One of the frustrating things about a career in the wine trade is that my family and friends are convinced that I spend most of my waking hours discoursing over fine wines in upmarket eateries while they are putting in hard graft at the rock face. It's very disheartening to return, exhausted, from a buying […]

Great to see so many Yapp customers at our tasting at Vintners' Hall on Tuesday evening, many of whom gamely had a crack at identifying our blind wine. We never find blind tasting easy (indeed, it's often humbling), but it keeps one match-fit and focuses the mind.     The wine was Patrick Jasmin's Côte […]

The Broughton Gifford Wine Club (the BGWC) meets fairly sporadically but meets all the same as it’s an excuse to get everyone out for an evening, break the routines – and, well, eat, drink and be merry. Normally there’s a theme – we’ve journeyed along the Rhône (although we’d did it south to north not […]

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 […]

The final leg of our buying trip begins in Faugères, an up and coming AOC that sits atop an impressive bedrock of schist, north of Beziers. Château des Estanilles is an estate that has recently changed hands and the good news is that the pioneering work of Michel Louison is being augmented by Julien Seydoux, an […]

After a hugely informative, if fairly exhausting, visit to the Salon des Vins de Loire we headed south to Bordeaux for a spot of castle-creeping with the Baron and Baroness d’Anglade at Chateau d’Abzac. As any fule kno, it is relatively easy to source good, classed growth Bordeaux but you get what you pay for. […]

The annual Salon des Vins de Loire takes place at the end of January takes place in the unprepossessing but functional Parc des Expositions in Angers and is always an informative affair. While a mid-winter gathering is convenient for winemakers, it can make for a chilly and challenging tasting programme for visitors. This kind of event, although […]

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 […]

There are few wine tasting venues that can match the regal splendour of Vintners’ Hall in the City of London and we are inordinately grateful to the Vintners’ Company for allowing us to visit periodically. Bedecked in oak panelling and dazzling with silverware amassed over 6 centuries this is a great setting for a wine […]