The Domaine Romanée-Conti is the most rarefied and expensive wine in the world, with vintages that need decades to mature. At a tasting for the 2006 DRCs, Bruce Palling hears one vintage intone “Leave me alone you fool--don’t you know I am trying to ...
London taxi drivers have a rock-solid formula for gauging when the economy is on the skids. It has to do with how many customers they drop off at Le Gavroche, the venerable Mayfair restaurant, during the holiday months. The more booked up they are on ...
Do you recall the pleasure of discovering a new brand that actually delivers something that is perceptively superior to an existing one? It usually doesn't involve an entirely new approach or radical departure from conventional wisdom--one feels the ...
Countless times I have had the following conversation with a friendly stranger after making some comment on a vintage or bottle of wine at a dinner party: "So, it sounds like you are a wine buff?" "Well, I suppose I am--but a fairly amateur one" ...
What makes a great chocolate? Is it 70% cocoa content? Is it using organically grown, fairly traded cocoa beans? Or is it the man or woman who takes the base ingredient, warms it, seasons it, "tempers" it as it cools, then coats a caramel with it, ...
Wines, like all of us, have finite lives. So it only stands to reason the same applies to books about them. I used to pore over the detailed notes of Michael Broadbent in his "Great Vintage Wine Books", but haven't opened them in years as the latest ...
There was no auspicious moment, no Pauline conversion, no big bang. The first time I tasted wine was on the outskirts of my home town in Australia in a shambolic studio belonging to an alcoholic artist who bought his wine by the half-gallon flagon—or, ...
Apologies if I bang on one more time about familial comparisons with ageing wines. I promise this will be the last one for a while. Children in the same family can be complete opposites in their youth and evolve at different paces in their early ...
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