I. Distractions In 1987, when I was 18 and a dollar was worth more than twice as much as it is today, I started reading magazines: M, Esquire, GQ. Nearby, in our somewhat cultured Texas town, a new bookstore opened in a cavernous space that had formerly housed the shag-carpeted roller skating rink of our childhood. Through the front windows, which had before been darkly tinted to give the place an alluring den-of-prepubescent-iniquity vibe, now streamed bright, clean light, showcasing a look and layout that would become the interior design gestalt of today’s national-chain, big-box book superstore. The rows upon rows of open, dustless shelving bearing a veritable warehouse of volumes; the ceiling hung with its industrial innards on display; the enfilade of check-out cubicles; and the wall – the great wall – that displayed a preposterous-to-behold assortment of glossies, quarterlies, journals, newsweeklies, fanzines, tabloids, almanacs, and all other flora and fauna of magazines arrayed upon a rack perhaps 50 feet long.  I went in there to look for a book. I liked books, and, one day, I was sure I wanted to write one. But I got distracted and bought a magazine instead – that August’s issue of GQ, which still stands out in my mind as a thing of formative significance. At that time, the zeitgeist was defined by a Walkman-wearing version of the American Renaissance Man – the highly-ambitious, status-obsessed, money-motivated, health-nut known as a Yuppie. No magazine positioned itself more authoritatively in defining this new sociological creature’s lifestyle than GQ, and it did it with whiter teeth, snappier suspenders, better accessories, bigger polka dots and more caffeine in the ink of its display copy.  I remember that issue less for the photos by Richard Avedon or Steven Meisel, the words of Martin Amis or Frederick Exley, than for this: Erzeugerabfüllung. It was one of the longest, strangest strings of letters from the Roman alphabet I had ever seen. Neither did it seem designed to come out of someone’s mouth. But there it was in Alan Richman’s Wine & Spirits column, accompanied by a lovely still-life photograph of his topic: two bottles of Riesling Kabinetts on a white, sun-dappled tablecloth. Richman’s main point – made almost 35 years ago – still holds true: estate-bottled, table-quality German wines remain some of the least expensive, most delicious wines in the world, chiefly because – then as now – the labels, as he wrote, “cannot be understood by anyone who is not a part-time oenophile, linguist and cartographer”. One US dollar in Richman’s pocket, as I have already said, bought what roughly two-dollars-and-fifty-cents does today; what he was on the hunt for was a good dry white in a range that would now cost somewhere between 12 and 30 bucks, and he easily accomplished that by finding a dealer in New York City who carried a good selection of wines from the Mosel and Rheingau. At the time, I didn’t know the meaning or significance of any of this, but it staked a claim in my brain. The only wine I had ever tasted was the one served at our Episcopal church during Eucharist on Sundays. The flavour it had was of a strange, super-concentrated jam that somehow warmed your upper body. Even as a young kid, I liked it. But the adjectives these German bottles were squeezing out of Richman – “citrus-like”, “honeyed”, “tart-sweet” – weren’t close to describing what was in that chalice, even if you believed in transubstantiation. Was it because Richman’s wine was white, and the parish’s was red? Perhaps, but both colours of grape juice bottled by Welch’s tasted pretty much the same to me. No, I sensed there was something – a lot – I had to learn, and, along with the romance and beauty of the labels, and the contextual air of well-bred taste and cultural with-it-ness featured on the other pages, this, I feel sure, was the decisive moment, the true origin point, when I came to believe that among the many extraordinary things that make life worth living, not just words but wine reigns at the top.  I warned you about distractions, didn’t I? Because that would be my excuse for now informing you, as a quite apropos footnote, that, yes, there was something unusual about our church’s Communion wine. It was, as I have confirmed with the church, actually port (Taylor’s Tawny, to be more accurate), cut, according to tradition, with water. There is a good and fascinating reason for this. In 1701, when the War of the Spanish Succession kicked off, France also became an enemy of England, and its wines, as a result, were no longer made available for import. The Anglican Church searched for and found a replacement, the fortified wines of its new ally, Portugal, and port continues to be an acceptable option to pair with the Host.  II. Distillations A satisfying story, not unlike a satisfying life, is one that surprises you with the mystery of its unfolding. A thing pulls in a certain direction long enough to reach the proximity of something else which then turns toward a new destination. I had actually gone into that bookstore, as I said, to look at books. But I came out, even though I didn’t yet know it, with a different compass point. Within a few years, shortly after graduating from college, in 1992, I got hired by The New Yorker, where I stayed for almost nine years. I then met my future wife, who wisely laughed at the thought we might be able to survive in New York City on my meagre salary, so I went to Vogue, and soon after became the founding editor of Men’s Vogue. After 23 issues, and four years, the financial crisis laid an axe to many magazines, including that one. Eventually, I took on the editorship of Town & Country. Then, finally, in 2016, I moved up to Esquire, the magazine, as it happens, that didn’t offer me a job when The New Yorker did, and became that storied magazine’s editor in chief, until – well, you best read about that in The New York Times.  