Yapp Travel

Here at Yapp Brothers we seldom participate in organised wine tasting trips as we enjoy the freedom of setting our own agenda and deviating from it as and when we care to. However an invitation from the Conseil Interprofessionnel des Vins AOC du Languedoc aka 'CIVL' to spend 3 days tasting sur place at the […]

There are certain bars and restaurants that transcend their industry. The roll call of chefs who learned their métier at Le Gavroche reads like a who's who of haute cuisine – Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wareing, Rowley Leigh & Andrew Fairlie, to name a few. Likewise, back in the day, Oddbins was the […]

Bravo to Olly, Oz and Tim (the Three Wine Men) for having the collective 'cojones' to host their York wine tasting at the end of September in a marquee. We were ready to be sewn into our long-johns for the weekend but, instead, we were treated to sunshine and blue skies. The only shadows cast […]

It’s always fun trying new things, and having just returned from Portugal on this year’s family jaunt to the Algarve we’ve managed just that. The small fishing village of Bergau is 50 minutes west of Faro (thankfully on the Easy Jet route from Bristol) and is all that a small fishing village should be – […]

You may have wondered how the Tour de France categorizes the hills and mountains it crosses. OK, maybe not?     Quite likely, this is a question that went round and round the heads of the riders as they struggled up and over The Pyrenees this week.     Hills are categorised on a scale […]

As regular readers of this blog may have noted, the Catanach clan are habitual in their vacation planning and the May half term once again found us back in the wilds of North Wales. Normal service was quickly resumed when my good friend Jeremy and his family returned to Pen-y-Bryn at the same time we […]

The family Catanach are now safely back in Blighty after a week away in Bulgaria, for the 2nd year running. The snow does now seem like a distant memory – and as always Bulgaria managed to throw a few swerve balls. It’s never quite what you expect – I know it’s red wine country, I […]

My patriotic Dutch colleague Bianca has been banging on about the merits of her capital city for so long I thought it was high time to tap into her expert knowledge and organise a half-term city break to the Venice of North to see if it was all it was cracked up to be. My […]

I attended a fascinating and uplifting talk yesterday evening by an inspirational individual at Rook Lane Chapel in Frome. Back in 2005 Hugh Broughton was running a small architectural practice in London, whose biggest commission to date had been a Girl Guides meeting centre in Wimbledon, when he heard on the Today programme that the […]

I recently put the concept of muscle memory to the test by taking a long weekend on the ski slopes. I’d last clipped my boot into a ski on a school trip to Les Arcs in 1982, so a few things had changed – not least the shape of the skis. What had remained consistent […]