A 3.00am start in London to catch the ‘commuter’ flight to Marseille is never a joy but the blue skies and Provençal sunshine off-set any fatigue. We hit the ground running and were tasting at Domaine de Trévallon by 11.00. Antoine and Ostiane Durrbach gave us a warm welcome and we were treated to a […]

We’ve been hosting Autumn wine tastings for the Oxford and Cambridge colleges for many moons. On my very first venture to Oxford 10 years ago with Robin (Yapp), no sooner had we set up the tasting in preparation for the arrival of the dons than he rushed me off to the Covered Market to seek out […]

Fortified by a superb dinner at Guy Julien’s truffle-orientated restaurant ‘Le Beaugravière’ in Montdragon (which has a legendary Rhône wine list) we arrived in Châteauneuf-du-Pape on Wednesday morning greeted by a blue sky and southern sunshine. At Le Vieux Donjon Marie-José Michel and her daughter Claire gave us a warm welcome and the happy news […]

At Yapp Brothers we are blessed with a spacious boardroom which is used for many meetings but few of them are as convivial as last night's dinner for Accenture and Vodafone Business Intelligence. Our old friend Clive Greenhalgh, patron of the Ambassador restaurant, cajoled us into opening our cellars after hours while he set up […]

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 […]