As far as distractions go, magazines were a good one. They made me who I am, gave me a tremendously worldly education, honed my taste, introduced me to all manner of accomplished people, required me to build quite a wardrobe, and paid me pretty well to do all of this, often with a glass of wine not far out of the picture. There was really no other way I would have ever got to taste all the bottles I have (a lot of the big names people whisper about from Burgundy and Bordeaux, Champagne and also Piedmont, Tuscany and Napa). I built a modest cave à vin of my own by buying the Smith Haut Lafittes of the world way before hedge-fund hoi polloi ran up the prices, and by having access to rare offerings, like 12 bottles of Fiorano, the legendary white wine Alberico Boncompagni Ludovisi, prince of Venosa, made before ripping out all his vines. I smelled the musty perfume of Margaux in the cellar as I watched the workers rack the wine by candlelight. I lured Jay McInerney away from the Wall Street Journal to become my wine columnist; and I once stood in Bordeaux’s town square, tight on 2002 Pétrus, trying with great focus to commune with the statue of Michel de Montaigne while my French friend, a true oenophile, extolled the majesty of the Big Mac’s special sauce.  As the editor of a magazine, curiosity is your profession, even to the point of distraction. Editors – writers, too – are prone to it. It’s a hazard of the gift, and having a jumble of ideas, if you’re any good, is key to making a magazine of any real intellectual or creative daring. Now as a husband and father of three, working from home and trying to be ‘present’, and a still youngish former editor and occasional micro-influencer trying to stave off the solitude to fathom and plot the next phase of a fruitful future, this skill of mine, the strength of which became even more magnified over two decades, is something of a family project.  The way I most often hear the word ‘distraction’ now, for instance, is when it’s being hurled at me in verb form by my wife or daughters accusing me of being more of a phone-enslaved screen vegetable than they are. (I respectfully disagree.) But it’s a sore point for two reasons. One, what I did as an editor is, in a nutshell, now what a smartphone essentially does. Not very imaginatively, of course, and not with taste or charm or originality, but with a bloody, money-grubbing ruthlessness that stalks every step of our digital peregrinations and doesn’t give a twist if the algorithms that are its brain make us its slave by retrofitting our attention spans for kindergarten.  The smartphone – not the former me or any of my fellow kind still in the media biz – is now the true croupier of culture, dealing out a targeted shuffle of Pavlovian temptations to the point of daily mental exhaustion. And, though this thing is in many ways my personal nemesis, I am, against every fibre of my being, too often its obedient servant. Aiming not to live according to the famous line by T.S. Eliot – “distracted from distraction by distraction” – I recently decided to at least take a serious inventory of my favourite ones, both those of the pre-digital sort (tennis, The Walking Dead, checking the mailbox, my sock collection) and those of the post-digital sort (the any and everything I do because my phone wants me to). Then I caught myself watching tennis on my phone and realised this might be harder than I thought. It’s enough to drive a person to drink, thank god! With that in mind, I like to keep a special something for the occasion around, in this case – what else? – two bottles of Riesling Kabinett, for it had struck me as more than a little weird that I’ve probably tasted fewer than a handful of German wines in my entire life. Part of the reason is that those I had were bad, and, like a lot of other simpletons about this great wine region of the world, I’d come to think of Riesling as a cloying elixir equal parts green Jolly Rancher, apple cider vinegar, and hairspray. This, I knew, was wrong, not true and, in terms of wine equity and inclusion, on the wrong side of history. But, if you happen to live in a place like I do – a bourgie swathe of Connecticut bordering New York City where the shops cater heavily to Cali-Fran-Taly banker’s tastes – it might take you a few stops to find what Richman recommended, an erzeugerabfüllung (estate-bottled) Kabinett (wine made from grapes with a minimum must weight/sugar content) Riesling, and when you do it will probably be coated in a fine sift of years-old dust. I bought a green (Mosel) bottle for US$16 and a brown (Rhine) bottle for US$20, both handsomely labelled. I opened them a few minutes ago and took several investigative swigs. The words bright, invigorating and snappy came to mind. One is indeed sweeter, and, though not my usual jam, it is tamped by a pleasing peachy tartness, and the classic overtone of honey isn’t making my palate feel doused with syrup. The other example is, as Richman said so long ago, a very finely layered creature with mineral clarity and an echo of baked bread, something a gluten-free person like me finds particularly appealing. A rather obvious thought: why haven’t I been buying this instead of throwing a ton of endless money at affordably bad white Burgundy, which is