I noted with interest that a special 20th anniversary edition of John Ralston Saul’s jeremiad, ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’ had been released, a book that provoked in me a great deal of thought when I first...
“In vino veritas, (in wine, truth)”
― Pliny the Elder
As we approached the end of the second millennium, huge growth in wine production in some countries saw a sort of industrialization of grape growing,...
“Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Consumer preferences in wine are a bit like hem-lines in the fashion industry, just as sure as they will rise, they...
I have just returned from Vinexpo in Hong Kong, where I was invited by my friend and colleague Robert Joseph, (of Le Grand Noir Wines) to attend an insightful presentation he called, ‘The Future...
The Chardonnay Set
The Chardonnay grape variety is arguably the most famous white grape variety of them all; as Master of Wine Jancis Robinson recalls, during the last decades of the first millennium -when...
Gewurztraminer, few can pronounce it (Gee-Worse-tram-inner) and even when they can, it generally fails to inspire much excitement. A rather motley looking grey, rose coloured grape in the vineyard its wines are perfumed, spicy...
‘And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon the place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took one of the stones of...
The winegrape variety known as Grenache has long been derided as common and somewhat ordinary: in Spain, (where it is called Garnacha) it was widely planted to make all manner of inexpensive wines: In...
