‘Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!’ If that phrase means anything to you, you’re likely of a vintage that remembers pre-Clarkson Top Gear. Growing up in the 1980s, you couldn’t miss adverts for the Beaujolais Run – an annual race to be the first to bring the new wine back to England. People would rush over
It’s telling that perhaps the best wine book of last year, Amber Revolution by Simon Woolf, was self-published, though you’d never guess from the quality of the design, photography or editing. Wine books are a tough slog for publishers unless they’re written by one of the big four: Clarke, Johnson, Robinson and Spurrier (sounds like
One of the joys of getting older is the appreciation of the solitary pint. But what to do as you sip your hard-earned beer? Usually after a suitable period of contemplation I’ll start fiddling with my phone. Not Adrian Tierney-Jones; he writes books, and his latest, A Pub for All Seasons (Headline, £20), is a
The German historian Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz wrote about British tastes in alcohol in the eighteenth century: ‘In London they liked everything that is powerful and heady.’ Not much has changed since then. Blame it on the weather, blame it on the food or blame it on the good times, the British have always liked their drink
For the first 50 years of the corked bottle, there was no easy way to get into it. The combination of cork and a strong glass bottle came together around 1630 but the first mention of a device to open the bloody thing wasn’t until 1681. Cavalier get-togethers must have resembled the teenage parties I
It’s funny how long it can take a man to learn a simple lesson. For example, for years I had assumed that women couldn’t really love flowers, that it was all some sort of conspiracy created by Big Florist in league with Big Greetings Card that everyone, apart from me, had fallen for. On Valentine’s
The people of these islands have long been famous for their drinking. A Frenchman writing in the 12th century described the various races of Europe: ‘The French were proud and womanish; the Germans furious and obscene; the Lombards greedy, malicious, and cowardly; and the English were drunkards and had tails.’ By 1751, at the height
Before I started researching my book Vines in a Cold Climate, I had a particular image of English sparkling wine as consistent but rarely that exciting. It was all a bit formulaic, like big brand champagne but leaner. I am pleased to say that I could not have been more wrong as the wines now
In 2012 the esoteric world of wine connoisseurship made the news when the FBI raided the Californian home of an Indonesian national called Rudy Kurniawan. They found a factory for creating fake wines with bottles, corks, labels and even recipes. According to Rebecca Gibb in Vintage Crime, Kurniawan’s counterfeit Mouton Rothschild from the legendary 1945
Last summer I attended a reunion at my prep school. The occasion was the leaving of a much-loved master. I thought that the appropriate thing to wear would be a tweed jacket in honour of prep-school masters everywhere. I found myself woefully overdressed. Pretty much all of my contemporaries were wearing gilets. It was a
A popular pastime in Britain is to post one’s breakfast on social media for strangers to pass judgment on bacon crispiness, egg doneness and whether baked beans are a vital component or just spoil the whole thing. Felicity Cloake is a writer after my own heart: she is not a fan of beans with her
The Platinum Jubilee celebrations look like boom time for the drinks industry, with various whisky, gin and port brands all releasing special commemorative bottles. But there’s one curious omission: Dubonnet, a liqueur that is said to be the Queen’s favourite. According to a spokesman from parent company Pernod Ricard, there’s nothing planned to celebrate 70
In 2014 I received a mystery phone call. It came from a French number but the voice sounded like a patrician Englishman from another age. It was a voice that you can imagine following into battle: ‘Hello, it’s Anthony Barton here’. You might not know the name but to a wine lover, it was like
Can you imagine if, in the 20th century, wine producers in France had switched from a product made (almost) entirely from grapes to something that was essentially grape-flavoured alcoholic sugar water? It’s inconceivable. In fact, they did just the opposite. To stamp out the growth of ersatz wines, the appellation contrôlée system was created, which,
Stroll around Florence and you’ll notice little ornate openings embedded in the walls of Renaissance palazzos. They look like doorways for tiny people, though they would have to be quite athletic tiny people, as the openings are three feet off the ground. But they’re not entrances for Tuscan pixies — they’re for selling wine. There
Picture the world before the invention of the bottle: if you wanted a nice glass of claret at home, you’d have to send a boy round to the tavern to fill up a jug — unless you were rich enough to have a whole barrel in your cellar. Around 1630, a new tougher glass was
When I mention to people that I have written a book about home bars, the most common response is, ‘my parents/grandparents/swinging uncle used to have one of those globe cocktail cabinets’. The other thing they mention is Only Fools and Horses. For years, having a bar in your home was seen as the height of
There are only two British television wine presenters taxi drivers have heard of, Jilly Goolden and Oz Clarke. Who can forget their double act on Food & Drink in the 1980s and ’90s? Since then innumerable cooks have become household names but there have never been any other wine celebrities who pass the cabbie test.
Fine wine rarely makes it into the public consciousness, but one event in 1976 has proved of perennial interest: the so-called Judgment of Paris. It heralded the arrival of wine from the New World, but also tapped into popular prejudice. Who can resist French wine snobs being made to look foolish? So these memoirs by
I was collecting my daughter from school when my path was blocked by an enormous black Range Rover sitting in the middle of the road. As I squeezed past, one tyre on the pavement, I opened my window and asked, as gently as I could: ‘Why don’t you drive on your side of the road?’