mostly a product aimed at fulfilling a desired outcome, like White Claw hard seltzer? III. Words But don’t let me get distracted, again. A writer really has to be careful about such things. Just think about it. Unlike, say, a painter or musician or actor or photographer, the process of writing requires zero physical exertion, no chance to score an endorphin release while sitting staring anxiously at a blank page. Of the many things in life that vie against the counter intuitive impulse to be glued to a desk, Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise, his classic study of the things that distracted him (and others) from becoming a great writer, names the temptations but does not say much about why they’re so deeply tempting to someone who would otherwise be sitting alone in an empty room. Praise, money, fame, social prominence, affairs and journalism are the most common boltholes, according to Connolly, who, as a famously late sleeper that married three times, might have also added the bliss of unconsciousness and excessive alimony. In 1938, the year the book was published, he would never have imagined how hard the task might get without a cigarette. Smoking is a death wish, I know, but when you want to off yourself for still having a hundred pages to go, being able to snap open a nice lighter, flick some ash, stub a butt and inhale some lungfuls of focus-enhancing nicotine must have been kind of helpful. Connolly also doesn’t have much to say about drink except that artists who drink to excess do so “out of the consciousness of wasted ability”. According to that, the 20th century’s most famous literary alcoholics – Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Styron, Elizabeth Bishop, James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner – might have left behind even greater treasures than they did. Because Ernest Hemingway did almost everything with more gusto than any of his peers, including running up his bar tab, as a drinker he belongs in his own sentence. He is the novelist who most romanced a good drink or nice bottle of wine as one of life’s great pleasures. Who didn’t want to have a vermouth with Jake when reading The Sun Also Rises? (Don’t, it’s gross, at least if you order it at one of those kiosks in Montmartre where the bottles are hung upside down with spring-loaded dispensers.) Or, track down a bottle of Valdepeñas, Hemingway’s favourite variety of Spanish wine. Or, get a drink at the bar named after him at the Ritz, in Paris, and then go somewhere on the Left Bank to order “a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine”.  In the early work, he is not boastful about drinking so much as he is the possessor of an unusual appetite for a good buzz. He is also, like Connolly, aware of the need to keep writing separate from drinking, and drinking within his control. It is hard to read the first paragraph of A Moveable Feast, in which he describes an “evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness”, except as a kind of terrifying admonition to himself. It is tragic that he didn’t heed his own advice. Late in his life, Hemingway became fond of rum daiquiris at the Floridita, his favourite bar in Havana, which might explain his taste for a prose style that soon became too often cloying self-parody. In one of the most extraordinary drinking sessions ever committed to words, in the roman à clef Across the River and Into the Trees, a 50-year-old Hemingway, who was smitten with a teenage Italian countess from Venice, fictionalises his infatuation with a last muse. In one stretch (that covers an evening-to-dawn crawl from Harry’s Bar, the grill at the Gritti Palace, a gondola and a hotel room), one half or another of the couple imbibes: one scotch whisky and soda; six Montgomery Martinis (15 parts gin; 1 part vermouth), two of which are described in size as ‘super’; a bottle of Capri Bianco; two bottles of Valpolicella; two bottles of Roederer Brut ’42; and two bottles of Perrier-Jouët. That is, I suppose, one extreme, and, clearly, not one to be tried at home.  The other might have been espoused by Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great critic and lexicographer. As a young man, he’d drained “many a bottle of wine” but loved port especially. (Perhaps Johnson, a devout Anglican who was born in 1709, in the midst of England’s 14-year war with Spain, also first encountered port as a boy at the Communion altar.) He describes himself to friend and biographer James Boswell as having been “apt to go to excess in it”, adding that, “therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it”.  Boswell, who worried about his own dependence on alcohol, even keeping a journal of his intake in an attempt to enforce moderation, argued for a third way, which some of the Romantics later adopted. Wine, he claimed, “produces truth; in vino veritas”. Hoping to persuade Johnson of his point, Boswell once convinced the critic to come down off the wagon for just one glass of claret, so Johnson “might judge, not from recollection, which might be dim, but from immediate sensation”. Boswell reports what happened after the glass was emptied: “Johnson shook his head, and said, ‘Poor stuff! No, Sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men,’” adding, “‘A man would be drowned by it before it made him drunk.’”  That actually reminds me of something I think I forgot to mention about Riesling Kabinetts – they’re also highly admired for their low percentage of alcohol. On that note, I think I’ll have another glass.  This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two.

