Belgium: Not Just The Best Beer In The World

Everyone knows the beer. Belgium also quietly makes genuinely good cool-climate wine, and has done for long enough now to have its own appellations.

Wine On A Volcano: How Etna's Soil May Have Saved It From Phylloxera

Vines growing in the sandy soil of an active volcano turn out to be one of the rare European survivors of the pest that wiped out almost everyone else.

Blanc De Noirs: Not Just For Champagne

Orange wine treats a white grape like a red. This is the exact opposite trick — a black grape, pressed fast enough to make a white.

The Best-Kept Secret Of Champagne: Rosé De Saignée

Most rosé Champagne gets its colour stirred in from a splash of still red wine. The rarer, harder version actually earns it the traditional way.

Everything You Need To Know About Champagne

Vintage versus non-vintage, the sweetness scale nobody explains, and what you are actually paying for at the top end.

Why Can't You Serve White Wine With Meat?

You can, often better than red — it was always about weight, not the colour of the meat on the plate.

Why Can't You Serve Red Wine With Fish?

You can — the real rule is much narrower than the one everyone repeats, and it has nothing to do with colour.

Better than Champagne? A Guide To English Sparkling Wines

Same chalk, same grapes, same method as Champagne — just a few hundred miles north, and only ripening properly since the climate warmed up.

How Climate Affects Wine

Same grape, same winemaker, wildly different wine — just move the vineyard a few thousand miles and change the weather.

Can You Drink Wine With Spicy Food?

Yes — just not with the big oaky red that convinced everyone otherwise. Here is what actually works, and why.

Champagne, Prosecco, Cava And Other Sparkling Wines

You would not call all red wine Burgundy. Stop calling all sparkling wine Champagne — six styles, one gas, six genuinely different drinks.

Find Out What You Like With A Simple Wine Tasting

No spittoons, no tasting notes, no exam. Just six glasses lined up in the right order and a decade of assumptions about what you like, corrected in one evening.

How To Read A Wine Label

Old World bottles look like they are hiding something. They are — it is just hidden in the label, in plain sight, in French.