Its 57 pages are incisively written by the bank’s executive vice president and founder of its Wine Division, Rob McMillan, and liberally illustrated with grapes and tables. You will learn, among other things, that 2018 was a year in which the US consolidated its position as the world’s largest wine market, breaking a new sales record – as it has done in each of the…

On the other, you have the pragmatists: those people who see wine as just an alcoholic liquid with some specifically annoying/useful (delete as applicable) commercial quirks, but which is there to be sold like any other fast- (if you’re lucky) moving consumer good. It’s a dichotomy that is beautifully dramatised in an encounter described in a new book, Godforsaken Grapes, by the American drinks journalist…

And even if the point of the exercise is more about recognising things that are injurious to our health and wellbeing rather than actually succeeding in doing something about them, that’s better than nothing. The wine trade could do with a similar process of taking moral stock. So here, in no particular order, are my suggestions for making the wine world a better place in…

It doesn’t seem so long ago that the word conjured up a last-century French world of hospitality. Starchy, snooty bordering on arrogant, full of impenetrable rituals and rules, the stereotype was that the sommelier was employed to exploit the general populace’s fear of the vinous faux pas, shaming customers into spending much more than they wanted. But today, the popular image of the sommelier is…

Will Sauvignon Blanc and Malbec be succeeded by grape varieties that share some of their characteristics, or something entirely different? Will the next Pinot Grigio or Shiraz be associated with a single region, or with something more global? These are the kind of questions on which the marketing department speculates before informing the viticulturists on what they should be planting or ripping up. But what…

Alas, in some cases, all-too quotable. Men of a certain generation and self-confidence are still wont to try the patience of waiters by imitating the film’s eponymous, dipsomaniac main character when ordering in restaurants: “We want the finest wines known to humanity. And we want them here and we want them now!” A gambit to which no waiter, at least not in the past 30…

It’s remarkable how astute most of them turned out to be. None of the 12 is glaringly wrong, although corks are not yet the minority closure and Spain isn’t quite the star (in my view) that Parker anticipated. But Malbec, Central Coast California, unoaked wines, and the rise of the wine web, among other things, have all come to pass more or less exactly as…

But when you’re dealing with thousands of stakeholders, all with competing – or, in some cases, diametrically opposed – interests, the experience can be, as one PR with years of experience running generic campaigns told me, “like herding cats”. Perhaps that’s why so much generic regional marketing material errs on the side of bland, with campaigns that deal in windy generalities or vacuous slogans that…

The consensus has been that free trade won the argument – along with liberal democracy – when the Berlin Wall came down and we reached, in the words of American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, “the end of history” circa 1992. The chaotic arrival of Trump and his MAGA philosophy (if it’s possible to dignify Trump’s random thought-burps with such a word) in the Oval Office…

This period of reflection is a form of due diligence, I suppose – a necessary corrective to the temptation to just plump for the names behind wines I happen to like. In other words, I have had to do what the name of the awards suggests and actually think about what makes a brand “admirable”. And, without giving away my final votes in what is…