Jay Fielden, former editor of Men’s Vogue, Town & Country and Esquire, recalls how a magazine column on wine, read in a Texas bookstore, shifted his ambitions beyond journalism and set him on the path to becoming a writer of books.

Former Esquire editor-in-chief Jay Fielden reflects on magazines, writing, Riesling Kabinett and the distractions that shaped a life in words and wine.

Jay Fielden on Wine, Words and Distraction

How one became another  

Group CEO Patrick O’Connor reflects on Bordeaux 2025: a hot, dry and early vintage defined by small yields, precise viticulture, restrained winemaking and a new wave of estates delivering wines of real distinction.

Patrick O’Connor, Group CEO, explores Bordeaux 2025: a hot, dry, early vintage shaped by precision, small yields and standout wines.

Bordeaux 2025 en primeur: vintage overview      

Bordeaux 2025: vintage overview               

Sitting opposite us, the dark-suited, dark-haired figure waved an elegant hand at the bottle of white Burgundy which he’d just fished out of a carrier bag and planted on the table with the air of a conjuror at a party. “You’ll like this,” he said; it was a statement, not a suggestion, delivered in a faint accent with American overtones and a hint of gutturality. In this totally unremarkable West London pub, a bottle of Meursault looked as out of place as a KGB officer. Which he was. We did like it, of course, who wouldn’t? It made the greasy steak and chips almost bearable, and was one of the best wines I’d ever tasted at that point in my life. I was 33 that year, 1978, and as a newish BBC foreign correspondent I wasn’t particularly well paid. He’d brought the Meursault with him to show us how sophisticated he was, and to counter the blandness of the food. But why had he suggested The Mitre as a place for lunch? It was handy for the Soviet embassy up the road, certainly; but I realised that the real attraction for him was the high-backed seats that enclosed our table and kept our conversation private. Sergei was a major in the KGB, masquerading as a press attaché. The habit of secrecy was deeply ingrained in him. The Meursault started to work on my companion, a gossipy, amusing, slightly naïve BBC executive. It worked on me, too, but under the influence of alcohol I tend to go quiet and introverted. Not so Harry. He delivered the brief lecture about Soviet harassment of our Moscow correspondent which he’d been planning. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t make Sergei burst into tears. On the contrary. “Ah, yes, the famous Declan.” Sergei managed to put the accent on the second syllable. “Such good Russian. A pity he wastes his time hanging around those drop-outs and wastrels.” I was particularly impressed by ‘wastrels’. “I suppose you mean dissidents,” I said, pushing my glass across for more Meursault. The label read ‘1968’; the Soviet embassy must have had a superb cellar. Sergei laughed scornfully and poured. “I hear Declan’s marriage isn’t going so good now,” he said. “Ah, no, his wife left him for an airline pilot,” Harry replied, giggling. I kicked him sharply: you didn’t feed personal details about your colleagues to KGB officers. “What?” Harry said, looking at me. We saw the bottle out. Sometimes I think I can still taste that rich, green-gold collection of butter, almond, citrus and, could it have been, or is it just my imagination after more than 40 years, hints of bracken and mayflower. At the end, we stood up and shook hands. “So you’ll go easy on Declan from now on?” Harry said. “Well, Declan must stop creating bad propaganda against the Soviet Union.” He had a good ear: this time the accent was on the first syllable. Sergei turned in the direction of the embassy, and we headed back to Television Centre. “Bloody good wine those Russkies can afford,” Harry said, and gave his high-pitched laugh.For journalists and spies, booze is a famous lubricant, a fuel, even. I came from a teetotal background, yet when I started as a foreign correspondent I soon found myself ordering a glass of single malt as a means of self-protection, while someone I was trying to pump for information opened up and talked in a way he or she never would if I’d ordered a Britvic orange. Yet there were exceptions. In Belfast and Derry, where I started my reporting career, the leaders of the Provisional IRA were mostly ultra-Catholic and never drank a drop; and as I branched out and began reporting on the Middle East, I found that organisations like Hezbollah and the followers of the Ayatollah were as teetotal as I had once been. There were no bars to meet them in, either. Fortunately, though, cities like Cairo and Beirut were more sophisticated. I soon found that anywhere with a