Order your wines by email I’m pleased to say it has become an annual tradition: our February offer of the new vintage of Chateau Musar with Lay & Wheeler. It has been a tremendous success with Spectator readers. The wine won’t be in the shops until May, but it can be shipped to your door
I caught The Antiques Roadshow (BBC1, Sunday) almost by accident the other day. It was one of those moments when you’re too lazy to turn the television off, you flip through the numbers on the remote, and there it is. Comfort viewing for Sunday evenings. It is 28 years old now, almost an antique itself.
The festive season is long over, so it’s time to stock up on less expensive but delicious wines that will be gluggable through the cheerless winter months. Last year one of our most successful offers was with Averys of Bristol, who offered terrific discounts, largely to reduce stocks of wines that were first-rate but weren’t
This being the Spectator’s bumper Christmas issue, we asked the television companies for a few seasonal preview discs. There wasn’t much ‘ho, ho, ho!’ about any of them. Some were merely grim: Three Kings at War (Channel 4, Thursday), for example, chronicled how three cousins — George V, Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Bill — helped,
There was much pre-publicity around Tsunami — The Aftermath (BBC1, Tuesday) implying that the second anniversary of the disaster was a little early to turn it into drama, and that the film would be distressing and demeaning for the victims’ families. I could see the point, though what struck me most was that with more
Click here to send an order by email This is our last Christmas offer for 2006, and contains a great many wines, starting with Corney & Barrow’s house white1 and house red6. Both are highly popular with Spectator readers, being inexpensive and quite delicious. The white is lemony and zestful, the red soft, mellow and
New Hall women always struck male Cambridge undergraduates as being a bit otherworldly, living in their weirdly designed college where the staircases had alternate steps for left and right feet, which ought to work but doesn’t. Possibly few of them had ever watched television, which is why only five — the minimum of four players
Click here to order online We have two Christmas offers this month, both from top-ranking wine merchants. The first is by Lay & Wheeler. Nearly all the wines have been reduced by 10 per cent (with free delivery); there are further discounts if you buy more than one case, and two of the reds represent
I was in Zagreb last weekend. The city closes early on Saturday, so I ended up watching television in my hotel. Once you’ve flicked past German stock-market reports and volleyball from Belgrade, there’s not a lot of choice, except one or two English-language cable programmes you would never dream of watching at home. Take CNN’s
Click here to send an order by emailThis is the first of our Christmas offers — a little early, I know, but a chance for you to stock up on pleasingly discounted bubbles for the festive season. It’s a very flexible offer from Armit of Notting Hill — you can buy most of the wines
At the Cheltenham Festival last week, Professor John Sutherland was on a panel discussing Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea — which on this occasion won the mock-Booker prize for 1966, defeating The Jewel in the Crown, The Comedians and The Magus. Prof. Sutherland made the point that a prequel like WSS can exist because the
Click here to send an order by emailStone, Vine & Sun of Winchester is one of my very favourite wine merchants. I’ve never tried anything of theirs that wasn’t first rate, and I was not remotely surprised when they won the Best Small Independent Wine Merchant award from Wine International this year. What they do
Normally I detest people who use laptops on crowded trains, but if you’re watching a DVD your elbows aren’t flying, and with earphones you’re no more of a nuisance to your neighbours than you would be reading a paper. So on a train crawling towards Bournemouth for the Tory conference, I set up the machine
Order the wines onlineI’m just back from my annual trip to Adnams of Southwold. It’s one of those events that makes the end of summer rather more tolerable. Their shop in town (they are soon expanding into other parts of booming East Anglia) is cool, elegant and stuffed with exciting wines which Adnams’ buyers have
At last the BBC has worked out what to do with Graham Norton. The series How Do You Solve a Problem Like Graham? (sorry, silly me, Like Maria) has just ended and it was so achingly, screamingly, dementedly camp it made its host, clad in a suit which appeared to have been woven from aluminium
Order the wines online Private Cellar is a very classy company. Its four principals all worked for Corney & Barrow, and its buying director is a Master of Wine with the magnificent name of Nicola Arcedeckne-Butler. I assumed this indicated Eastern European origins; in fact it’s an old English spelling of ‘Archdeacon’. Nicola and her
How should wines be sealed? This issue continues to fret the trade. Those who believe in screwcaps correctly argue that they make it far less likely that wine will go off. Up to 5 per cent of all bottles are ‘corked’, as oxidation and sourness result from air penetrating an inadequate cork. Sometimes the effect
The French are finally coming to terms with generic wines. The bottles, instead of being labelled with the name of the grower and location, have names that are either trendy (Fat Bastard or Le Freak) or else amiably meaningless, such as Chamarré, a kind of butterfly. The labels also show the grape variety. This information
This offer is, I think, exceptional value. Merchants occasionally overstock on first-rate wines which don’t sell off the page. Order the wines online This offer is, I think, exceptional value. Merchants occasionally overstock on first-rate wines which don’t sell off the page. For example, if you saw, on the list published by the old and
Organic wine is increasingly popular, in spite of the fact that few people know what the term actually means. The rules seem to be strict but variable, work differently from country to country, and are monitored by a bewildering number of autonomous organisations. Some of these allow a handful of additions, such as preservatives. But