How to drown your sorrows
Age. At the Spectator party last week, the editor asked me how long I had been attending the festivity. I…
The key to dealing with this election? Wine
An old friend phoned. Normally cheerful, he was fed up. One of his business partners was being more than usually…
A lunch good enough to lift Tory spirits
Things could have been worse. My host was determined to lunch al fresco, and after all it was late June.…
The joy of Portuguese wines
There was a wonderful old boy called John – Sir John – Wordie, who was a quintessential member of the…
The best bottle to come from the Gigondas
One needs wine more than ever, yet when imbibing, it can be hard to concentrate. So much is going on.…
How to become an old soak
Drink and longevity: there seems to have been a successful counter-attack against the puritans, prohibitionists and other health faddists. Indeed,…
The case for Churchillian drinking
Churchill. No disrespect to Andrew Roberts’s more recent work, but I set out to look up a point about drink…
The glory of German wines
I have had three recent conversations, all lively if unrelated – and all well lubricated. The first concerned Anglo-Saxon England…
The world is a mess. Why not find escapism through wine?
In most children’s stories, the good characters live happily ever after. Works suitable for older readers tend to greater realism.…
It’s time to take Italian wine seriously
Tuscany: earth has not anything to show more fair. The landscape is charming. The gentle hills seem to smile down…
Tories know how to find themselves a good drink
I feel old, and feelings are not always wrong, This eheu fugaces mood came on me at the Conservative party…
You have to be truly incompetent to eat badly in Paris
Paris has enough great restaurants to maintain its claim to be the world capital of gastronomy. That said, Parisian residents…
A perfect slice of Calabria
The Romans wrote the history, or at least the myths. But long before Romulus murdered Remus, the Mediterranean – the…
What wine should you serve to a matador?
We were talking bulls. A friend of mine, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, is a remarkable character who can claim at least two…
Port is fashionable once again
I once drank some excellent port at Ted Heath’s table. The invitation came as a surprise, but it almost certainly…