sizeable Christian population, Egypt and Lebanon, of course, but also Syria, Iraq and westernised countries like Turkey and Pakistan, made allowances for thirsty westerners and permitted them to drink, even if in cities like Peshawar you had to sign a big leather volume and register yourself as an alcoholic. The bar in the old Commodore Hotel in Beirut was a wonderful centre for professional alcoholics of this kind. I first went there in June 1982, when West Beirut was under hourly attack from Israeli planes and tanks, and there were no shelters to protect us. The presiding spirit of the place was a correspondent called Chris Drake, a hospitable soul who dispensed booze and information even-handedly. When the barrage was going on, it would have been suicidal to leave the Commodore, and the building shuddered to every nearby explosion. Chris Drake had a parrot, and when the bar was packed in the evening with journalists glad to still be alive, it would imitate the sound of a shell in flight with startling accuracy. Most of the people there, not me, thank God, had walked into the bar on their first night, heard the parrot’s hugely convincing whistle, and thrown themselves on the floor shouting “Incoming!”. There would be a roar of laughter, and someone would help them up and offer them a glass of arak, an infusion of grapes and the seeds of the anise plant. I acquired a real taste for arak at that time, and I still think of that slightly oily, metallic, liquorice-tasting liquid hitting the back of my throat and burning its way down. A few years later, during another upsurge of fighting, the Commodore was heavily shelled by the Syrian army. The building was destroyed, and no trace of the parrot was ever found. When peace was restored and there was money around, the Commodore was rebuilt, much bigger and more glitzy, but the architect designed a new bar precisely where the old one had once been. You can still see the space on the floor where many a famous journalist measured his length when the parrot did its party trick. I took my wife and 13-year-old son there a couple of years ago, and one afternoon, when the bar was empty, my son insisted on re-enacting the whole thing. In China, things were different. Meetings with underground figures usually took place at their homes or outdoors, given the fear of surveillance. I often chose Ritan Park in Beijing, where teahouses served pu-erh tea and offered a discreet place to talk. By contrast, official meetings required alcohol, specifically Maotai, a fierce baijiu distilled from sorghum at over 50% ABV. At one banquet, after being insulted by a local Party official, I tried to outdrink him. The plan failed, he had help, but we still ended the night collapsed together, singing in two languages. The next day, I was told this had enhanced British prestige. Countries where alcohol is banned present different challenges. In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, I smuggled in a 27-year-old bottle of Laphroaig disguised as Fanta, only to pour it down the toilet when soldiers began searching rooms for alcohol. They never entered mine. After the fall of the Soviet Union, I tried to track Sergei down but never found him. Before that, though, I had taken my revenge by signing him up to every unwanted mailing list I could find, encyclopaedias, dubious magazines, and more inventive subscriptions besides. It made me feel very good.And yet, if I imagine meeting him again, I always picture the same thing: Sergei standing in the doorway, holding a superb bottle of Meursault. For that, at least, I’ve always been grateful. This article was written by John Simpson, who reflects on his experiences reporting across the world, and the role alcohol has played in the art of face-to-face reconnaissance. Illustrations by Natsko Seki. Originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two.

BBC world affairs editor John Simpson reflects on reporting from conflict zones, recalling memorable bars, encounters and the role alcohol plays in the subtle art of face-to-face reconnaissance.

BBC world affairs editor John Simpson on bars, encounters and how alcohol shapes reporting, trust and intelligence gathering worldwide.

John Simpson on bars, spies and the art of reporting

Refuge,  refreshment & reconnaissance

Xiao-Li Meng, Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics at Harvard and Founding Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Data Science Review, was inspired by a student to combine wine and statistics—leading to insights far beyond what they ever expected.

From wine tastings to data science, Xiao-Li Meng explores how statistics reveals simplicity in complexity – one glass, experiment, and insight at a time.

