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3 days ago | 
newstatesman.com | Andrew Jefford
Fifty-one years ago, I bought a bottle of Chianti. I was a nursing assistant, living in nurses’ accommodation. Wages went on food, drink and books; I taught myself to cook. When the communal pans were laid aside, I opened the straw-swaddled bottle, poured the pale red wine and marvelled: every drop was sucked from Tuscan soils. It seemed incredible: we were sitting here, drinking Tuscany. Literally. Near Norwich. Gulp!This astonishment expanded. Wine (I read) possessed a thing called terroir.
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4 days ago | 
worldoffinewine.com | Andrew Jefford
After the qualitative highs of 2019, the 2020 Brunello di Monalcino vintage is a significant step down, says Andrew Jefford. There’s one irrefutable conclusion that we can draw from the 2020 vintage in Brunello di Montalcino. Perhaps it’s obvious; perhaps it’s even a platitude.
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1 week ago | 
buff.ly | Andrew Jefford
‘We face three challenges,’ said Yiannis Paraskevopoulos, the email’s author, when I caught up with him and fellow grower Stellios Boutaris in early 2025, shortly before the February earthquakes that added to Santorini’s simmering stresses. Yiannis co-owns the 13ha Gaia winery, while Stellios’ Ktima Kir-Yianni has recently become the owner of the 40ha Domaine Sigalas winery, as well as partnering with Paris Sigalas for his new Santorini venture Oeno P.
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1 week ago | 
decanter.com | Andrew Jefford
‘We face three challenges,’ said Yiannis Paraskevopoulos, the email’s author, when I caught up with him and fellow grower Stellios Boutaris in early 2025, shortly before the February earthquakes that added to Santorini’s simmering stresses. Yiannis co-owns the 13ha Gaia winery, while Stellios’ Ktima Kir-Yianni has recently become the owner of the 40ha Domaine Sigalas winery, as well as partnering with Paris Sigalas for his new Santorini venture Oeno P.
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2 weeks ago | 
worldoffinewine.com | Andrew Jefford
Andrew Jefford tastes 2022 Prince Alexandre Chavchavadze Tsinandali Estate Kakhetian Blend Qvevri. Why do we do it? Why do we rip white grape juice away from the protective skin in which it comes into being? What leads us to carry out this act of separation? It is, like the sieving and milling of flour or the polishing of rice, a refinement. We’ve come to consider the skins of white grapes mere husks.
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1 month ago | 
newstatesman.com | Andrew Jefford
The taste of wine is the taste of fermented grape juice: diverse, distracting, shockingly beautiful. And there’s more. Wine’s flavours, famously, can convey origin with great precision, though the mechanisms at play resist easy definition. Behind that, underwriting both our understanding of wine regions and the ability of those working in them to prevail on the market, lies history. History is wine’s forgotten ingredient.
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1 month ago | 
decanter.com | Andrew Jefford
Is democracy the safest form of government, or might autocracy have its merits? Is prosperity best assured through free-trade, or through protectionism? All urgent questions at present, affecting wine as they affect everything else; the responses are consequential. So much so… that I’ll leave those answers to you. I have a different dichotomy to discuss; it may even be the key question in wine aesthetics. When you treat yourself to a special bottle, what do you hope you’ll find?
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2 months ago | 
newstatesman.com | Andrew Jefford
March’s second day this year was a Sunday. My brother and I walked the Sussex South Downs. Almost three months since midwinter, the freshly peeled air drenched the leafless woods and hills with pale light. Yellow crocuses quietly exploded in the grass; the first larks unspooled their ribbon of song above. At lunchtime, we dipped down to the Ram in Firle. We sat at a bare table in its dark, womb-like dining room with our beloved hatchlings: two pints of Harvey’s.
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2 months ago | 
worldoffinewine.com | Andrew Jefford
Andrew Jefford, Susan Hulme MW, and Michael Palij MW look for depth amid the easy charm as they taste the 2020 Barolo vintage. 2020 Barolo: More than comfortable? Poderi Luigi Einaudi Barolo Monvigliero Verduno 2020 (14.5% ABV) |94SH | The color is mid-ruby without any evolution. The nose is softly fragrant and enticing, a hedonistic mix of floral notes, such as iris, violet, and rose, as well as ripe red cherry in alcohol.
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2 months ago | 
decanter.com | Andrew Jefford
There’ll be a snowy photo of the vines in winter, or merry harvesters throwing their baskets in the air, with a scrawled signature. Occasionally I’m sent a list of wines with all the scores obtained in the previous year, like a wonk’s school report; or I get a request for a date – at one of the wine fairs the owners will soon attend. I glance, note… recycle. And then out tumbled this: ‘What I Believe: Welcome to the corner of my consciousness.’ I unfolded the brightly coloured A2 sheet.
