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
We’ve all been there: the brain stuck in first gear during an interview; an inappropriate remark to a senior colleague or client; uncontrollable shaking before a speech in public. For most of us these are relatively isolated incidents. There are, however, serial offenders whose failure to control their manners and nerves ultimately proves fatal in
Don’t imagine this book by a 42-year-old Englishwoman who has been in her time an English undergraduate at Oxford, a digging-in anti-roads campaigner and a lonely depressive in her London flat, is anything resembling your average expedition into the wild. The usual elegant reflections on wilderness and its transcendent emptiness are absent here. Instead, there
Q. Everyone over 40 in my office has been let go. I assume I have been spared the axe because Human Resources has never had a record of my date of birth. Now a mountain of paperwork has arrived from the school at which my son will take up a place in September. We, his
Our article entitled ‘Shall we tell the Prime Minister? His gang has scattered like rats’ (10 March) was not intended to suggest that Sir Ken Macdonald, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, had leaked information to officials at No. 10 or that he was pressurised by the Police to withdraw from making the decision about
After drinking over 1,000 Riojas in a year while researching a book, John Radford explains how Spain’s best-known red wine continues to reinvent itself with such success If not actually reinventing the wheel, Rioja is certainly reinventing its wines on a rolling basis, as, astonishingly, it always has done. Since the pioneering Marqués de Murrieta
Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book had been published before in this country, but when, two years ago, the enterprising Sort of Books reissued it for the first time in many years, it seemed that its moment had come. I pressed it on a lot of people, often to find that they, too, had discovered this
The author salutes the 1847 vintage of the legendary sweet wine from the Gironde, Château d’Yquem, a bottle of which recently became the most expensive wine ever sold in the United States and is now the most expensive white wine in the world The author salutes the 1847 vintage of the legendary sweet wine from
As part of a six-month tour of the main wine-producing countries of the world, the author stopped long enough in South Africa to discover the hidden treasures of Hamilton Russell Standing on Cap Agulhas gazing at the ocean, aware of the fact that we were on the very tip of Africa, it seemed unlikely that
Possibly the finest white wine of all France, Chevalier Blanc is remarkable for having a little known cousin, a red Chevalier that stands up to many of the fine wines of the Médoc Possibly the finest white wine of all France, Chevalier Blanc is remarkable for having a little known cousin, a red Chevalier that
Oliver Rackham is quite clear from the beginning. This huge compendium of a book, the culmination of a lifetime’s work, will provide no answers. It will ask plenty of questions but has no theory to promote. It is not about the environment, the solipsistic idea that the world exists to surround man, but ecology, the
Two great crime writers of our time — Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith — talk about the terrible allure of bad deeds and the dark side of Edinburgh AMS: Let’s talk about Edinburgh first of all. We both write about the same place, but in different ways. John Rebus’s Edinburgh is a relatively bleak,
A cellar can – and should be – much more than just a cave; if well-designed it can provide a valuable space in which to drink as well as store your wine, says Paul Wyatt in his comprehensive guide to building the perfect wine store The great Burgundy producer Henri Jayer used to say that
The Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh had quite a send-off. As per the plans he drew up himself before his death, the memorial party organised by the Friends of Theo was adorned with a rock band, comedians, miniskirted cigarette girls, and female guests in twin-sets and pearls — something Van Gogh had found an erotic
Apart from libraries and other centrally administered faculties, the University of Oxford is made up of 45 colleges and halls, all possessing a wine cellar. As a result, the wine culture of the place is immense and indelible, and a sizeable minority of dons – the term describes any fellow of a college – have
When La Baronne Philippine de Rothschild served 1945 Mouton-Rothschild to more than 200 guests at the Syndicat des Crus Classés Dinner on 21 June 1993, the idea was to pour magnums. But when the ma
Wine has been collected since the late 17th century by everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Lloyd Webber. Not much has changed either, except the idea of wine as an investment – any suggestion that wine might be sold on for a profit, effectively creating a wine stock market, would in days gone by have
When I was seven my father gave me a duty-free Timex, my first watch. I loved it, wore for it years, and haven’t had another one since it stopped ticking a decade ago. Why? Because I don’t need one. I have a mobile phone and a laptop and I’m always near someone with an iPod
In Competition No. 2446 you were invited to provide a poem with the title of ‘The Danger of Queer Hats’. There are one or two queer hats in literature, like the one worn by Lear’s Old Man in the Kingdom of Tess, which was ‘a loaf of brown bread, in the middle of which he
Out of the darkness and the bouillabaisseof nebulae and swirling gas we come,out of the toxic argon wilderness,seeking a sanctuary and a home. Be kind. Love one another. The frogs are dying. The old copper beechfesters in acid rain. The sky corrodes,contaminated birds are robbed of speechand, wrapped in fumes, Antarctica implodes.Be kind. Love one