Author: blog

Professor Natty gets fizzical A new series where you can ask Professor Natty (neither a professor nor well-dressed) any wine-related question you care to, and he will attempt to give…

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order. Samuel…

Doug's Top 10 11 I have got a little list of personal wines of the year. It is a diary of drinking, naturally, but also about my feelings and attitudes…

“For as we would wish that a painter who is to draw a beautiful face, in which there is yet some imperfection, should neither wholly leave out, nor yet too…

So, we were having lunch in The Barbary on Westbourne Grove the other week and Alex Dale popped open a bottle of Vinum Pinotage from Stellenbosch. I don’t have a…

You take the venom out of a cobra and what have you got? A belt. Glenn Quagmire – Family Guy I am a sucker for observational comedy. You know the…

November – the month of the drowned dog ~Ted Hughes; The eleventh twelfth of a weariness ~ Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary and the arrival of the first tranche of…

We started the season with a good water supply. Hot weather in April caused a very early bud break which meant a high danger of late frost. Fortunately, apart from…

Getting on Minerves Our final Pyrenee visit in Southern France was to Domaine Jean-Baptiste Senat, located in Trausse-Minervois, a rural commune in the Aude Department. Trausse is part of the…

Of vines, wines, feasts, oyster-education - and absent Picpoul On the second day of the Pyrenees's jaunt around Southern France--not-so-bright and definitely earlier than we would wish--we left our hotel…