Wine, statistics & serendipity: A Harvard journey

Seeking simplicity in statistics, complexity in wine, and everything else in fortune cookies 

Sitting plum in the middle of the Côte d’Or, the hill of Corton is hard to miss. Its wines, especially the whites, however, are all too often overlooked. We sat down with some of the region’s leading producers to explore the pedigree and potential of this site and its powerful, long-lasting wines

Discover the pedigree and potential of the hill of Corton’s whites – the fine Chardonnay from Corton-Charlemagne, Charlemagne and Corton Blanc 

Exploring Corton-Charlemagne, Charlemagne and Corton Blanc 

Corton-Charlemagne: the Grand Cru of the future?  

Some of Nicolas Champagneux’s earliest memories are of life in the vines – of the hubbub of harvest with his grandparents. It’s not the hard work that he recalls, it’s “des bons moments de famille” he tells me – the convivial spirit that infused the air. He grew up in the heart of Côte-Rôtie, spending weekends and holidays in his family’s vineyard – a swathe of Les Grandes Places, a prized site in the commune of Verenay, where his great-grandfather planted vines at the start of the 20th century.  Les Grandes Places is an extraordinary site – with the most famous producer arguably Jean-Michel Gérin. In the north of the Côte Brune, in a southwest-facing amphitheatre, this steep site has crumbly mica schist soils, which allow the vines’ roots to drive deep into the bedrock. It’s home to some very old vines – such as the centenarian plantings that Champagneux farms – and produces wines that are beautifully elegant yet with dark, fleshy power. Champagneux has almost two hectares here, having the largest holdings. Nicolas’s uncle André took over running the vineyard after his grandparents, while his father Gérard went to work in a factory. There wasn’t enough money for both brothers to join the family business back then, with Côte-Rôtie not nearly as sought-after as it is today. Other than a couple of barrels for personal consumption, the family didn’t make wine, farming the site and selling almost all the fruit to Guigal, one of the Northern Rhône’s most famous names.  Indeed, beyond the family vineyard, Nicolas spent a lot of time at Guigal – after his father Gérard left life on the factory floor to head up their viticulture team. From 16, Nicolas would work there in his holidays to earn some money. When Champagneux turned 18, he needed to find a job: he was determined not to work in an office and loved being outside, so he ended up becoming a high-wire electrician – working with huge currents of 20,000 volts. “You were never in the same place, each day was different, each task was different – so there was no monotony,” he says. He often finished his day early, and – a farmer born and bred, unaccustomed to the concept of relaxing – would go help in the family vineyard.  When his uncle passed away, there was no one else to take over the domaine – so he stepped up to the plate, keen to ensure his family’s heritage was preserved. He decided to start keeping the fruit and making wine under the family name, wanting to see the year’s efforts captured. He knew how to work the vines but had never dreamt of being a winemaker – but, never one to be put off by a challenge, he learnt on the job. That was 2014, and the wines have rapidly earned him a reputation in the region. The family cellar had the essentials, but the first few vintages were made with the bare minimum – with a new cellar built in 2016 (Yves Cuilleron advised on the project).  Almost a decade after he left the world of pylons, transformers and conductors behind, life might follow an annual cycle, but it’s as un-monotonous as it was before. Nicolas works as a one-man band and values the independence that brings – managing his own time and being his own boss. “There is still a lot to do and each year is different,” he tells me. He hopes his son will join him at some point – he was born in 2009, and his uncle put away a stash of wine from the vintage, some of which is set to be released for its 20th anniversary in 2029.   Climate change is at the forefront of his mind, with harvests now early September and even August versus October under his uncle. Where they used to struggle to get 13% potential alcohol, his wines often sit at 14-14.5%. He’s now working with grass cover, deleafing less and using a little whole bunch in warmer years to preserve freshness in the wines. Otherwise, little has changed in the decade since he started – he continues to work as simply as possible, looking to translate the vines he grew up amongst into wine. And that’s just what he does: the wines are elegant expressions of Les Grandes Places, perfumed and suave, with a fine grip of tannins and an underlying savoury salinity, ageing beautifully – as a mini-vertical of the 2015, 2016 and 2017 vintages showed recently.   The Nicolas Champagneux wines  From his four hectares of vines, Nicolas Champagneux makes three wines: an IGP Vin de Pays des Collines Rhodaniennes La Rémise and two Côte-Rôties, Les Grandes Places and La Dédicace, all made with 100% Syrah.   La Dédicace comes from the younger vines in Les Grandes Places, with a “mere” 40-60 years behind them on average. Around 6,000-7,000 bottles are produced of this “baby” Grandes Places.   Les Grandes Places comes from his oldest vines, averaging a little over 100 years in age, with some planted in 1910. Just 1,500 bottles or so are made of this wine each vintage.  Both the Côte-Rôtie wines are made in exactly the same way, mostly de-stemmed with  little whole-bunch added in warmer vintages and fermented with indigenous yeast, reaching a maximum 28-30°C, and spending around three weeks on skins. The wine then spends 20-24 months in old oak before bottling.  Nicolas Champagneux Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places: a vertical tasting  2022 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places: This is packed with spicy intensity – clove and cardamom along with a hit of Szechuan pepper. The palate offers a juicy lushness, layered with deep, concentrated dark cherry fruit and a twist of black tapenade, with mouth-coating tannins and all refreshed by a line of vibrant acidity. A baby now, best approached from 2030.  2021 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places: A really impressive 2021, poised and powerful, Champagneux’s Les Grandes Places needs air but gradually reveals pepper spice and more delicate, lifted, violet florals. There is, however, power and weight to the palate – more than you might expect from the pretty nose, with a savoury firmness, supple but structured tannins and juicy acidity. It’s dark and brooding, gothic with its haunting florals, with a long, mouth-watering, saline finish. Approach from 2027.  2017 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places: The 2017 Les Grandes Places combines delicate florals with a bloody, iron note on the nose, leading on to a palate layered with bramble fruit. The tannins are round, supple and soft-textured, with tangy acidity that cuts through the concentrated fruit, while the long finish is scented with white pepper and parma violets.  2016 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places: This 2016 is in a gorgeous place. Heady incense combines with sweet cherry fruit and a touch of smoke on the nose, leading onto a palate that you sink into – the wine soft and supple, with waves of sweet fruit, yet all cut by an intensely saline, savoury edge. Fresh and flawlessly balanced, decant and enjoy now and over a good decade to come.   2015 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places: The sternest of the trio of 2015, 2016 and 2017, this is a powerful and impressive vintage of Les Grandes Places – with all the best characteristics of the year. The wine is dark and broody, compact and amazingly primary still, with black cherry fruit and blackberry filling the nose. On the palate, however, it has amazing purity and intensity, with a crystalline quality to the fruit, plenty of acidity to complement its concentration and the firm tannins. Smoky, saline notes linger in the mouth, with a dusting of petal florals on the finish. Decant if opening now, but this will be even better if you can resist for another few years.  Explore all current listings from Nicolas Champagneux including a range of back-vintages or read more about the Rhône 

