The flavor of grapefruit in wine of Shanxi

My father worked in the wholesale supply of fruit and vegetables. He would often come home with a box of the day’s best produce, and so I became interested in what was in season. Both my parents often worked late, so cooking dinner to help take some weight off them inspired me to want to learn more. My first kitchen job at age 14 was at a Greek restaurant in Southampton, and it inspired my love for foods of the eastern Mediterranean. Today, I’m lucky to be able to obtain the best produce from ‘O ...

The spirit was filled into a single ex-Sherry cask at the Speyside distillery in 1940, shortly before The Second World War forced The Macallan to close for the first time in its history. Bottled at 41.6% abv, only 288 decanters are available worldwide, featuring eye-catching packaging: a mouth-blown glass decanter sitting on a bronze sculpture of three hands, created by Scottish artist Saskia Robinson. The hands represent the distillery workers of 1940 who made the whisky; former Macallan chairm ...

Last year, there was much mirth on wine Twitter about a particularly excruciating tasting note. You’re right. The wine trade needs to get out more. But still… this one was a beauty. It began well enough – really quite beautiful, in fact. But before long the imaginative descriptions were getting more ornate and strained. It moved from poetic to meaningless before finishing with a reference to Burnt Norton – the first of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets – that put it firmly in Private Eye magazine’s ...