The Chronicle
Latest dispatches
18 results across all types
- news
The Judgment of Paris Revisited
Even for opera lovers, it promises to be an odd show. Next month’s Napa Valley Festival stages the premiere of a work bringing Bacchus and Venus to 1970s Paris and Napa, mythological heroes re-enacting the wine world’s most mythical tasting. The Judgment of Paris, the opera, is the latest re-telling of the celebrated 1976 tasting […]
- news
Looking Back
Twice a year, I help to organise a wine dinner for a group of friends. For the most recent one, in Paris, my job was to bring the sweet wines and a selection of Grenaches. In preparation, I looked at what I have in bond and had a selection delivered to my house. Coravin in […]
- news
Grapes of Wrath
Riding the overground to The Wine Society’s latest panel on labour standards recently, I finished the final pages of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. If you’re yet to read it, the novel opens in 1930s Dust Bowl America and follows the Joad family as they migrate from their barren Oklahoma farm to California, where they […]
- news
Is The Customer Always Right?
Though technically I have an account, I have steered clear of Substack, which gives me the vibe of a methadone clinic for recovering Twitter addicts. The vertiginous dopamine highs of hundreds of likes and multi-thread comments have long gone. Instead, users administer tiny amounts of artisanal interactions to one another. Humblingly, a good part of […]
- news
A Storm In A Wine Glass
After a decade of social media hype, beautiful packaging and expensive publicity, is it time to call last orders on no-low? Pick up a trade magazine, open your emails or attend an industry trade show and you will be guaranteed an article on the phenomenon known as no-low, a combined category of low and no […]
- news
The Matriarch Of The Chartrons
If you want to understand the modern science of wine, you must eventually study carbon dioxide and the mechanics of alcoholic fermentation. To do that, it helps to look to the Scottish Enlightenment and the brilliant 18th-century chemist Joseph Black, who first discovered CO2. Without having identified CO2, fermenation would have remained a mystery. But […]
- news
Take Five
Commercially, the wine world’s problems continue. Young people are drinking less or not at all. Those who are drinking are largely not taking up drinking wine. It remains quite unfathomable that spirits remain roughly static, or even increasing, in the decline of alcohol consumption. If alcohol is bad (although only an excess really is) then […]
- news
Let’s Keep Wine Democratic
The wine market’s extremes are getting more extreme. Late last month Yellow Tail owner Casella Wines plunged to a AU$5.5 million [£2.9 million] loss, against a background of contraction in the Australian industry and US tariffs. Yet a few days earlier at Sotheby’s New York, an 1870 magnum of Château Lafite fetched $200,000. The opposite […]
- news
Nostalgia Isn’t Dead
The era that defined my youth is cool again. After years of gentle roasting from Gen Z, Millennials everywhere are finally having a reprieve: the 1990s and 2000s are enjoying a comeback. Does this mean I can restore my side parting, dust off my skinny jeans? Absolutely not. But I can, at least, don my […]
- news
The Bare Canvas
The psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, observed of creative life that, “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.” Van Gogh’s work was unappreciated for most of his life, while Kafka’s demand to have all his papers destroyed at his death is arguably, or at least should have been, the last […]
- news
Role Models
At a recent Pinot tasting, a leading South African producer long known for elegant wines firmly denied that they had ever copied Burgundy. Fair enough. We all want to be original; we all firmly believe that we are. And yet this producer had planted Pinot. At Hyde de Villaine in California, they deny copying Burgundy; […]
- news
The Perfect Gift
I remember the first time I saw a four-leaf clover. I was five. It was gifted to me by a kind lady called June, a childhood friend of my mother. She explained to me that they are rare, considered charms by some, lucky for sure, and likely to be kept close by those who find […]
- news
Au Revoir, Michel
Twenty-five years ago, when Michel Rolland was in his pomp, I was lucky enough to have dinner with him at the Cinnamon Club in London. I arrived early and was sitting alone at the table ordering my thoughts. Two Portuguese winemakers saw me and asked if I’d like to join them. “I’m waiting for Michel […]
- news
Sliding Into Grace
The myth goes as follows. A venerable wine (most probably a red Bordeaux, and likely from the Left Bank) is brought up from the cellar, with all due reverence. It has been lying there undisturbed for decades, accruing dust, shedding tannins, mellowing into maturity, dreaming who knows what dreams. The bottle is opened, with infinite […]
- news
Wine’s Third Wave
We may surmise that the Iran war’s impact on the wine trade is unlikely to be uppermost in the minds of Tehran or Dubai residents. Nevertheless, this economic shock will be real. Inflation soared and glass prices skyrocketed when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022; worse will likely happen now that Gulf oil and gas are […]
- news
The Ghost In The Glass
Anyone following wine discourse remembers what happened in early 2023. That was when ChatGPT appeared, seemingly threatening the jobs of wine writers: an “extinction level event,” some declared. Soon after, reports circulated that it had scored 92% on the introductory Court of Master Sommeliers test, 86% on the Certified exam, and 77% on the Advanced […]
- news
What You Want It To Be
It feels odd today, but there was a time when science was considered an aristocratic pursuit. Tycho Brahe was a nexus of Danish noble lineage, Lavoisier was the intellectual face of the Ancien Régime, while Darwin was the happy beneficiary of decades of haute bourgeois accumulation. Even Newton, often taken as the plebeian of the […]
- news
France’s Next Great White
We think we know where to look for fine white wine in France: Burgundy, obviously; Alsace Riesling, Sancerre and Pouilly Fumé, Pessac-Léognan and a few other highly regarded whites from Bordeaux are all in the pantheon. But the picture is changing, for a number of reasons: climate change, and a renewed focus on whites to […]