It's spring, it must be Champagne! As the years roll by, I'm start to realise how short they're becoming. Why, it seems only a couple of weeks ago that I was at the Champagne Bureau's annual tasting in the Banqueting House in Whitehall, London. As it

The pub world is a fickle place - premises are closing all around us and, depending on whom you ask, the indutry is either in trouble or in crisis. In my own locality of Barnet in Hertfordshire (look me up, buy me a drink!) there are pubs boarded up, form

The clothes you wear to a tasting are important - you want something that you don't mind staining with red wine; hence there is a prevalence of scruffiness and flamboyance in the wine-writing fraternity. So imagine the consternation caused by being requir

Food and wine go together like ... well ... food and wine! There is a huge amount of snobishness over which wines to serve with which food - red with red meats, white with fish etc. That's all well and good but with the myriad of wines available to us, wh

Regular visitors to this podcast series will be delighted to know that The Kernel Brewery in Bermondsey was one of only 3 finalists in the 2012 BBC Food And Farming Awards – I spoke with them last year (see the podcast on Mircrobrewing earlier in this s

You may know the wines of Wolf Blass from the supermarket, where his Yellow Label wines sell pretty well. But Wolf began by making premium wines, characterised as Black Label, Grey Label and, more recently, Platinum Label. These high-end wines are much mo

The Great British Beer Festival 2011 just ended at Earl's Court in London. As a judge in the CAMRA beer festival, I have, on occasion, got to go along and taste beers entered into the competition to win a medal and, hopefully, the title Best Beer. In the

Every area of work has its networks of colleagues, contacts and friends, and, in an ideal world, it's difficult to tell them apart. The same is true of the fraternity and sorority of wine-writers. We meet and compete in the convivial atmosphere of tasting

While the grand wine houses boast of their age and ancient heritage and the newer wine-makers talk of creating a lasting presence in winemaking, there is a group of Londoners who are doing it the way it has always been done. The Urban Wine Company have be

Some things are traditional and unchanging; or at least that's the impression we have. It always rains at Wimbledon, the hats are huge at Ascot and Champagne will always be, well, Champagne. So, one might ask, what's the point of the Champagne Bureau's an