Dream’s hit Things Can Only Get Better was the theme tune of Britain’s Labour Party in Tony Blair’s 1997 victory, much reprised at Labour’s election landslide earlier this month. It might as well be the jingle of the international wine trade and its press too, with their story of never-ending improvement and growth. But that narrative masks substantial variations in the ways that different regions are evolving, even in the same country. More important, things can – indeed might well – go backwards. Permanent progress is certainly a seductive theme when surveying the last 40 years in wine. Last ..read more

Wimbledon is currently in full swing and with it the usual jamboree of British wins in the first week, middle-class patriotism and £12 Pimms. As a child who grew up in the 1990s, I remember vividly when Conchita Martínez won against Navratilova in 1994, against all the odds. I watched from behind the sofa the gripping Graf v. Sánchez-Vicario final of 1995 as though it was a horror film. I lived through the dominance and inevitability of Pete Sampras, the tail end of Becker and Edberg, the commentary of John Barrett and the faint sense of emptiness as the BBC coverage rolled on the second Sunda ..read more

Can winemakers still be self-taught? Or must they, in this technocratic age, be able to sport some letters after their name? When I asked Peter Hall, the arch-maverick of Breaky Bottom, how he learnt to make wine, he said, ‘from a book.’ I didn’t believe him, quite, so I asked him again. He said, ‘I’ll review this while I open the next wine. I told my son Jon, who is a sculptor, I could teach him to make wine in 20 minutes. Rubbish, of course. But a few 20-minutes a week…’ So I asked him again. He said, ‘The good Lord above.’ In an Irish accent. Then: ‘I don’t know.’ In other words, This is bo ..read more

Once it enters your mind, the question becomes so persistent, so obstinate in its highlighting of an anomaly, that it’s impossible to remove. What if the Emperor’s weavers were telling the truth? You know the tale, of course, in all likelihood first heard it as a child and have internalised it fully. Two con men approach a vain Emperor claiming they can make the most gorgeous clothes for him. But there is a twist: those clothes will only be visible to those of a certain intelligence. The ruse works. Even though nobody, Emperor included, can actually see the clothes, everyone plays along, lest ..read more

Wolfgang Amadeus composed to a genre, like every author in his era. A sonata consisted of three separate pieces, the first telling the story of tonal conflict between two contrasting themes: one lively, one lyrical. At the end of the movement, the conflict was resolved by playing both themes in the same key. The same went for symphonies and quartets, while divertimenti, masses and operas followed their similarly standardised scenarios. Genre determined the audience’s expectations: people sat down to a sonata knowing what was going to happen. This, in turn, informed what and how Mozart wrote. Y ..read more

At first sight, it looked like a PR disaster. Sir Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, was filmed falling off a paddleboard into Lake Windermere five times. He’s a middle-aged bloke with a paunch and no sense of balance. Politicians do all sorts of silly things by mistake – members of the public can ambush them too – but Sir Ed’s aquatic pratfall was deliberate. He’s done a number of similar things campaigning for July’s general election. And guess what? It seems to be working. At a time when global politics is getting scarier by the day, Sir Ed comes across as a person who doesn’t take ..read more

In the Azorean psyche lies a shared history of inhabiting a place shaped by lava flows and volcanic eruptions. There is also the constant threat of earthquakes and storms, which have, in the past, prompted emigration. Living on Europe’s western flank, out in the mid-Atlantic, the locals have developed something called “Azoreanity”, a term coined by writer Vitorino Nemésio to describe an identity forged from living in a unique, otherworldly archipelago of nine islands. Wine has been made here since Portugal’s Age of Discovery in the 15th century. But it’s no magic carpet ride. Azorean vineyard ..read more

For the past three years I’ve been serving on the committee of my local tennis club in west London. Calling it a tennis club is accurate up to a point; we have five astroturf and three grass courts which see a lot of action (our first team even won the Middlesex Premier Division); but as one witty member from the Midwest – the Dorothy Parker of The Club Which Cannot be Named – put it, we could also be termed a “wine club with a tennis problem.” The club is a sociable place and wine in generous measure is consumed in the clubhouse and on the adjoining terrace; it has been part of my mission, as ..read more

This year’s Bordeaux En Primeur campaign has attracted much controversy over release prices. But while a number of leading châteaux have made substantial cuts on what they charged for the 2022s, that is unlikely to alter a more fundamental shift in the fine wine market, already under way for more than a decade. This has important implications for wine criticism. Most producers of premium wines – of which there are now far more around the world than ever – today price them with reference to what the international luxury market will bear. That marks a change from the traditional Bordeaux approac ..read more

Given my fondness for wine writing, you won’t be surprised to hear I like other pointless discussions too. So I enjoyed the noise generated by a recent New York Times Op-Ed criticising the “Anthropocene” label, a term employed to describe the new geological epoch human intervention has brought on the planet. My own issues with it are etymological. After all, those that extract fossil fuels, let alone those that profit from them, tend to look down, not up. (A little language puzzle for those of you that are so inclined.) But, as the piece ably covers, there are better reasons to dislike the sem ..read more