If I had a pound for everybody who told me that they would like my job I wouldn’t need a sodding job and I could fulfil my destiny of becoming an international playboy – a role for which my forebears, rather short-sightedly, failed to provide adequate funds. Members of the general public naïvely assume that […]

January 25th is, as our Scottish cousins are well aware, Burns Night (or more accurately Burns Supper, or even more accurately Burns Nicht). Traditionally a celebration of the life of the poet Robert Burns, he is honoured by the consumption of haggis, washed down with scotch whisky. There is a lot of pomp and ceremony […]

It’s our final day in the Rhône valley and we are beginning to flag a little as we wend our way out of Orange once again at 8.30am. We’ve long since given up trying to convince friends and family that tasting wine is an arduous task, but you can have too much of a good thing. We […]

Tom and I are making a whistle-stop voyage down the Rhône valley this week to catch up with vigneron friends and get an insight into the Rhône 2009 vintage, of which we have heard great promise. After driving south from Lyon in heavy rain on Sunday evening we started tasting bright and early on Monday in […]

Earlier this year there were attempts within the UK wine trade to ‘talk up’ the 2008 Rhône vintage – as noted on our blog entry on March 10th. Although some perfectly decent wines were made in the Rhône valley in 2008 it was not an outstanding vintage. Fortunately as our vineyard visits and tastings to […]

Having developed an unhealthy interest in cycling the legendary peaks of the Tour de France over the past few years and having my friend Paul Bottrill entered in to this year's Etape du Tour (see August 2009 posting 'Etape in Cotes du Rhone'), I chose to spend a long Bank Holiday weekend on 'recon' in […]

Over the past few months, a new currency has been adopted in the sleepy village of Broughton Gifford and its surrounding hamlets. This came as a result of all the juggling that goes on in getting small children to and from where they should be. Those of you who do this on a regular basis will […]

9.00am on Monday 20th July and I found myself sweeping through the most northerly outpost of the named Côtes du Rhône Villages, Rousset-les-Vignes. Eighteen villages are entitled to add their 'handle' to the Côtes du Rhône Villages moniker, marking them out as superior to generic Côtes du Rhône. As I swept past gnarled vines and lavender fields I […]

On April 20th my co-director Tom Ashworth and I embarked on a whistle-stop tour of the Rhône valley in the august company of the Weekend Telegraph’s globe-trotting wine-hound Jonathan Ray. The aim of the trip was to get a broad overview of both the Northern and Southern Rhône and an insight into recent vintages and […]