Henry Jeffreys

Mentioning the name Carla Bruni at the Hoxton Hotel in Paris had a magical effect. The previously cool receptionists all jumped to attention and quickly pointed me upstairs; a sign of what an important figure Bruni is in France.
Former model, singer, former First Lady of France and to that remarkable resume we can add winemaker, or at least wine impresario.
In 2020 Carla Bruni and her husband, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, bought Château d’Estoublon in Provence with Jean-Guillaume ...

In recent years, my generation (I’m in my 40s) has looked askance at people in their late teens and twenties with their obsession with TikTok, baffling love of grey tracksuits and, worst of all, their refusal to indulge themselves alcoholically. This is especially concerning for Britain’s beleaguered drinks industry, which has been reeling from lockdown, tax rises and over-regulation. But could there be light at the end of the tunnel?
A new survey from IWSR, a market research company, suggest...

This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Earlier this year I smelled possibly the most beautiful wine I have ever experienced. It brought to mind the scene from The Leopard where Prince Fabrizio is wandering in the garden of his palazzo in Palermo and smells “an erotic waft of early orange blossom”.
But whilst the prince’s garden is overripe, “cloying, fleshy and slightly pu...

Chet Sharma: chef, DJ, PhD
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore
When Europe triumphed over Paganism
Tibor Fischer
Douglas Cooper – a complex character with a passion for Cubism
Adrian Clark’s new biography has a tone that is relentlessly disapproving
Andrew Lambirth
Dan Richards revisits his nightly nightmares
He explores the lives of the nurses, train drivers, rescue crews and factory workers who are up and about while the rest of us are sleeping
A.S.H. Smyth
MAGA tourism in the heart of DC
Butterworth...

Marketing sherry is a real 'three pipe conundrum'. It benefits from strong name recognition in that almost everyone has heard of sherry. The challenge is that the drink that 90 per cent of people recognise as sherry – creamy sherry – doesn't taste much like the sort of wines that are drunk in Andalusia like finos, manzanillas, and dry olorosos.
One option is to forget all about what they do in Jerez and lean into the older demographic. This is something the El Consejo Regulador, the sherry re...

Some prominent wine tycoons have the air of Roman emperors, aloof and intimidating, naming no names, but not Jean-Claude Mas. With his mad professor hair and mischievous gleam in his eye, he's more impish rather than imperial.
We met on a sweltering Paris night over an informal dinner with his wife and various members of the Les Domaines Paul Mas team. JC, as people call him, was relaxed and full of bonhomie. As were his employees. No one was going to be fed to the lions.
With our food, we tu...

Kent Albariño might sound like a hard-boiled New York detective but it’s actually a glimpse into the future of English wine. Believe it or not, there are at least five acres of Galicia’s finest grape variety growing in the Garden of England, plus some at Ancre Hill in South Wales. And it’s not the only exotic vitis vinifera variety lurking in Britain. If you know where to look, you can find Chasselas, Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Gamay, Cabernet Franc, Syrah and more.
In the past, these noble gr...

A new exhibition of classic Campari advertisements at the Estorick Collection in London features images that you’d never get past the Advertising Standards Agency today. Some feel designed to appeal to children, for instance; others link the consumption of Campari to seduction. Thankfully there were no such strictures in early 20th-century Italy, when these posters were commissioned.
Campari, a red, bittersweet, alcoholic spirit, has its origins in the heart of industrial Italy. In 1860, Gasp...

You can learn a lot about a winemaker by tasting his wine. In The Accidental Connoisseur, Lawrence Osborne wrote of one wine that smelt of ‘simmering insanity’, reflecting the angry Italian who made it. I didn’t have quite such an extreme reaction to Peter Hahn’s Clos de la Meslerie Vouvray, but I did deduce that he was idealistic, determined, romantic, perhaps a little dogmatic, and given to certain esoteric beliefs.
Having now read his book Angels in the Cellar, I can say that my deductions...

This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Unbound was launched in 2011 with the promise of “a better deal for authors, a better deal for readers” by hirsute publishing veteran John Mitchinson and writers Dan Kieran and Justin Pollard. In March it went into administration owing around £2.4 million to creditors, including over £600,000 to authors, with £1,000 of that debt owed to m...

This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Cockney rhyming slang can cause problems for Americans looking to launch products in Britain, as Martin Amis noted in an article in the London Review of Books.
He was reviewing Iron John, Robert Bly’s 1990 book about masculinity whose title will have East-Enders sniggering into their jellied eels. Amis writes: “I’m afraid, iron (iron hoo...

Austria’s reds are rich in flavour, if not always heritage
This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The Austro-Hungarian empire had its own internal wine economy. The most famous was Tokaji, the great sweet wine that is still made in Hungary and on a much smaller scale in Slovakia. But according to wine-loving historian Giles MacDonogh there were other high quality sweet wines ...

Abandoning classic styles shows a lack of confidence
This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
All regular attendees of wine tastings will have their own shorthand, even if it’s just a system of ticks or stars. I have various abbreviations that come in useful, such as NW (natural wine), TP (touch pooey — very useful for assessing natural wines), and GWR (good with rillettes).
One ...

This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
In the introduction to Nothing if Not Critical, published in 1990, the great art critic Robert Hughes laments how the traditional techniques of painting that had been passed down from the 16th century were no longer taught.
He writes “virtually all artists who created and extended the modernist enterprise between 1880 and 1950, Beckmann n...

When I was researching Vines in a Cold Climate in 2022 the issue guaranteed to rile up English wine producers wasn’t Brexit, the Sussex PDO or the baffling Covid restrictions which were still in place at the time but Charmat. Yes, a method for making fizz turned out to be the most controversial thing in the entire book.
The ire was focused at one brand in particular, Harlot. It is produced by MDCV UK which is backed by serviced office tycoon Mark Dixon who also owns Château de Berne in Proven...