Wine Club

Robin Yapp, the dentist-turned-wine merchant who founded Yapp Bros in 1969, used to scare the pants off my poor father on forays to France. A somewhat insouciant driver, Robin would belt along in his ancient right-hand-drive estate car, foot to the floor, with his mind on other things. Every now and then, mid-anecdote, he would

After a monumental, liver-challenging but heart-lifting and even tear-inducing 12-hour lunch with Fuzzy, Nigel and co, we’re back with a bang. We drank, we danced and we hiccoughed our happy way home as if Covid and the long, spirit-sapping lockdowns had never happened. And so, jabbed and double-jabbed, drinks in hand, here we are strolling

I haven’t been to Le Marche for yonks. Heck, I haven’t been anywhere for yonks. Who has? My last jaunt abroad was an overnight flit to Paris in February last year. It was huge fun, with the opera followed by such an exhaustive bar crawl that I needn’t have booked a hotel. I only went

After the debacle of my crash landing at The Griffin the other week, Mrs Ray has been keeping a frustratingly close eye on me and I’ve been forced to take it easy. It turns out that I’m on some sort of probation and spend much of my time on the naughty step alongside No. 2

I think it’s fair to say that I overshot the runway at The Griffin the other day. So excited was I to be out and about, large glass in hand, mixing with much-missed mates on the East Sussex gastropub’s fabled ‘Serengeti’ terrace, that I foolishly didn’t keep as close an eye on the speedometer as

We’re so nearly there. This time next month, groups of six will be able to dine the night away indoors and then, just five weeks later, we’ll be free. Hurrah! Happy days are here again, the skies above are clear again, dum-de-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. I simply cannot wait. I miss my mates, I miss the bottles we

Crikey, I worked up quite a sweat putting this one together. But you know me, always the team player. After selflessly draining dozens of bottles on your behalf, I finally cracked it with this bumper Antipodean selection showcasing two countries, seven regions/producers and ten different varieties/blends. Don’t say I don’t try. We in the UK

We all have our own ways of getting through these dark days. I might have put on a shed-load — nay, a detached-garage-with-a-two-bed-flat-upstairs-load — of weight during lockdown, but my strategy of eschewing all social Zoom calls in favour of ringing two chums a day for a natter and seeing one chum a day for

Mrs Ray and I are barely speaking. When she accompanied me to my appointment with the vaccinator yesterday, she loudly declared that when it comes to needles I’m something of a fainter and that she had stay and hold my hand. This is utter tosh of course, unless you count that time my dentist thought

Hold on to your hats folks for this is one heck of an offer, nothing short of a good old-fashioned Spectator scoop. I humbly suggest that you must be either crazy or teetotal to overlook it. We’ve five wines, all from Anthony Hamilton Russell in South Africa, of which two — the 2020 Hamilton Russell

OK, so that stone I put on during the first lockdown and then managed — very smugly — to lose, thanks to my patented ‘don’t-eat-anything-white-and-ditch-the-chocolate-you-idiot’ diet… well, I’ve put the whole darn thing on again. Every bloody pound. I was 13st 2lb, then 14st 2lb, then 13st 2lb and now I’m flipping well back to

I don’t know about you but I’m now comfortably back in the saddle after a serious but ultimately doomed attempt at dry January. My corkscrew and I are inseparable friends once more and it’s as if I’d never been away. Wet February here I come! I ache for uncorking time — which Mrs Ray and

Dry January? Are you kidding? What dry January? I’m sorry, but I really don’t think this is the year to be considering such things. Having sought a number of opinions, the consensus was this: don’t be such an idiot, now is not the time. At Mrs Ray’s behest I did try my best, though, and

Well, it’s almost upon us, the strangest of Christmases. Thrust into our ridiculous bubbles, some folk are stuck seeing the people they don’t want to see and other folk are stuck not seeing the people they do want to see. It’s all going to be very odd and not a little challenging. The key to

Our squabbles at home about Christmas are as traditional for us as carol-singing, roast turkey and stockings are for others. Our current standoff concerns the tree. Our boys think a plastic one is most environmentally friendly. Yes, they argue, ultimately it will go to landfill, but it’s reusable, will last for decades and doesn’t necessitate

Oh dear, I’m so sorry, I got a bit carried away this week. Now that we’re no longer on the naughty step and Christmas isn’t being taken away from us after all, I’m in a cloud of euphoric indecision. We can finally meet actual, real, genuine people — hurrah! — but what the heck are

And it was all going so well. Actually, that’s a complete lie. Nothing’s going well for any of us. What I meant was that since I gave my poor liver such a merciless pounding during the last lockdown, I had decided not to drink a drop during Lockdown #2. Last time there was no apparent

Those naughty Yapps — Jason Yapp and step-bro Tom Ashworth — might be notorious leaders-astray of naive and innocent journalists, but they do know their wine. In particular they know their Rhône wine, and nobody deserves to be International Wine Challenge Rhône Specialist Merchant of the Year more than they do. In honour of said

These are dark days indeed and, with nobody seemingly in control, we’re pretty much back where we started, with lockdown beckoning once more with its bony finger. Well sod that. With a long, lonely winter ahead, I’m stocking up like fury. No, not with bog rolls and baked beans, you fool, with vino! I don’t

I don’t know about you but I’m still drinking like a bloody fish. I just can’t help myself. I mean there’s bugger all else to do now that I’ve finally watched all those 264 episodes of Frasier chronologically, put 1,191 meticulously chosen songs on my Spotify playlist (that’s a heartening 74 hours and 28 minutes’