Our nine merchant partners – Armit Wines, Corney & Barrow, FromVineyardsDirect, Honest Grapes, Mr Wheeler, Private Cellar, Swig, Tanners and Yapp Bros – represent the cream of the UK’s independents and boast centuries of experience between them. They all have particular areas of expertise and stock wines that you would never be able to find on the supermarket shelves or local off-licence.
Chateau Musar is beloved of Spectator readers, thanks largely to my sainted predecessors — Messrs Waugh and Hoggart — both of whom adored its wines. As a result, the Speccie has forged a bond with this Lebanese winery and, owing to the diplomatic exertions of our partners at Mr Wheeler, we are in the enviable
The first thing to note is that it’s not about policy. The not-so secret seven MPs who left the Labour party this morning have not changed their policy preferences. They have not become Tories. Nor have they even become liberals. They could, with little difficulty, endorse much of the Labour party’s 2017 manifesto without compromising
At last, having kept pretty shtum about it for the past few years, the virtue-signalling set has mustered up some sympathy for women caught up in the horrific Isis vortex. Unfortunately, though, their sympathy isn’t for the Yazidi women who were burned alive after refusing to become sex slaves for Isis jihadists. Or the Kurdish
Some years ago I was introduced to one notion of how to tackle dishonest and insincere accusations of racism. It was not just that there should be a social cost to making a dishonest claim, but that the cost should equal that borne by somebody who is accurately and correctly identified as a racist. Without
In 1919, a 31-year-old Tommy from Bristol, named George Robertson – fresh from fighting alongside French troops on the Somme – married Suzanne Leblond in Abbeville, northern France. In 2017, George Robertson’s great grandson, Emmanuel Macron, became French president. Macron embarked on a policy that, while acknowledging Franco-British friendship, sought to ensure that Britain did
It’s clear that our universities have a problem with free speech. We’ve recently witnessed students at the University of Oxford not only protesting Steve Bannon’s appearance at Oxford Union, but attempting to prevent others from even attending the talk. Only last week, Peter Hitchens had a talk he was due to give cancelled at the
Cripes. At this rate the CBI will be putting out reports on Brexit’s potential benefits, George Osborne will be reminding us he could always see its upside, and even the FT will be running leaders saying Brexit doesn’t quite mean the end of the world. There have been plenty of twists and turns in our
We should all be firmly back in the saddle by now, with dry January but a ghastly memory. And if there are still any stragglers still toying with glasses of mineral water, I trust this selection courtesy of FromVineyardsDirect will tempt you off your high horse. Four classic French regions are represented (Burgundy, Provence, the
Patrick Jardin lost his daughter when Islamist terrorists attacked the Bataclan in November 2015. Nathalie was one of 130 people killed that evening in Paris and her father still pays her mobile phone charges so that he can hear her voice on her answer message. For Jardin, time has healed nothing. He spearheaded a successful
Margaret Nelson is a 74-year-old woman who lives in a village in Suffolk. On Monday morning she was woken by a telephone call. It was an officer from Suffolk police. The officer wanted to speak to Mrs Nelson about her Twitter account and her blog. Mrs Nelson, a former humanist celebrant and one-time local newspaper
Liam Neeson has been ‘cancelled’, which is internet-speak for ‘cast out’. Overnight he has gone from being the avuncular star of ropey American thrillers to being ‘trash’, persona non grata, a foul, nasty man Hollywood should no longer indulge. His crime? He confessed, during an interview, to having once had a terrible thought, a thought
It’s no coincidence that the EU had already prepared a statement on Monday that ruled out any Brexit renegotiation, even before the ‘Brady amendment’, which requested the replacement of the backstop within the withdrawal agreement had been voted on. One of the reasons why, is that a certain Martin Selmayr is now very much sitting
The first thing that struck me when I emerged from the metro station onto the Place de la Nation was the amount of corduroy. It was without doubt the trouser material of choice for the middle-aged men participating in Sunday’s inaugural Red Scarf (Foulard Rouge) rally in support of the Republic and its institutions. As
However misguided their ideas, until recently it was safe to assume that those on the Left did at least want to improve the lot of humanity – they wanted the global population to enjoy better health, a better diet and longer lives. They just disagreed with capitalists and free marketeers over how best to achieve
He will hate me saying this, but Anthony Barton — now in his late eighties — is the grand old man of Bordeaux. Co-owner with his daughter, Lilian Barton-Sartorius, of the fabled Châteaux Léoville & Langoa Barton, Anthony represents the eighth generation of his family in Bordeaux, the links having first been forged in the
If you thought the last two years of transatlantic relations were bad, things are about to get even worse. Donald Trump and his hard-charging secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have scheduled a Middle East security conference for February 13th and 14th. Poland, perhaps the only country in Europe that looks fondly upon Trump as a
Let me start by confessing that Diane Abbott made my heart sink long before she opened her mouth on BBC Question Time last week – and she has made it plumb the depths since. The confected row over the shadow home secretary’s “treatment” on the show showcases all that is rotten about the current Labour
Britain moved a step close to Weimar yesterday when the Prime Minister used the threat of terrorism to get her way. Being a conservative woman of the upper-middle class, Theresa May did not precisely mimic the cries of ‘there will be blood’ that come from the right’s more deranged corners. You don’t talk like that
The politicisation of consumer products is one of the weirder developments of recent years. First, Oreos came out in support of gay rights. Then Nike extolled us to ‘believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything’, in its multimillion-dollar campaign with controversial former NFL star Colin Kaepernick. Now Gillette has launched a new advert
God help us all, because no-one else can or will in these present circumstances. If you wished to apportion some blame for the shambolic state of British politics these days you will not be short of candidates to bear some measure of the opprobrium they all, to one degree or another, deserve. Spare us from