Henry Jeffreys

This is something I wrote for Root + Vine magazine, the vinous off-shoot of Root + Bone magazine (which is always worth reading).
I tend to base family holidays around wine much to my six year old daughter’s annoyance. On a recent visit to Sanlúcar de Barrameda, we spent a wonderful (for me) afternoon at Hidalgo La Gitana. Fermín Hidalgo (below, stopping for a restorative plate of jamon and a copita at 11am), oblivious to my six year old daughter’s increasingly sulky antics, gave me sherry af...

Like a lot of wine writers, I have a particularly soft spot for Oporto and the Douro valley, possibly the most beautiful wine region in the world. Here’s something I wrote for Boisdale Life magazine on just this subject:
After three days in Porto, the true reason for the ancient alliance between the English and the Portuguese dawned on me. Yes there’s wine and having a common enemy in the Spanish, but it’s really about a shared love of stodgy food. The city’s most famous dish is called a Fran...

Porto’s hugely ambitious World of Wine will open this summer despite the global pandemic, says the force behind it
Words by Henry Jeffreys
It would, at any time, be seen as an ambitious undertaking: a wine attraction spanning 300,000 square feet, with more than 350 employees, six museums, five restaurants and an initial budget of €100 million. But this is not, of course, ‘any time’.
The World of Wine was, from the outset, slated to open in Porto (main image) in summer 2020. Work began in June...

Today marks one of the least celebrated anniversaries in American history, the 100th anniversary of the day when the 18th amendment “to prohibit intoxicating beverages” came into effect. That day, after many years of campaigning, Prohibition had arrived.
Some sensible folks were prepared: the Yale Club laid on enough booze for its members to last 14 years. For normal people who wanted a drink, however, it meant liquor that made you go blind, mobsters and non-stop Charleston competitions. Pret...

Drinks expert Henry Jeffreys shares his top Malbecs from Argentina and beyond. He picks wines for any budget, with blowout bottles and plenty under £10.
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A wine merchant once let me into a secret about or...

The wine bar boom has got a lot of press in the last few years and for good reason. There are now so many interesting, informal places in central London that serve great wine. But the same venues do tend to come up again and again (naming no names) so I’m looking a bit further afield to the suburbs and even, sharp intake of breath, to places outside the capital.
Some of these are proper restaurants or others are shops that will sell you some cheese to eat alongside your wine. At all of them y...

‘Good with cheese’ has to be the least helpful back label wine serving suggestion after ‘good with pasta’. Do they mean all cheeses from Roquefort to Pecorino? The cheese board coming out at the end of a meal is a minefield for the wine lover. All those strong, disparate flavours can play havoc with your carefully-chosen wines.
Don’t serve anything too old or fine with pungent cheese; powerful cheese will knock out an old wine. Even the classic combinations sometimes don’t work: I find that t...

They do things properly at Quinta do Noval: after every dinner of deliciously sturdy Portuguese food, the decanters come round. Each night, we tried at least two different ports and had to guess what they were. One night was particularly special, a trio from 2000: the normal vintage wine, the Nacional, one of the world’s rarest wines made from a tiny vineyard of ungrafted vines, and the colheita, aged in wood rather than in bottle. And which was our favourite? A silly question because the Nac...

In this essay, I put on my thinking beret, stroke my chin and delve into the vexed question of to what extent taste in food and wine is entirely arbitrary.
“Everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor but they couldn’t possibly all have good taste.” When Harry Met Sally, Nora Ephron
At a local Chinese restaurant there are asterisks by certain dishes with an explanation underneath that reads simply: “not recommended.” The asterisks appear next to delicacies such as chicken feet ...

For many beer fans, particularly in Britain, lager is that nasty fizzy stuff, sold through amusing adverts featuring laconic Australians, dancing bears or cheeky cockneys. But it has just as interesting a story as more celebrated beers such as IPA, as Mark Dredge explains in (Kyle Books, £14.99). The first two thirds, featuring figures such as Jacob Christian Jacobsen of Carlsberg fame, are riveting; but inevitably the story slows with the mergers and acquisitions that have seen the rise of B...

Wine always tastes better on holiday. In fact some wines, like Retsina, should only be drunk in the place where they are made. In his excellent new book Alchemy Rory Sutherland, aka the Wiki Man, remarks on this phenomenon: “The situation or place in which we find ourselves may completely change our perception and judgement. As a good illustration of this, one reliable way to lose money is to go on holiday to some exotic locale, fall in love with the local speciality alcoholic drink and decid...

Cast your mind back to a time when cider cost more than wine. In the 17th century, these ciders (or cyders, as they were called) were high in alcohol, made from varieties of apples with evocative names like Redstreak and the best of them sold for more than the finest wines. And that’s not all, bottle fermentation techniques pioneered by these cider lords were later used to make champagne. Yes, cider in Restoration England was decidedly fancy.
Sadly most cider sold today is a pale shadow of it...

Though we might think of ourselves as a post-God society, much of what we do still smacks of religious observance. Take Dry January or Veganuary, for example. These are like secular versions of the Lenten fast. I didn’t do either. In fact it was more like Hamuary in our house. Some people in the drinks trade, no doubt worried that all this abstinence is bad for the bottom line, have come up with an antidote, Tryanuary. I know, another dreadful portmanteau but still, I like the sentiment, be a...

On the blog today we have UK brand ambassador for Disaronno Rod Eslamieh, a man who has had a chequered career in the drinks industry. He gives us the benefit of his hard-won wisdom…
Eslamieh began working in drinks when his father bought an old fire station in Brentford, west London, which they turned into a bar and restaurant. It was an odd career move because up to this point Eslamieh didn’t drink alcohol. But he quickly fell in love with the bar culture, and the venue became very successf...