The companies’ understanding of the luxury retail environment and what makes the wealthiest of fine spirits collectors tick has resulted in yet another record being smashed with the sale of two rare bottles of The Macallan 1926 for a combined $1.2m (£890,000) in April. The whisky itself was clearly an amazing liquid— distilled in 1926 and aged for 60 years in ex-sherry casks before its…

It had a neck tag saying it had won a top award, so I bought it. But when I tasted it, it was a total disappointment – so much so that I rang a writing colleague who had been heavily involved with the judging of the award. “Yes I know,” he said. “The whisky in that bottle isn’t the same as the whisky we tasted.”…

We would order two halves of bitter (young, middle-class men ordering halves is enough to get under the noses of your average publican right there), then my actor friend would complain about his beer, no matter what condition it was served in. The licensee’s response should have been to taste the beer, explain that it was meant to taste that way and why, and then…

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…

For anybody who missed it, the bare bones of this sorry saga are as follows. In February, a whistle-blower who apparently worked for World Duty Free (WDF) at Heathrow airport posted on popular Chinese social media site Weibo details of what appeared to a be a discriminatory shopping promotion, in which travellers flying to China had to pay much more than those flying to other…

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…

I’d like to tell you what country I was in but I haven’t got a clue – and that has nothing to do with tasting more than 40 whiskies. It’s down to the fact that we were in that area around Lake Constance where Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Liechtenstein meet, the borders are uncontrolled (remarkable in itself given that Switzerland’s not in the European Union),…