My bottles of the year
This has been the most fascinating political year I can remember. I have even found myself dreaming about politics –…
Advent is the season for revelling in fine wine
Crime. Fear not: none of us was planning to break the law, with the possible exception of hate speech. Where…
Chilean wine is hard to beat
We were assembled to taste Chilean wines assisted by magnificent Scottish food, courtesy of the Scottish embassy in London, otherwise…
How Maggie took her whisky
The whirligig of time brings in his… astonishments. Who would have thought it? Even a couple of decades ago, the…
The finest Rhône I have ever tasted
The medics would have one believe that alcohol is a depressant. That may be their conclusion drawn from test tubes…
Alan Clark’s wines were as remarkable as he was
Où sont les bouteilles d’antan? For that matter, où sont les amis with whom one consumed them? These autumnally melancholic…
Nick Elliott and a life worth drinking to
The English language has immense resources, but the odd weakness. What, for instance, is the translation for ‘Auld lang syne’?…
The wonder of wine from the Mosel
Conservatives used to be good at inspiring a mass membership, underpinned by organisations. Before the first world war, the Primrose…
The treasures of sherry
We were talking Spain and drinking Spanish. The UK and Spain are very different societies, but we did find points…
The healing power of wine
What goes best with a broken rib? The answer, I think, is any drink you enjoy that will not make…
When in doubt, have a drink
Most Tory MPs enjoy leadership elections. There may be an element of what the trick-cyclists call ‘displacement activity’. Equally, it…
How to drown your sorrows
Age. At the Spectator party last week, the editor asked me how long I had been attending the festivity. I…
The key to dealing with this election? Wine
An old friend phoned. Normally cheerful, he was fed up. One of his business partners was being more than usually…
A lunch good enough to lift Tory spirits
Things could have been worse. My host was determined to lunch al fresco, and after all it was late June.…
The joy of Portuguese wines
There was a wonderful old boy called John – Sir John – Wordie, who was a quintessential member of the…
The best bottle to come from the Gigondas
One needs wine more than ever, yet when imbibing, it can be hard to concentrate. So much is going on.…
How to become an old soak
Drink and longevity: there seems to have been a successful counter-attack against the puritans, prohibitionists and other health faddists. Indeed,…
The case for Churchillian drinking
Churchill. No disrespect to Andrew Roberts’s more recent work, but I set out to look up a point about drink…
The glory of German wines
I have had three recent conversations, all lively if unrelated – and all well lubricated. The first concerned Anglo-Saxon England…
