Webmaster Mick and I have discovered that the 'Contact' facility on the site hasn't been working properly since we left the UK, so if you have tried to contact me via that page and not heard anything

We’ve arrived in Australia.

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.

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.

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.

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

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’.

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