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

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 estates on the English sparkling wine scene.

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.

What?

Londoners hearing these names will instantly think ‘Davy’s’; the rest of the world will be utterly bemused. Explanations later. If you’re planning to visit London, though, read on.

Wine bars get little media coverage nowadays. They’re useful, though – if you want to meet someone in a quieter location than most pubs, if you want to drink better wine than the branded yawn served in pubs, but if you don’t want to spend as much as in most restaurants (or fashion bars).

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.

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.

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’).

A friend of mine, Gary Mead, has just published his second book: The Good Soldier: The Biography of Douglas Haig (London: Atlantic Books, £30).