the wine thinker

A column that originally appeared in Meininger’s Wine Business International It’s always interesting to watch a metamorphosis – especially when it has commercial implications. Not so long ago, before the advent of video recorders and catch-up tv, we all tuned in to watch television programmes at the same times, communicated by letter and fax and […]

A piece that first appeared on Tim Atkin’s website First things first. Before getting to the meat of my first contribution to Tim Atkin’s site, perhaps I should say a little about who I am and how I came to some of the – to some people, sometimes surprising and annoying views – I often […]

Kirsten Dunst as Marie Anoinette  Marie Antoinette may not actually have suggested that her people eat cake (as Gareth Russell makes clear in this blog post), but the spirit of that comment has been alive and exceptionally well over the last week or so in Britain. Consumers, Rose Prince, food writer of the Telegraph made clear on […]

  It’s Lent. For some people, that means giving up something they enjoy. Last month, there were those who followed an annual routine of giving up alcohol for the whole of January. My proposal requires a different kind of self-denial, but one that might be genuinely useful to you professionally Give up reading and talking about […]

Good use of Facebook by Barefoot Wine Cellars http://www.slideshare.net/robertjoseph/tip-for-the-day

Yesterday’s post inevitably raised responses along the lines of “it’s all very well for a big winery like McGuigan with huge budgets, but how can the little guys compete?” To which I have an answer. Go look at this. Okay, smaller wineries won’t have a e-bookful of recipes by a famous chef, complete with mouthwatering images, […]

People are fascinated by potatoes If you read this a year ago, I apologise for repeating it here. If not, I don’t think I can express these thoughts any better than I did in this column 12 months ago… Whenever I tell people that I know a little about potatoes, there’s a brief pause while […]

Following yesterday’s – unusually widely-read-and-commented-on – post detailing my view of the apartheid separating wine and food, I’d like to ask readers of this blog what they honestly think of the concept – the personalized Recipe Collection e-book – we were working on when we discovered the rarity of wine-and-food photographs. The background to the […]