A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to walk to the northern tip of Gozo: one of those summer walks on small Mediterranean islands where, after a while, your feet barely seem to be touching the gr

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. I am, though, frustrated by France’s inability to sell its wine effectively, and communicate what it has to offer to all those who haven’t spent years studying Hegel, Kant and Ding an sich.

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!