BlogMadeira: the missing link
Submitted by Andrew on Thu, 10/30/2008 - 11:03. categories [ ]
Is Chile the New Australia?On September 30th I took part in a debate in which five panellists were invited to chew over this proposition.
Submitted by Andrew on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 20:01. categories [ ]
Rockyards and stonejuice
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 09/30/2008 - 19:48. categories [ ]
Walkabout in SonomaWhenever I’m asked about California wines, I feel a pang of guilt, since my knowledge of them is so sketchy.
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 09/07/2008 - 09:27. categories [ ]
Ken Grills AndrewKen 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 09/02/2008 - 07:04. categories [ ]
The MissionA bright May morning and a Mayfair restaurant: The Square.
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 08/26/2008 - 09:52. categories [ ]
Absinthe friend
Submitted by Andrew on Fri, 08/01/2008 - 14:08. categories [ ]
Calling Little VenetiansI finally made it to David Motion’s The Winery at 4 Clifton Road W9 (http://www.thewineryuk.com/) recently, close to Little Venice.
Submitted by Andrew on Sat, 07/26/2008 - 11:34. categories [ ]
Wiston Ho!
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 07/22/2008 - 16:17. categories [ ]
Everything you always wanted to know about the Champagne area revisions but were afraid to askChampagne intends to expand its growing area. Here’s the nitty-gritty, based on a recent visit. Is this a new idea?
Submitted by Andrew on Fri, 07/11/2008 - 11:32. categories [ ]
Light, capers, fennel, anis, mastic
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 06/29/2008 - 11:08. categories [ ]
Green wine: why?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.
Submitted by Andrew on Wed, 05/28/2008 - 13:58. categories [ ]
All the fun of the FairTo 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
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 05/27/2008 - 10:33. categories [ ]
The train to LondonI 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 05/06/2008 - 20:28. categories [ ]
Architecture and the burden of livingI 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 04/29/2008 - 07:52. categories [ ]
Behind the scenes at the tastingOff 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 04/27/2008 - 15:35. categories [ ]
Coming soon: Wine of France! (Maybe)Those of you who have bumped into my writing down the years will know that I love French wine.
Submitted by Andrew on Fri, 04/18/2008 - 11:13. categories [ ]
Brahms in the forestThis 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?” 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 04/15/2008 - 20:19. categories [ ]
Real people, real palates: what do you think?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?
Submitted by Andrew on Mon, 04/14/2008 - 16:17. categories [ ]
Beer versus wine: the truthI believe ... wine drinkers, even the most cultured, are unfairly blinkered about beer. (Not all, but most.) Whereas cultured beer drinkers invariably appreciate wine. Unfair!
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 04/01/2008 - 17:41. categories [ ]
A golden tomorrow: medals and afterFirst, 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Mon, 03/31/2008 - 20:55. categories [ ]
The ghost of apples past: Calvados
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 03/25/2008 - 20:56. categories [ ]
Big red shoot-out in the Wolfson butteryLast 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 03/16/2008 - 17:30. categories [ ]
The peaks of the Andes?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
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 03/02/2008 - 15:00. categories [ ]
Cold snaps
Submitted by Andrew on Sat, 02/23/2008 - 19:45. categories [ ]
From City Flogger to Chopper Lump
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 02/17/2008 - 12:26. categories [ ]
Fairtrade or rogue trade?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?
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 02/10/2008 - 11:01. categories [ ]
Join me for a leap-year dinnerAre 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).
Submitted by Andrew on Wed, 02/06/2008 - 09:47. categories [ ]
Farewell, Bill Baker, heroic wine merchantI 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Sat, 02/02/2008 - 21:41. categories [ ]
Whisky blends: chewing the fat
Submitted by Andrew on Fri, 02/01/2008 - 14:53. categories [ ]
Should I stay or should I go?Writing about places on earth, and the foods, drinks and scents connected with them, necessitates travel.
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 01/27/2008 - 14:49. categories [ ]
Thinking about it: listen inBack 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 01/20/2008 - 16:40. categories [ ]
Tasting whisky: not sympathy, but understandingAgreed, 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...
