There are many ways of understanding wine, but you’ve never really finished the job until you lace up a pair of boots and leave the car behind.

Stones, wind, silence.

It was almost fifteen years ago that I sat, eating soft-fleshed olives and briny feta, with Christos and Lambrini Lagelou. Midday was drawing on; it was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross.

The scene was a large London trade tasting at the Merchant Taylor's Hall: Bordeaux '88s, so far as I remember.

Bordeaux has changed more in the last twenty years than in the previous hundred, yet it still tends to be considered conservative, brahmin-ridden and sclerotic by comparison with the fast-moving south

The bar in the Hotel Meurice was full of weighty African diplomats sinking whisky and muttering into mobile phones.

The Bulgarians are justly proud that Dionysus, the god of wine, is ascribed Thracian origins.

There, in the dock, stands the troublesome recidivist. Indicted, yet again, on a dozen counts. Arraigned before those who love her most.

There are three reasons for planting a vineyard.

Few wines taste of disaster and catastrophe. I can think of only three. Two come from Savoie, where heavy rains in November 1248 dislocated half a mountainside. Millions of tons of rock sheered from Mont Granier, thundering down onto the village of St André and its neighbouring hamlets, turning them into a human and animal necropolis. The place was left to its ghosts for centuries, but eventually vines found their way there. Out of this terroir of the dead comes a pair of light, brisk, nettley whites: new life qualified by tart history.