Often, at the end of a summer’s day, I turn to the Quran, not to hide, like the Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb, in its shadow, but to ponder its dazzling certainties and to wonder what on earth could have produced them – to which the good Muslim will reply, “Nothing on earth”.

And then the question arises: What am I to drink with this book, which tells me that I [...]

Good wine is a labour-intensive product, and the labour in question is highly skilled and ever more informed by scientific knowledge. In a country like the United States, where qualifications are real and therefore a costly investment, good wine is bound to be expensive.

Moreover, the combination of patriotism and Parker (Robert, the country’s leading wine critic), not to speak of the sheer wealth of the suburban middle classes, has [...]

Midsummer is an anxious time in Scrutopia – the time when the hay is ready but the weather not, when the livestock is eager for the fields, but the fields far from eager for livestock, when the fox cubs are looking for chickens but the chickens unprepared for this as yet unchastened enemy. Nothing will improve until the hay is in, when we will celebrate our success with a bottle [...]

The only observable respect in which our country has changed for the better since my youth is in the presence of wine on the dinner table. But I am prepared to go along with the decline in morals, manners, music, literature, religion, art, politics and personal relations, if I can persuade myself that this decline is the necessary corollary of that small but life-changing improvement.

Still, there is room for the education [...]

Although the Book of Genesis does not say so, the fruit of the tree of knowledge is generally assumed to have been an apple. Eating it, our first parents were able to distinguish good and evil for themselves, without the benefit of God’s instruction.

In this, as Satan said to them, they would “become as gods”, and so (though this he didn’t say) they would be cast out from Paradise, [...]

Marsannay-la-Côte is the northernmost village of the Côte d’Or, situated on the Côte de Nuits just south of Dijon, some suburbs of which it has collected around itself in the form of small modern estates. It is unique among the Burgundy villages in having an appellation for all three colours, red, white and rosé, granted in recent times.

Traditionally, Marsannay was regarded as a source of grands ordinaires for the [...]

Nicolae Ceausescu, president of communist Romania, was obsessed by traditional forms of life, and determined to destroy them. He therefore devised a scheme, more comprehensive than any that has occurred to New Labour, for the final extinction of the countryside. His idea was to raze all the villages to the ground and to gather the natives into concrete towers, in which they would be shut up at night under the [...]

The so-called “collapse of the pound” – by which is meant the pound’s return to earth after a period in fairyland – has unfortunately increased the price in Britain of the only commodity that matters. We winos are having to tighten, which is to say loosen, our belts.

Yet there are still merchants who have maintained their prices at a level that is affordable to serious drinkers (who of course [...]

The Greeks called the Italian peninsula Oenotria, the place of wine, by way of acknowledging its real meaning as a wine-growing, and therefore God-loving, country. And perhaps no wines have benefited more from the rise of the new and discriminating wine trade than Italy.

The peninsula has turned its back on mass production and reassumed its natural condition, as an assemblage of towns, villages and regions living side by side [...]

After seven years of writing this column, it seemed only reasonable to put my thoughts about wine between hard covers. My publisher agreed, and now the book is finished, insofar as anything can be finished that depended at every stage on a half-empty glass.

I found myself looking back to my own early days as a wino, and to the wine writers who had preceded me along the path to perdition. I [...]