It’s almost a decade since Nicolas Champagneux took over his family’s vines and started making wine under his own name – the first generation to do so. We sat down with the vigneron to find out more about his heritage and the journey so far 

How the talented young vigneron in Cote-Rotie has taken his family’s legacy and created a new domaine that is one of the Rhone’s most exciting 

Nicolas Champagneux – building on his birthright 

Nicolas Champagneux: building on his birthright 

It’s no secret that Scotch whisky is dominated by two giants – Diageo and Pernod Ricard, who represent 60% of the market, with three other big players taking the next 20%. That leaves a mere 20% for those who have the wallets and mettle to fight over the rest – but that’s an increasing number of people. There are currently over 30 single malt distilleries at some stage of opening.  “I think it’s a bit of a worry to be honest,” Mark Reynier, Renegade Spirits founder and CEO, says. Reynier has been behind three of the most talked-about distillery projects in the past 20 years – the resurrection of Islay powerhouse Bruichladdich in 2000, the renovation of a former Diageo brewery into Irish single malt distillery Waterford in 2015 and the construction of Renegade rum distillery in Grenada from scratch in 2020. All three have a dogged focus on terroir and have not been without their struggles. “Superficially it does look easy - but it sure as hell isn’t,” he says. “With Bruichladdich we almost went bust twice. With the best will in the world and two-distillery experience I got it wrong with Renegade and almost went bust last September.”  In Reynier’s view, many of those opening distilleries are driven by romantic ideas and the desire to make a quick buck – from landowners looking to monetise estates to “crooks” who “promise fortunes to be made”. Few, however, have the knowledge, business nous or money to back up their ambitions.  Wolfcraig – a new distillery in Stirling – is one of the industry’s most interesting projects, largely thanks to the experience of the team involved. While neither of the founders Jamie Lunn or John Moore had worked in whisky before (coming, respectively, from construction and finance), Jamie Lunn’s father is former Whyte & Mackay chairman and chief executive Michael Lunn – and happened to be eager for a new project. It hasn’t been plain sailing though: the team had a false start with an ill-fated attempt to take a controlling stake of an existing distillery. Downhearted but not defeated, they made the decision to go it alone. Moore and Lunn have assembled a first-rate team with over 200 years’ experience. Master Blender Richard Paterson OBE was the most recent addition to the roster – which Jamie Lunn affectionately refers to as “the Harlem globetrotters of whisky” – including Dr Alan Rutherford OBE (former Production Director at Diageo, Master of the Quaich and previous President of the Malt Distillers Association of Scotland), Ian Macmillan (a Master Distiller, also a Master of the Quaich and a member of the Worshipful Company of Distillers) and Iain Lochhead (former UK Bacardi Operations Director, and another Master of the Quaich). But even with a team of such pedigree, it hasn’t been easy. “It was three and a half years of pain,” Moore says. Every decision has been driven by an unwavering mission to produce a truly special liquid, considerable industry experience and business acumen. Stirling, for example, was chosen not just for its infrastructure, but its accessibility – within an hour’s drive of 70% of the Scottish population. The team ensured they were fully funded and have consciously built a brand – and decided on the style of spirit they’ll be making – before physically breaking ground. “Out of all the new whisky distilleries,” Moore says, “very few of them are designing their own unique spirit and they have not put any thought into why they have a particular shape of still.” Wolfcraig, by contrast, is having their still handmade by Forsyths, with a distinctive double-ball design to produce a more muscular, full-bodied spirit. It’s not just new players and mavericks behind the trend though, with some of whisky’s most historic names being given a new lease of life. Halewood International, for example, is bringing malt whisky distilling back to the heart of the Scottish drinks industry in the Port of Leith, Edinburgh, for the first time in 100 years with the John Crabbie Distillery.  Today, the name John Crabbie might be synonymous with ginger wine, but he was an independent bottler, single malt producer and recognised blender in the 19th century. For the team here, creating something new brings great freedom. “One of the key parts of our distillery is its versatility,” Global Dark Spirits Manager Andy Wallace says. “Because of the type of distillery we have, we can change our new make spirit and we can be very adaptable. That flexibility, put in the hands of somebody who knows what they are doing, like our Master Blender Dr Kirstie McCallum – a chemist with an excellent palate – and we’re going to experiment.”   Experimentation with different casks is high on the agenda. In addition to PX and Oloroso casks, the team is looking at how Manzanilla might work and playing around with other wine cask finishes.   Prior to joining Halewood, Wallace spent six years at William Grant & Sons, the home of Balvenie and Glenfiddich since 1887. “They are beautiful, incredible distilleries in a beautiful part of the world,” Wallace says, “but they come with their own inherent limitations… some people will see them as being a bit aspirational and not for them.” In his view, building something from scratch – even with a history like Crabbie’s – means they don’t have to produce a certain type of product. “What we want to do is bring new people into the category and allow people to drink differently,” he explains. Free from the burden of a legacy, a new distillery can be more agile. This can, however, be a catch-22. In a quest to stand apart, rather than play the old boys at their centuries-perfected game, innovation – if not managed in a considered, well-financed, way – can end in tears. “A lot of people have got rather carried away with the romance and [they] don’t really understand the consequences and the costs, and the durability that you need,” Mark Reynier explains.  “And above all you need a unique proposition. Just to be another distillery isn’t enough. The distilling bit is the easy bit. I think this is what’s going to be the downfall for a lot of people. The maturation and the time and cost is the crunch. And then you have got to bring it to market.” Wallace agrees. “You must have a long-term plan for selling your product because you have got a several-year timeline before you can launch anything in the first place,” he says. “One of the big challenges for whisky companies is predicting demand. If you have to predict how much 12-year-old product you’re going to sell on day one, that is a really difficult challenge.”   This was one of the many reasons Wolfcraig was determined to be fully funded from the get-go. “A lot of new whisky distilleries are just living hand-to-mouth and raising money year-on-year and that is emotionally draining,” Moore says. “But, also more importantly, it takes time away from the business when you are constantly fundraising.” It’s no small amount of money required, either. While you might be able to start a gin distillery with £50,000, whisky is a different beast. “Even the small craft distilleries, you’re talking several million pounds to set up,” Moore explains. “Our overall investment will be close on £20million… So, it’s not something you go into lightly.” “Running a distillery is an expensive business,” Reynier adds. “Just when you most need the revenue to get into the market, that is when you are least likely to have it. You are building in a lag period. You have created this brand over a decade, but you don’t actually have enough stock maturing to satisfy the sales that you have created or are creating. So, you have got to plan forward.” Waterford is a distillation of everything Reynier got wrong at Bruichladdich and everything he felt he wasn’t able to do because of a “lack of resource, lack of desire perhaps, tradition getting in the way, and the lack of logistics”. “We had a war chest because we knew that to do it properly, we had to be able to insulate ourselves financially to be able to buy ourselves the time to do it properly, with proper, premium-quality barley, single-farm distillations for uniqueness and for complexity,” Reynier explains. “Practised at Bruichladdich, perfected here.” Ultimately, once you get past the business and branding, it’s the quality of the liquid that will sort the wheat from the chaff. “We need to achieve the same core things any distillery does,” Wallace says. “We want to make genuinely brilliant drams that people will enjoy in years to come.” Browse all Scotch whisky or read more Editorial 

