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I’ve been fortunate enough to visit Champagne many times, but the Champagne Academy is an entirely different proposition. Over the course of one very full week in June 2025, our group of Academicians followed a program involving sixteen Grandes Marques, with lectures, exams, cellar tours, vineyard visits, tastings, lunches and dinners packed in from morning until late at night. It was intense, occasionally excessive and absolutely brilliant. The week began on the terrace of t

South Africa was not somewhere I had been actively planning to visit, but a wedding at Groot Constantia provided a very good reason to go. What began as a trip built around the celebrations quickly became ten days of excellent food, remarkable hospitality and rather more winery visits than Sanja and I had originally intended. It was my first time in South Africa. I had long been a fan of wines from Hemel-en-Aarde and would have loved to include the region, but there was not e

At some point on our first morning in Japan, a black minivan with two chauffeurs pulled up outside our hotel in Yokkaichi. It wasn't quite how I had imagined my first visit to a sake brewery would begin. The rather improbable transport arrangements had been made by a mysterious games entrepreneur whom Henry had befriended over sake in Tokyo the previous evening. They had apparently spent the night discussing a forthcoming sake-and-gaming collaboration, and when the entreprene

Most wine trips begin with the wine; this one began with a wedding in Brașov, Romania. Brașov was not an especially straightforward destination to reach from England. At the time, its limited direct flights were from only three airports: Luton, Budapest and Dortmund. Sanja and I didn't particularly fancy the idea of Luton, so Budapest won - and provided a very good excuse to turn the journey into a longer trip through Hungary. I asked Ferenc Zelenec, one of our sales reps and

There are easier places to grow grapes than the Douro. Vineyards rise sharply from the river in narrow terraces, roads twist around the hillsides and almost every view makes you wonder how anyone manages to work the land at all. I visited Quinta de la Rosa in March 2024 while spending time with my family in Portugal. My parents have a house in Lourinhã, which makes a trip north to the Douro Valley relatively straightforward. I had already met owner Sophia Bergqvist and shown

About a year and a half ago, I was approached by the brilliant Michael Koenig, who is a doctoral student in Music and Global history here at Oxford University. He had recently been to a talk on synaesthesia and wanted to try and replicate some semblance of this blending of senses to those of us who don’t experience it. As a prize-winning Fellow of the Royal College of Organists and a recipient of the Silver Medal of the Musicians’ Company, Michael was more than capable of cov

Founded in 1810 by Nicolas Schlumberger, the eponymous Domaines Schlumberger is now run by the sixth and seventh generations of the family. With 130 hectares of land under vine, 70 of which are qualified as Grand Cru, this makes them not only the largest owner of vineyards in Alsace, but also the largest owner of Grand Cru sites in the region. Their Riesling Saering has long been a favourite of mine (especially with a fondue!) and I was very excited to be able to visit them t

There are definitely some perks to working in the wine industry and I was thrilled to have been able to combine a visit to one of our producers, Champagne Gosset in Épernay, as part of a holiday road trip to Lake Como for a wedding. Gosset prides itself on being the oldest "Wine House in Champagne" having started out in 1584 making still (and predominantly red) wines before the advent of Champagne itself. In fact, it wasn't until the 18th century that Gosset began to make spa

I was lucky enough to be invited on ABS Wine Agencies’ Masters of Riesling trip this June. It’s one of the wine industry’s most coveted tours and it certainly lived up to all the hype. On arrival at Stuttgart Airport, we were promptly offered a glass of Sekt (or German sparkling wine) that came straight from a cooler in the boot of the minivan – certainly a first for me, but carpark bubbles definitely needs to be more of a thing! Glass in hand, off we went to Weingut Schnaitm

Sitting on Bordeaux’s Left Bank, the Médoc covers just over 16,500 hectares of prime wine real estate. The region covers eight named appellations: the Médoc and Haut-Médoc, as well as the more famous Saint-Éstephe, Pauillac, Saint-Julien, Margaux, Listrac-Médoc and Moulis. Interestingly, although the wines from these appellations come at a variety of different price and quality levels, they are appellations for red wine only. I was lucky enough to spend last summer between lo