The Chronicle
Latest dispatches
33 results across all types
- news
Nasty Not Nice
Why are people drinking less, when wine is better than ever? I have an idea. Wine is too good. The wine trade is too nice. What we need, to have people queuing at the door (to get in, not to get out), is less fun. Wine needs to be more complicated. Instead of telling people […]
- news
A Level Playing Field
What do we mean by the word “Burgundian”? Used indiscriminately to describe a region that is famously, almost defiantly complex, it’s a term that covers so many appellations, terroirs and styles as to be almost meaningless, especially when it comes to white Burgundy. Are we talking Chablis, the Côte Beaune or the Mâconnais? Les Clos, […]
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Affordable Luxury
Would I pay £25 for a glass of Veuve Clicquot? Not if I could help it, no. Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t drink Veuve Clicquot if it cost £5 a glass. The only circumstance in which I can imagine drinking it is if it’s free at a work function with no fire […]
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Meet Your Robo-Somm
The year is 2029. First-world civilisation has adapted to mass surveillance. Waymos and Tesla Robotaxis chauffeur NPCs between work and their domicile. Porch Pirates have spared your paleo meal-prep subscription order… life is fantastically mediocre. Dinner time has arrived and a monochrome rainbow of hope appears in the form of a text alert. Your “irl” […]
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The Pluralism Of Wine Writing
Einstein was there before us. As he famously put it, I know not with what technologies the third 67 Pall Mall awards were fought with, but the fourth will be fought with quills and inkwells. Perhaps entrants will be invited to nearby Westminster school and asked to produce their submissions in real time. Maybe Richard […]
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Drinking Quite Well
I hope you’ll forgive this column for being somewhat nostalgic. I want to begin by giving a picture of the wine-drinking habits and economics of a particular middle-class English family from the 1960s onwards. I am talking about my own family and you may know from previous articles published here that my father was a […]
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Raising Standards
Joy is unconfined, one assumes, in the Languedoc village of Montpeyroux: last week it became the 369th French Appellation d’Origine Controlée. This will mean stricter controls on the red grapes used – but you can go wild and use 10% Counoise! – and maximum yields of 45 hectolitres per hectare. The commune’s wines were previously […]
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Palliative Measures
Things can only get worse was a mantra of student life in the 1980s. Thatcherism was dystopic, a priori. Graduation was just a blip. We were all back in our berths at the union bar that evening. The tough thing about Chicago School monetarism was that it foreclosed on the futures that a university education […]
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A Performance Art
Susannah Cibber was a terrific singer, by all accounts. Handel gave her the contralto solos in Messiah, and she had a great acting career as well: she became the highest paid actress in England. What did she sound like? Not the most polished of singers by contemporary accounts, but very expressive, very moving, very sweet, […]
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Hand In Hand
Rowan Hooper’s new book, Togetherness, is a fascinating study of symbiosis, what he calls a “neglected silo” of scientific research. The subject might sound a bit geeky and pointy-headed, but it’s central to the way that nature works. To anyone brought up on Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, or who has watched an […]
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Michelin And The Death Of The Wine Guide
It was entirely predictable that Michelin’s new venture into wine would trigger huffy French recriminations. Its Wine Selection Burgundy 2026, launched this month, awarded nine producers the top accolade of three grapes, another 20 vignerons two grapes, and 33 one grape. A further 32 were merely “selected”. Mais putain! They only gave Domaine Arnoux-Lachaux one […]
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The Yang Of Greek Wine
By now this is so well-known that repeating it enters broken record territory. The biggest story for Greek wine the past 20 years has been the rise of Assyrtiko. From a Santorinian oddity / best-kept secret to international fame, it did more than any other grape variety to put Greek wines on the map. It […]
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Marketing Natural Wine
I recall a conversation I had with one of the new people I met when I first moved to Madrid. She’d found out that I worked in wine. “In wine?” she said with excitement. “There’s a great wine bar in Lavapiés you must try! They sell natural wines, it’s really good.” I took out my […]
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Too Difficult?
Yeats entitled one of his mid-life poems ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’. The poem is mainly a complaint, about the tangled business of running a theatre (the Abbey in Dublin) and the infuriating difficulty of “management of men”, as opposed to the pure delight of writing poetry. But the title points to something which has […]
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The Manipulation of Nature
Why are there so many exclamation marks in the world, and so few hyphens? What spurred this reflection was a menu: a dish featuring ‘Grilled line caught John Dory fillet’. And an unrelated Instagram post enthusing about exclamation marks! They’re such fun!! Aren’t they!?! Well. Exclamation marks are generally unnecessary and mostly silly. Hyphens are […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]