Wine
The Berry Bros supremacy
For more than 50 years I have assumed that any sensible person will be a right-winger, even if not all…
Could Trump’s tariffs be good news for British wine-lovers?
Professional Englishmen and women – doctors, accountants and even journalists – could once afford to drink first-growth claret like Château…
The seductions of Provence
Riches, ancient cities, great architecture, splendid landscape, agriculture to match, trade routes, romance. Records of human settlement stretching to the…
I think I’ve found the perfect TV series
Drops of God is one of those gems of purest ray serene that cable TV prefers to keep hidden in…
Should you bother decanting wine?
We were almost having a symposium and I was invited to define Toryism in one sentence. I replied that one…
The Reagan effect on wine lists
Let us indulge in a slight paraphrase. What rough beast slouches towards the White House to be reborn? The inauguration…
Kemi should prepare for a political pounding
It is extraordinary to remember. When I was a small boy in Scotland, Christmas Day was not a holiday. My…
My bottles of the year
This has been the most fascinating political year I can remember. I have even found myself dreaming about politics –…
Could I limit myself to 100 bottles of wine in a year?
Back in January, I wrote about my new year’s resolution to cut down on my drinking. The thought of total…
Advent is the season for revelling in fine wine
Crime. Fear not: none of us was planning to break the law, with the possible exception of hate speech. Where…
Chilean wine is hard to beat
We were assembled to taste Chilean wines assisted by magnificent Scottish food, courtesy of the Scottish embassy in London, otherwise…
How Maggie took her whisky
The whirligig of time brings in his… astonishments. Who would have thought it? Even a couple of decades ago, the…
From public bar to cocktail bar: books for the discerning drinker
There’s something for all tastes this year, whether poetic meditations on the pub, advice on wines for extended cellaring or recipes for new-wave martinis
The finest Rhône I have ever tasted
The medics would have one believe that alcohol is a depressant. That may be their conclusion drawn from test tubes…
Alan Clark’s wines were as remarkable as he was
Où sont les bouteilles d’antan? For that matter, où sont les amis with whom one consumed them? These autumnally melancholic…
Nick Elliott and a life worth drinking to
The English language has immense resources, but the odd weakness. What, for instance, is the translation for ‘Auld lang syne’?…
The wonder of wine from the Mosel
Conservatives used to be good at inspiring a mass membership, underpinned by organisations. Before the first world war, the Primrose…
The treasures of sherry
We were talking Spain and drinking Spanish. The UK and Spain are very different societies, but we did find points…
Letters: the courts are not trying to subvert parliament
Judge not Sir: The claim by Ross Clark (‘Keir’s law’, 22 June) that the left can achieve what it wants…
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…
