

Chablis. I think it was in the early 1980s as an indigent student travelling back from friends in Provence that I first set foot in the...

Having started this blog in Sancerre with the Dr No of Chavignol (Sean Connery having just passed on, and Cotat's door supposedly always...

It was 2017 when Jean-Marc Rolout returned to the silver screen in 'Ce que nous lie', a charming movie of family retrievals set, of...

Kimmeridge. It's a village in Dorset in southern England, and very picture postcardy - thatched roofs and sandy beaches. But to any...