One of the biggest pleasures of working in wine has always been meeting passionate people, especially when visiting wine producers in situ. Recently I had the chance to meet two contrasting giants owning vineyards on the Saar River, part of the Mosel winegrowing area. Each one demonstrated a true passion about their very special piece… View more
Just looking at this stunning Provence vineyard shot taken by Mick Rock of Cephas makes me want to jump in a car and get down there now. It’s that wild inland Mediterranean look that I love – much as the coastline can be spectacular (exploring the calanques for example) the allure of the green mosaic… View more
Wine Travel Guides has been live for a whole year now and the feedback has been great – when a subscriber writes to me saying how useful the guides are with his wine trip planning, it makes it seem all worthwhile; when I have a good week for subscriptions, it’s even better! I’ve been wavering… View more
The first wine region that should have been covered on Wine Travel Guides ought by rights to have been Savoie. After all, I do live part of the time just over an hour away from the vineyards. But, I was so busy editing and promoting the rest of the site I never got to writing… View more
A subscriber of Wine Travel Guides (occasional wine tour guide, Lits Philippou) tipped me off about this really interesting Champagne bar/shop in Epernay and I was able to stop by on my way back from Haute Savoie to London (via the Jura!) before it had even been checked out by our Champagne expert Tom Stevenson…. View more
We were expecting to eat well in our two weeks in California last month, but there were several restaurants that exceeded our expectations. Not being the ones we went to with friends or colleagues, or read about in guidebooks, they really felt like travellers’ finds. The most unexpected was on our last night staying in… View more
Writing this from California where Brett and I are spending a couple of weeks spreading the word about Wine Travel Guides and learning how American wine lovers tick. Yesterday (Sunday afternoon) we decided to cruise the Russian River Valley incognito, pretending we were pure wine tourists. Used brochures and the Lonely Planet Guide as our… View more
Unusually, we needed to spend time near the Channel ports of Calais and Boulogne at the beginning of this week, en route back from France to England. And, to my great surprise, we made some good finds: Firstly, a hotel that could almost be a large chambre d’hôte, in the middle of the fields in… View more
Took a week off mid-July and went to Le Marche in Italy. We drove down from the French Alps through the Mont Blanc Tunnel and reached Modena for lunch. The place I had hoped to find, ‘Restaurant Lauro’ full of car memorabilia, seemed to have disappeared, but fortunately I had an old Michelin red Guide… View more
