‘Imagine Beaune as the Bahamas during the Jurassic, around 150 million years ago’.   It was a compelling image from geologist Francoise Vannier, up on the podium with David Croix to introduce a fascinating tasting of Beaune climats and terroir, that prehistoric inland sea (that reminds me of another famous one in Chablis where the Kimmeridgian soil is comprised of squashed ancient oyster shells, the same in Sancerre).   Around 23-35 million years ago (Oligocene) the climate r

It really was a fluke coincidence. My wife and cousins had been walking part of the Camino and I’d been chasing truchas in the Pyrenees...

‘The Wine in My Glass – Tales of Wines, Winemakers and Places’   I have to preface this with a warning that this post is publicity for a...

The week had started well, when our Norwegian friend Andre opened a 2012 Chave Hermitage that was not oxidised, (after a series of...

A year ago, on my last visit in spring 2024, the Serein River was a muddy torrent in flood. But in late June 2025 it was a trickle over...

I have been many times to Chianti, between Florence and Siena, but only in more recent years to Montalcino and the gloriously scenic and...

I keep forgetting how much I like Syrah from the Northern Rhone, and how much it is not a wine from the south even though the word Rhone...

Ask any top winemaker and they will promise you that they take as much care over their basic wine as their grand cru. It is, after all,...

If Burgundy is the temple of terroir, and now the altar to hype and the unaffordable, Barolo is fast becoming the alternative new cult...

Endless rain, a million damp slippery leaves underfoot, shortened days, holidays seemingly long gone, it’s that somewhat depressing time...

Gevrey-Chambertin. It’s the first biggish and, of course, major wine village that you hit when heading south into the Cote de Nuits, and...

I realise that I’ve been negligent in posting, though I do have a valid excuse (writing a book, to be published in 2025 which will...

The radio this week has been full of despairing parents complaining about unavoidably ubiquitous smart phones at primary schools and...

Jujuy. It’s two hours flight northwest of the Argentina capital on the border with Bolivia, with a long backbone of the Andes and, on...

Novello Every time we drive back from Italy, we snake up the motorway through the narrow Val d’Aosta to the Mont Blanc tunnel, and admire...

‘La France va mal’. Having lived here for 30 years it’s a perennial cry. France is sick! Looking across the Channel at the ongoing...

The age-old rivalry. No, not the French and the English, but the Bordelais and the Bourguignon. Bordeaux versus Burgundy, the gently...

I last visited the royal town of Pau and the next-door wine town of Jurancon twenty-five years ago, and a lot has changed since. First of...

Occasionally a kind and vinously very well-connected friend invites me to a tasting with one of the grands. I don’t usually post...

Soil in Les Clos, Grand Cru, Chablis I have written before of the link between a village on the south coast of Dorset in England called...