This blog is an edited version of a Madeira ‘masterclass’ I gave at the Portuguese Embassy in London on October 29th 20

On September 30th I took part in a debate in which five panellists were invited to chew over this proposition.

It’s been too long since I visited the Languedoc.

Whenever I’m asked about California wines, I feel a pang of guilt, since my knowledge of them is so sketchy.

Ken Payton, one of the administrators of an excellent site called (you won't forget this one) Reign of Terroir, has recently asked me some some searching and wide-ranging questions.

A bright May morning and a Mayfair restaurant: The Square.

I’ve been doing a little work on pastis recently (see Financial Times piece on 9.8.08) and that has taken me back

I finally made it to David Motion’s The Winery at 4 Clifton Road W9 (http://www.thewineryuk.com/) recently, close to Little Venice.

Recording interviews for the Food Program of July 27th/28th has given me a chance to visit some old friends as well as new es

Champagne intends to expand its growing area. Here’s the nitty-gritty, based on a recent visit.

Is this a new idea?

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to walk to the northern tip of Gozo: one of those summer walks on small Mediterrane

This is a very brief introduction to a vast subject, prepared from a speech given to Waitrose Wine Advisers at the London Wine Trade Fair on May 22nd 2008. It is divided into two sections, crudely called Macro and Micro.

Macro

12 billion years ago – in other words 12,000 times one million years ago – the Universe came into being.

To the London Wine Trade Fair for two days last week. Faced with the possibility of tasting almost anything and meeting almost anyone, what’s the strategy?

Aimless wandering is best avoided, since the Fair drifts by in a succession of 10-minute chats with old acquaintances: socially enjoyable, but professionally useless. A determined stride and temporary tunnel vision is the best way to move down the channels and gulleys which separate each island stand.

Spreading the word

I live in Kent and work from home. Most weeks, though, I will be in London two or three times for meetings, tastings and other professional excursions. I bike to High Brooms station, then take the train: a 55-minute rail journey.

I tuned in to the BBC World Service two or three nights ago and hooked up with the end of a conversation with Richard Rogers (whose rapid and distinctive half-mumble must be hard for those who have learned English as a second language to follow).

"Can architecture change lives?" he was asked.
"You make the burden of living easier," Rogers replied.

Off to the Decanter World Wine Awards tastings every day last week, medal-hunting with the Regional France and Languedoc-Roussillon panels. I can’t reveal any of the results, obviously; indeed I don’t know them yet myself in any useful sense, since all we’ve done is award medals to unidentified wines. What I can do is pass on a little of flavour of the week, and try to explain why it’s so enjoyed by its participants.

Those of you who have bumped into my writing down the years will know that I love French wine.

This is number 1 in a discontinuous series of ‘quotes of the day.’ (’The day’ being the day I come across them.)

Florence May: “How can I most quickly improve?”
Johannes Brahms: “You must walk constantly in the forest.”

A little background: Florence May (1845-1923) was a talented English pianist who had travelled to study piano technique under Clara Schumann but who ended up as a pupil of Brahms himself. She later wrote a two-volume biography of Brahms.

Decanter magazine has asked me to write a piece addressing the issue of whether the palates of professional wine buyers, sommeliers and wine critics are ‘too developed’. Example? I don’t like anything much in the Yellowtail range (yes, I know it’s “[yellowtail]” but I refuse to get involved in typographical affectation without good literary cause). I don’t drink much Gallo Colombard, either. Yet these wines bring pleasure to hundreds of thousands of drinkers every day. Should I take this into account before I dismiss them?

I believe ... wine drinkers, even the most cultured, are unfairly blinkered about beer. (Not all, but most.) Whereas cultured beer drinkers invariably appreciate wine. Unfair!

First, a warning: this is a boring post. The subject does, though, matter. If you’re looking for pure entertainment, though, I’d skip this one.

The background can be found in the entry for February 10th: Fairtrade or rogue trade? In a footnote to that post, I wondered what controls there might be to stop producers (or retailers) who had won a gold medal at either the International Wine Challenge (IWC) or the Decanter World Wine Awards (DWWA) committing fraud along the following hypothetical lines.

I was in Normandy between March 3rd and March 6th 2008. In bitter cold.

Last Wednesday provided an opportunity to trial a tasting I have long relished. There are three French appellations which strike me as institutionally undervalued: Cahors, Madiran and Bandol.

A South American press tasting organised last week by Laithwaites provided the opportunity to take a look at five vintages of Almaviva (the Philippe de Rothschild-Concha y Toro joint effort from Maipo

I received the two photographs posted here on February 19th from Konstantina Chryssou Hatzidakis on Santorini: the island in

What?

Thresher recently sent me a box of six Fair Trade wine samples to look at. Let me preface what follows by saying that I think the Fairtrade initiative is an excellent one, and I congratulate Thresher for promoting the initiative during Fair Trade fortnight, which runs from February 25th to 9th March.

But … do retailers play fair with Fair Trade? All the ‘fairness’, after all, appears to be the result of the producer’s efforts. What does the retailer do? Shouldn’t we begin to demand Fair Retail margins on Fair Trade products?

Are you in London on February 29th? Would you like to taste some of Bordeaux’s greatest 1998 wines, 10 years on? If so, there are still a few places available at a Laithwaites Fine Wine dinner I will be presenting at the Goring Hotel (close to Victoria station).

