Jason Yapp

1. Can you tell us what your first wine revelation was? That life always looks rosier with a decent glass of wine at hand and the promise of more in the bottle. 2. You’re an infamous observer of ‘Dry January’. What wine do you miss most in abstinence? A crisp, clean, zesty, aromatic, refreshing, slightly

I was struck recently as I perused the modest collection of bottles I pretentiously call my ‘home cellar’ (the really good stuff has to be kept out reach, I’m afraid) by the dreadful uniformity of its contents. There was certainly enough variety in terms of style, but everything was held within the globally invariant, ubiquitous,

With last year’s bicentennial of the battle of Waterloo, a lot of people have been banging on about Napoleon Bonaparte being a tactical genius who never lost a battle to a weaker force. Which is all very well – but hardly anyone touches upon the more interesting topic of what he liked to drink. Napoleon’s

Wine is one of life’s great joys – so why, asks Jason Yapp, do major retailers do such a dismal job of flogging it? I have several items to declare: bags of prejudice, a heap of self-interest, a smidgen of latent snobbery and chips on both shoulders. But even accounting for all of the above