The quote came to mind when I asked French winemaker Maxence Dulou what had made the company he works for, Moët Hennessy, start a similarly ambitious, if rather less life-threatening, project in Yunnan province on the Chinese side of the Himalayas. “They had a wish to do something different,” Dulou said of the beginnings of the project that would go on to be called Ao…

My answer is the same as most other ‘parasites’ (as Jancis Robinson MW once memorably described wine writers): not unless I already had a large fortune of which to dispose. Starting a winery from scratch – establishing vineyards, buying equipment, setting up an infrastructure to sell the stuff – is both capital intensive and blood pressure inflationary. Physically hard, too, if you’re going to look…

But there it is in the diary in Amsterdam in November – The World Bulk Wine Exhibition. I can hardly contain my excitement. OK, so I’m being a bit sarcastic. But who can blame me? Talk to most people in the wine industry and you’ll rarely get them to admit to having anything to do with the trade in bulk wine. It’s the elephant in…

At the level of fine wine, its ways of working don’t seem to fit in with the prevailing cult of the individual. To be a thoroughbred, or so the received wisdom goes, you need a single vineyard or, at least, single estate, worked by a single “passionate” man, woman or family. As the product of grapes grown with more or less conviction and talent by…

I’m a hapless early adopter of gadgets with a fetish for the latest designs of training shoes and unable to get through a supermarket without picking up at least one tweaked variant of a breakfast cereal or chocolate bar. Whether you see this kind of behaviour as open-minded and curious or simply credulous and greedy, you’d have to concede that for brand owners it makes…

A hotel you chose for its proximity to the aircraft hanger venue you spent the previous day trudging around in a fruitless search for a purpose. A venue where natural light is banished, along with any chance you had of remembering the rural romance that made wine seem so special all those years ago, you think, as you uncap another over-priced whisky miniature from the…

_______________________________________________________ But then that’s often the way with the more deluxe end of the California spectrum – whatever fame the wines may achieve in their own backyard, they tend to struggle to make a name for themselves in more competitive markets such as northern Europe or Asia, where the local pride that works in California counts for nothing and where prices can look…

________________________________________________________________________ Not that The Man has seemed especially interested in what the natural wine movement has had to offer so far. No matter how willing they might be to appropriate some of the outsider cool, no large wine producer or importer has as yet looked to invest in the natural wine scene in the same way as its corporate cousins SAB Miller and…

____________________________________________________________________ Like many wine drinkers of my generation, I cut my teeth on Australian wine. That makes it sound painful. In fact, it was the suave texture of my favourite Rosemount Shiraz that marked it out in the early 1990s, at a time when the rough-house tannins and wild acidity of the cheaper end of European wine really did taste like (and…

The late David Bowie, willfully different (and provocatively obscure) to the end, suggested ‘chthonic’ (me neither) and ‘miasma’ when asked about his in Vanity Fair’s famous Proust Questionnaire. If the New Zealand wine industry were a person, the word that would drive her friends to distraction with its repetition would undoubtedly be ‘pure’. So frequent is its use – whether in tasting notes or in…