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 01/13/2008 - 08:11. categories [ ]
English wine: more signs of the timesI 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’).
Submitted by Andrew on Thu, 01/03/2008 - 17:22. categories [ ]
New Year thoughts: the attic of poisoned cobwebsI 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 01/01/2008 - 20:22. categories [ ]
Return of the light
Submitted by Andrew on Mon, 12/24/2007 - 09:38. categories [ ]
Tasting with Decanter
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 12/02/2007 - 11:32. categories [ ]
Why blog?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
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 11/25/2007 - 17:31. categories [ ]
The Field Marshal and the Dram
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 11/20/2007 - 21:31. categories [ ]
A Taste of LaithwaitesBack in September, I had a chance to taste a range of wines from Laithwaites, the ‘hidden giant’ of British wine retailing.
Submitted by Andrew on Mon, 11/12/2007 - 12:30. categories [ ]
The Mysterious "1850 Bowmore"Islayphiles may have heard tell of the record-breaking bottle of Bowmore recently auctioned for £29,400 at a McTears auction in Glasgow.
Submitted by Andrew on Sat, 11/10/2007 - 15:26. categories [ ]
Bordeaux 2005s: the onset of winterThe 'Bordeaux Union des Grands Crus' caravan parked in London’s Covent Garden yesterday. Out came the 2005s.
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 10/30/2007 - 10:26. categories [ ]
Rhône 2007: the gremlin skewered?to follow
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 10/28/2007 - 13:30. categories [ ]
Britannia in an apronInternational 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’.
Submitted by Andrew on Sat, 10/20/2007 - 11:47. categories [ ]
St Emilion and Pomerol 2007: snapshots from a harvestI’ve spent the last four days in St Emilion and Pomerol.
Submitted by Andrew on Sat, 10/06/2007 - 17:52. categories [ ]
Great table wine from NovalI’m hugely excited by table wine developments in the Douro, as regular readers of my columns will know.
Submitted by Andrew on Mon, 09/24/2007 - 17:15. categories [ ]
Remembering Michael JacksonMichael 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 09/09/2007 - 09:15. categories [ ]
The Bulgarian phoenix: not quite extinct
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 09/02/2007 - 11:27. categories [ ]
Eating other animalsVisitors 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,
Submitted by Andrew on Thu, 08/16/2007 - 14:38. categories [ ]
Santorini — hedonistically speaking
Submitted by Andrew on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 06:37. categories [ ]
Reflections in a calderaLast week I travelled to Santorini — or, in Greek and on many maps, Thira.
Submitted by Andrew on Mon, 07/02/2007 - 13:42. categories [ ]
Reporting from China: the agony and the ecstasyFor 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
Submitted by Andrew on Sat, 06/23/2007 - 06:15. categories [ ]
See you at Taste of London?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
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 06/17/2007 - 07:04. categories [ ]
China thoughts
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 06/05/2007 - 16:31. categories [ ]
After the masterclassIt 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
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 05/20/2007 - 10:14. categories [ ]
Islay in AprilI was on Islay this year between April 7th and April 14th: the first time I have ever visited in April.
Submitted by Andrew on Mon, 05/07/2007 - 16:37. categories [ ]
Worldview: have your sayMy 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
Submitted by Andrew on Thu, 04/05/2007 - 21:01. categories [ ]
Islay JourneyI 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Thu, 04/05/2007 - 20:32. categories [ ]
Australian endeavourAs 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Thu, 04/05/2007 - 20:03. categories [ ]
Make mine an AeoliaI consult for the winelist of a London restaurant. Every week or two, the sommelier team and I taste samples for the list.
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 04/01/2007 - 20:50. categories [ ]
Pavane for a dead GalloErnest Gallo died on March 6th 2007.
Submitted by Andrew on Sun, 04/01/2007 - 20:38. categories [ ]
Tea and treatiesStardate 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.
Submitted by Andrew on Tue, 03/27/2007 - 18:06. categories [ ]
|