I cannot imagine anyone who looks less like Father Christmas than Adam Brett-Smith, the managing director of Corney & Barrow. Adam is slender instead of fat, his face clean-shaven rather than covered in a fluffy white beard, and he would no more wear a red fur-lined suit and a silly hat than you or I
This is a cellar that looks like a cellar, with stacks of wine in wooden cases, some of it covered in dust and cobwebs, the finest stored in a locked cage with a creaking door. In spite of that, they have a modern approach to pricing. The business has an enormous turnover, and the inevitable
Southwold has just been voted the finest seaside resort in Britain, and it’s easy to see why. Southwold has just been voted the finest seaside resort in Britain, and it’s easy to see why. Even in the rain last month people looked cheerful, and in the bustling dining-room of the Crown you’d imagine that the
Spectator readers are famous for being richer than most, which is why the magazine carries ads for cashmere hip flasks and handbags made from the toenails of hand-reared angora rabbits. Nonetheless, we all like a bargain, and I do my best to seek these out. Sometimes merchants will have too much of a wine which
Fortnum & Mason has its own range of wines, and as you would expect, they are very good indeed. These are not simple house wines, trading under an anonymous label; they are selected by Fortnum’s chief buyer, Tim French, as the best example he can find of each type of wine. As well as the
Here’s a very exciting offer. We start with two wines which are phenomenal value. They are from the Pierre Henri estate in southern France. This is a big enterprise (they have just taken an order for 50,000 cases from Royal Thai airlines) and you might expect the wines to be bland and mass-produced: alcoholic grape
Offers from Corney & Barrow are always extremely popular with Spectator readers. They may be one of the poshest of all wine merchants — two very wealthy writers whose books you have seen piled high in Terminal 4 were tasting for their own cellars the day I popped in last month. Lunch in their airy
How do you choose a wine these days when there are literally tens of thousands of different bottles on offer, and where even a modest corner-store supermarket might offer a choice of a hundred? What is likely to be nicer, a Corbières or a Madiran? Which will be drier, a California Chardonnay or a New
This month’s offer includes great classics, together with wines that may be unfamiliar but live up to Berry Brothers’ high standards I love to visit Berry Bros. & Rudd’s shop at the bottom of St James’s Street, London. In the window there might be a few choice bottles â” a Methuselah of Château d’Yquem sticks