As demand for single malt whisky continues to soar, the number of distilleries – big and small – preparing to fling open their doors increases at a bullish rate. Holly Motion talks to a few of the industry’s newest names to see if everything is as rosy as it seems

Investigating the sharp rise in the number of single malt whisky distilleries with Waterford, Wolfcraig and John Crabbie. 

Distilling dreams

Everything about Glenfarclas is venerable. For almost 200 years, the distillery with one of the most enviable addresses in Scotland has remained fiercely independent and committed to quality. Where countless others have amalgamated and joined behemoths of the industry, Glenfarclas has remained family-owned – amassing enviable stocks of aged single malt in the process. Today, the sixth generation of the Grant family maintains many traditional practices, including direct firing its stills, to produce the highest quality, full-bodied sherried Highland single malt possible. This resolution and myriad difficult decisions made by the family during times of immense hardship have led to genuine innovation and secured Glenfarclas a place as one of the most coveted and collectable names in Scotch whisky. But just how has one of the only family-owned Scottish distillers become such an icon and which Glenfarclas bottlings are the most highly sought after? The history of Glenfarclas The Glenfarclas distillery was built on the River Spey in 1836 when Robert Hay was granted a licence to distil whisky. Cattle breeder John Grant took over the farm and distillery following Hay’s death for 511 pounds and 19 shillings and leased it to John Smith who left five years later to build Cragganmore. The site passed between Grant generations until the Glenfarclas-Glenlivet Distillery Company was formed with Pattisons of Leith in the 1890s. This partnership wasn’t to last long and Glenfarclas was fortunate to weather the Pattisons Crash in 1898 that threatened to bring the entire industry down with it. The distillery has firmly remained under the Grant family’s ownership since. George Scott Grant is one of the key figures in the distillery’s long history. During his 52-year tenure, which ended with his death in 2002, George built up Glenfarclas’s name and brand image. George had the foresight to restrict the supply of stock to blenders and squirrel away stocks. This decision has proven extremely lucrative as Glenfarclas now boasts a depth of stock that few other whisky distilleries can rival. John L. S Grant, the current chairman, has been with the company since 1973 and succeeded his father in 2002. The sixth generation is represented by George S. Grant who joined Glenfarclas in 2000. George works as the larger-than-life global brand ambassador, introducing the world to the remarkable Glenfarclas story and spirit. The distillery’s fortunes oscillated throughout various whisky booms and busts. Production has increased, been scaled back, and considerable stock laid down when times were hard. Throughout all this, the Speyside distillery can legitimately lay claim to a series of firsts – it was one of the first single malts to be consistently available when others were concentrating on blends and it was among the first Scottish distilleries to open a visitor centre. It was also the first to introduce a cask-strength single malt whisky. Today, Glenfarclas operates the biggest stills in Speyside and its Highland single malt accounts for two-thirds of the distillery’s annual production – sold in more than 90 markets worldwide. Glenfarclas’s distillery character The distillery, located one mile from the River Spey, is situated on a stretch of land that boasts the likes of The Macallan,  Balvenie,  Glenfiddich and Aberlour. The distillery sources its water from the neighbouring Ben Rinnes mountains. Glenfarclas is famed for its full-bodied, Sherry-matured expressions. The distillery only releases expressions at natural colour, often at cask strength, aged for extended periods of time. The unique still shapes and sizes, alongside the traditional ingredients and distillation techniques add to the distinctive distillery character. Glenfarclas new-make spirit is only ever matured in a combination of first-fill and refill ex-Oloroso casks from the highly regarded José y Miguel Martin. John Grant makes an annual pilgrimage to the bodega in Jerez to ensure his Highland single malt will eventually slumber in the finest quality oak. To this day, all six of Glenfarclas’s stills, which are the largest in Speyside, are direct-fired. The distillery team experimented with steam heating in 1981 to no avail as the family believed the final product to be inferior and lacking its characteristic full-bodied style. The distillery is capable of producing approximately 3.5 million litres of spirit annually. Normally, two of the stills are kept in reserve, while four work around the clock. Glenfarclas single malt whiskies Glenfarclas has consistently released single malt whiskies of exceptional quality from its enviable stocks. The Grant family has more than 50,000 casks slumbering in its expansive on-site warehousing at any one time to draw from. In 2007, Glenfarclas gave the world a glimpse at its incredible depth of stocks with the first release of its highly collectable Family Casks bottlings. The series of 43 (and counting) single-cask, vintage single malts spans seven decades and is highly sought after by whisky lovers. In addition to the limited releases, Glenfarclas bottles a “made to age” core range, which includes the 10 Year Old, 12 Year Old, 15 Year Old, 17 Year Old, 21 Year Old, 25 Year Old, 30 Year Old and 50 Year Old. The distillery also produces an incredibly popular cask-strength bottling named “105 Cask Strength”. Some of the most collectable Glenfarclas bottlings Notable limited releases include the Glenfarclas 50-year-old (released in 2005) and the 175th anniversary commemorative bottling, released in January 2011. The latter was an impressive vatted whisky from casks from 1952 and five successive decades. In June 2015, Glenfarclas launched the highly collectable limited expression £511.19s.0d Family Reserve to mark 150 years of the Grant family’s ownership of the distillery. The bottling was named after the amount (511 pounds and 19 shillings) John Grant paid for the Glenfarclas farm in 1865, and came with a copy of the original bill of sale for the distillery. One of the most remarkable limited releases is the Glenfarclas Family Trunk, released in 2018. Only 60 of the leather shipping luggage trunks containing 50 bottles of 200ml single malt from the Family Casks collection, dating back to 1954, were ever produced. Today, a single trunk, available to purchase from the distillery, costs £120,000. In 2020, the distillery released another highly collectable whisky for the Spirit of Speyside Festival, which was cancelled due to the global pandemic. Each year, a member of the team chooses a spirit to be bottled for the annual whisky celebration. In 2020, the responsibility fell to the men behind the still, and The Stillmen’s Dram was born – a 10-year-old matured in a first-fill Oloroso butt, bottled at cask strength. The Glenfarclas Family Casks Collection The Glenfarclas Family Casks collection is a highly collectable series of single cask bottlings from the family’s extensive stocks. Since the first bottle was released in 2007, the Family Casks whiskies have garnered a loyal following and become a real collectors’ item. The single-cask whiskies, which span seven decades, are some of the finest expressions from each vintage since 1954. Glenfarclas Pagoda series The highly collectable Pagoda series features two of the oldest Glenfarclas whiskies ever released. The extremely limited vintage whisky bottlings are inspired by the famous pagoda kiln which was decommissioned at the distillery in 1972. Each Glencairn crystal decanter is a unique work of art. No two are exactly the same and each element – from the side graphics to the exquisite pagoda stopper – have been painstakingly crafted. The Glenfarclas Pagoda Series is available in extremely limited quantities. Only 180 bottles of the 1954 vintage Pagoda Ruby Reserve (62-year-old), and 1953 Pagoda Sapphire Reserve (63-year-old) were ever made. The outrun of The Pagoda Reserve Trilogy (1956 vintage 59-year-old, 1967 vintage 48-year-old and 1971 vintage 43-year-old) was limited to 100 sets. Browse Glenfarclas whiskies or read more Editorial

Glenfarclas is an iconic, family-owned single malt Scotch whisky producer. As bottlings from the Grant family’s impressive aged stocks become ever-more collectable, Holly Motion charts the fascinating history of this fiercely independent whisky maker

A spotlight on Glenfarclas. We explore how the traditional, independent Scotch whisky distiller became one of the world’s most well-respected names.

Exploring the Scotch whisky icon, Glenfarclas 

Everything you need to know about Glenfarclas

Château Bois-Malot

France

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