I am sad, very sad, to hear that Bill Baker has died. He was, in a way, the best of us — in that he gave himself entirely to his vocation. Gleefully. On every occasion I met him, I marvelled at this, while at the same time worrying (on behalf of all those that loved him) that his devotion was too reckless, too absolute. His zest for life was so strong that I thought it would serve as his angel, whisking him away from the brink. Until last week, it did.

I am about to post the article on Johnnie Walker and rival whisky blends which appeared in the FT on January 19th.

Writing about places on earth, and the foods, drinks and scents connected with them, necessitates travel.

Back in December 2004, I attended the now-celebrated conference at the University of London called ‘Philosophy and Wine’. You can read the piece I wrote for the FT afterwards (February 2005) in the articles section of this site.

Barry Smith, the organiser, has edited and published a collection of essays, some of them originally papers given at the conference and others written specially for the book, called Questions of Taste.

Agreed, it’s the time of year for it. The wind lifted a tile or two off the roof last week, and since then armfuls of rain have been slapping about the house and, I fear, sprinkling the cumulus of orange mineral fibre which fills the attic and pretends to insulate us from the winter cold. Let’s move swiftly to insulation of a different sort...

I had lunch at Benares today, Atul Kochhar’s Michelin-starred Indian restaurant on Berkeley Square, and Atul told me he has taken a stake in Wickham Vineyard in Hampshire. Not to get involved in wine production, which will remain in the same hands as before, but to open a fine-dining restaurant there — called Vatika (Sanskrit for ‘Vineyard’).

I read a handful of history books in 2007. They described the hundreds of thousands who died horribly as the Byzantine Empire collapsed; and the millions who died senselessly, a prey to vanity, in the Napoleonic Wars; and who spent their last hours wallowing in the mud of the First World War. I tried to imagine what history might be like if it was written by the comfortless dead, and not by the lucky living. It would, it seems to me, be an angrier history. The living tend to conclude, broadly speaking, that ‘it was worth it’. Their own lives and freedoms seem testament to that.

I visited my old friends Peter and Christine Hall at Breaky Bottom Vineyard in East Sussex on December 22nd.

I did my first two days’ tasting in Decanter’s new HQ last week – the Blue Fin Building.

My Italian colleague Franco Ziliani, author of the entertainingly irascible Vino al Vino blog (at www.vinoalvino.org), recently contacted me with some questions for an article he is preparing about wi

A friend of mine, Gary Mead, has just published his second book: The Good Soldier: The Biography of Douglas Haig (London: At

Back in September, I had a chance to taste a range of wines from Laithwaites, the ‘hidden giant’ of British wine retailing.

Islayphiles may have heard tell of the record-breaking bottle of Bowmore recently auctioned for £29,400 at a McTears auction in Glasgow.

The 'Bordeaux Union des Grands Crus' caravan parked in London’s Covent Garden yesterday. Out came the 2005s.

to follow

International visitors to this site may not be aware of this, but the last week has seen a flurry of interest in the UK concerning alcohol consumption levels among the ‘middle classes’.

I’ve spent the last four days in St Emilion and Pomerol.

I’m hugely excited by table wine developments in the Douro, as regular readers of my columns will know.

Michael Jackson, beer and whisky writer, died on August 30th 2007, in his 65th year.

Here are some of the things I liked about him, and some of the reasons why I will miss him.

I journeyed to Bulgaria between July 3rd and the 5th this year.

Visitors to the ‘Worldview’ section of this site will know that human population growth and the impact of humans on the environment trouble me more than the way the Bordeaux 2000s are shaping up,

Readers of the previous post will find me in a fretful frame of mind. Here are some sunnier recollections.

Last week I travelled to Santorini — or, in Greek and on many maps, Thira.

For those who may be otherwise engaged this Sunday June 24th at 12:30 (roasting hogs, for example, or cycling the route of the Grand Depart of the Tour de France which whistles off through southern En

If anyone is around at the Taste of London festival in Regents Park on Thursday night, do drop by and say hallo: I will be tutoring 3 half-hour ‘masterclasses’ with some white and rose wines at t

I was in China between May 22nd and June 1st 2007.

It was good to catch up with old friends and make a few new friends at the Decanter New World Fine Wine Encounter on Saturday May 19th, and I tasted my way around the wines I had chosen for the ‘New

I was on Islay this year between April 7th and April 14th: the first time I have ever visited in April.

My distinguished colleague John Graham, Senior Contributing Editor to Tatler magazine and a former US Editor of the Financial Times as well as a mean man with a deck of cards, has recently contacted m

I am writing this on Thursday April 5th 2007 before setting off for the long drive from Kent to Islay, where I will be next week.

As readers of Waitrose Food Illustrated will know, I tutor a regular series of wine lunches for the magazine in partnership with various wine producers, generic promotions organisations and importers.

I consult for the winelist of a London restaurant. Every week or two, the sommelier team and I taste samples for the list.

Ernest Gallo died on March 6th 2007.

Stardate March 27th 2007, and my blog begins with a glass of tea. It’s mid-afternoon, and I’ve just opened up a packet of Phoenix Honey Orchard oolong tea.