Modena Anima
The Po River basin is the food bowl of Italy, in its heart is the region of Emilia Romagna and it is here you will find ‘Il cibo di re e angeli’, (the food of […]
terroir
Natural History part 5. ‘The One Straw Revolution’ On Man and Nature
Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves. -Jean-Jacques Rousseau Masanobu Fukuoka (1913 –2008) was a Japanese farmer and philosopher, he was a trained microbiologist and agricultural scientist and after completing his education […]
Natural History Part 4. ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’ On Reason and Nature
I noted with interest that a special 20th anniversary edition of John Ralston Saul’s jeremiad, ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’ had been released, a book that provoked in me a great deal of thought when I first read […]
Natural History Part 3. The Opimian Falernian, One Wine to Rule Them All
“In vino veritas, (in wine, truth)” ― Pliny the Elder As we approached the end of the second millennium, huge growth in wine production in some countries saw a sort of industrialization of grape […]
Natural History -part 2. A Hegelian Dialectic
“Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.” ― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Consumer preferences in wine are a bit like hem-lines in the fashion industry, just as sure as they will rise, […]
The Chardonnay Set
The Chardonnay Set The Chardonnay grape variety is arguably the most famous white grape variety of them all; as Master of Wine Jancis Robinson recalls, during the last decades of the first millennium -when […]
The Best and Wurzt of Wines
Gewurztraminer, few can pronounce it (Gee-Worse-tram-inner) and even when they can, it generally fails to inspire much excitement. A rather motley looking grey, rose coloured grape in the vineyard its wines are perfumed, […]
Jacob’s Ladder
‘And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon the place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took one of the stones of the […]
For the Love of Grenache
The winegrape variety known as Grenache has long been derided as common and somewhat ordinary: in Spain, (where it is called Garnacha) it was widely planted to make all manner of inexpensive wines: In France […]
Roasted Slopes
The Wines of the Cote Rotie, (Roasted Hillside) on the sharp rising slopes at the Northern end of the Rhone Valley are some of the most seductive and alluring wines from all France and […]