Alex on taste

It's confession time: I am from the cassette generation, although only just. My best friend in very early childhood was an old electric Bush gramophone with a lift-up lid and built-in speaker, capable of playing at all three speeds featured in my parents' record collection: 45 rpm ( Have You Ever. More...

'Would you like a drink?' 'Sherry.' 'Sherry.' 'Sherry?' 'Sherry.' 'Sherry.' Perhaps not the most famous of the many quotable passages in Withnail & I (image of Richard E Grant and Richard Griffiths © Hand Made. More...

5 Mar - In the original version of this review, Alex included a brief paragraph criticising the proofreading of this book. But since Tim reminded me that he had sent me an email explaining that the copy he sent me had not yet been proofread, I have of course removed this paragraph, and whipped. More...

When I was little, tomato ketchup came only in glass bottles. By the time a decent amount had plopped onto the plate, your chips had gone cold. 'The best things come to those who wait', said the advert, and so a generation waited. Sure enough, after only a few years, we got squeezy plastic. More...

Happy New Year, Purple Pagers! I hope you have drunk well this Christmas and are now giving your livers a few days' well-deserved rest while you ponder what to drink during 2013. A little period of abstinence offers a good vantage point from which to survey your cellar; for my part, I have. More...

I rarely feel more typically English than on my annual buying trip to Burgundy. It isn't just that my warmest coat - essential for surviving in near-freezing cellars - happens to scream 'urbanite from abroad', and nor is it the number of other British merchants one bumps into there in the second. More...

What happens when an irresistible force meets an unmovable object? British wine drinkers may be about to find out. The unmovable object is the five pound price barrier. This was the critical threshold between 'everyday' and 'premium' when I joined the UK wine trade 15 years ago, and I am. More...

In the last half-century or so, technology has developed so rapidly, it's easy to lose perspective. Luckily there is a tried and tested way to sum up this exponential progress. It takes the form 'my x contains a more powerful computer than Apollo y ', where x is a mundane household appliance,. More...

I'm just back from an awesome holiday in California. I mean 'awesome' strictly in the modern sense, of course; in other words, I enjoyed myself. While I did experience moments of fear and reverence - reverence for the rugged grandeur of Yosemite, fear that our 'return empty' rental car would run. More...

Every now and then, if I get a bit of free time at the weekend, I suffer a perverse urge to tackle a Beethoven piano sonata. And when I say 'tackle', I emphatically do not mean 'master'. It's more the amateur rugby sense: grappling, flailing, fumbling and eventually falling flat on my face,. More...