Henry Jeffreys

This is something I wrote for The Fence’s newsletter. A friend described this new magazine like this: “The Fence seems a new and rare original voice in the magazine world, it’s good nature and high spirits rather reminiscent of Spy magazine in the 80s.” High praise indeed, it’s well worth signing up to the newsletter and subscribing to the magazine itself.
I know what you’re thinking, what with all these queues for petrol and bare supermarket shelves, it’s about time I started a wine cellar. ...

How do you write a wine book that appeals to the general reader? All the stuff about schist, clones and yields that make up a good part of wine writing gets very wearing over the course of a book, even for a self-confessed nerd like me.
The answer is to leaven the technical stuff with human stories; bring out the characters, the heroes and, ideally, some villains too. One author who does this marvelously is Robert Camuto. His previous book Palmento, about the wines of Sicily, contained an unf...

Can you imagine if, in the 20th century, wine producers in France had switched from a product made (almost) entirely from grapes to something that was essentially grape-flavoured alcoholic sugar water? It’s inconceivable. In fact, they did just the opposite. To stamp out the growth of ersatz wines, the appellation contrôlée system was created, which, for all its faults, provides a guarantee that a particular wine will be made from grapes from a certain area.
But there was no such regulation i...

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Cinsault – then known as Hermitage – was South Africa’s most-planted grape variety. Harnessed for everything from cheap reds to brandy, its reputation, however, was so poor – and its presence so ubiquitous – that it was also employed in the winery for a more menial function. ‘Cabernet Sauvignon’s tiny berries would clog up the press, so Cinsault would be added as a lubricant,’ says Cape wine expert Malu Lambert.
In subsequent years, this subtle, perfumed variety slowly ...

Henry Jeffreys recalls his time working for a certain tousle-haired comedian.
Readers who know Russell Brand from his political comedy and his podcast might be surprised that he started out as a man who made knob gags. This is to do him a disservice, because for a time in the mid to late noughties, he was probably the best knob gag merchant in the country, if not the world. Brand seemed to arrive fully formed in 2005. Overnight, he was the most famous man in Britain, like Mick Jagger, Kenneth...

Life’s too short to drink bad wine.
Few wine lovers have resisted spouting those words at one time or another. Apparently, Goethe came up with the saying, though that might be as accurate as all those quotes attributed to Orwell that people use to win arguments on Twitter. I associate it most with the late English political writer Simon Hoggart who for many years wrote a wine column in the weekly British magazine Spectator, not the Wine Spectator, and published a book called, yes you guessed ...

This is something I wrote for a new drinks magazine called Tonic that I’m involved with. The first issue is out there, the second is coming and we’re working on the third. You can get a 10% discount off the magazine here with the code HWOB10 at check-out.
Armenian brandy was the Johnnie Walker Black Label of the USSR. If you wanted to smooth a transaction in Minsk, Smolensk or Vladivostock, then a bottle of konyak to the right man would usually do the trick. The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam r...

This week we’re stirring up a cocktail created by bartender Cas Oh. He’s the author of a lavish new cocktail book called Co-Specs. It’s called the Belafonte and it’s a deliciously drinkable blend of Campari, white Port, and tonic. It might just be our drink of the summer.
As I mentioned last week, it’s not easy to invent a new cocktail. Someone has almost always had the idea before you. But this week’s drink does seem to be genuinely new. It’s called the Belafonte and, according to its invent...

There’s been so much going on at the Copper Rivet Distillery since we last visited in 2018: the release of a single malt, a column malt and the opening of a fancy new restaurant. But that’s not all! There’s a grain whisky coming soon too. We took a trip to Chatham to find out more.
Distilleries often come with spectacular views but on a sunny day, it’s hard to think of a better one than Chatham’s Copper Rivet Distillery and its surroundings. It’s housed in a beautifully restored Victorian Ita...

With English Wine Week taking place on 19-27 June, why not explore the brave new world of Pinot Noir from Kent, Sussex, Essex and beyond?
There’s a character called Tim Cranmer in John le Carré’s Our Game who grows Pinot Noir in Devon in an attempt to make a Burgundy-style wine with notably lack of success. I can’t remember much about the novel — something about Chechen separatists, not one of his best — but I do recall how accurately this pursuit summed up the quixotic nature of Cranmer’s ch...

Sassicaia, Tignanello, Ornellaia: for wine lovers those names conjure up Italian flair and style every bit as much as Alfa Romeo or Ferrari. Even their collective name sounds like a fast car — Super Tuscans. Whoosh!
The Super Tuscan story begins in the 1940s when an aristocrat called Mario Incisa della Rocchetta planted Cabernet Sauvignon vines on his estate in Bolgheri in coastal Tuscany. He was a Bordeaux fan, but World War II had disrupted his wine supply.
He made a wine every year for his...

When the writers of British sitcom, “I’m Alan Partridge,” wanted to choose the most embarrassing wine for the hapless hero to order over an important lunch, there could be no better choice than Blue Nun.
Blue Nun, a German wine that sold 3 million cases globally a year in the early ‘80s, had by the late ‘90s, when this episode first aired, become a two-word joke. Say the words blue and nun, and watch the hilarity ensue.
But Blue Nun shouldn’t be a joke. Not only does this much-maligned wine h...

What do Saddam Hussein, Queen Elizabeth II, and Jimi Hendrix have in common? They all had a thing for Mateus Rosé. Yes, that wine in the funny shaped bottle.
Once considered passé, Mateus has a history to rival some of the great wines of the world, and it’s storming back just in time for its 80th anniversary.
Icon of Rebellion
The story of Mateus begins with one man, Fernando Van Zeller Guedes. “He was a visionary,” says João Gomes da Silva, chief sales and marketing officer of Sogrape, the n...

Big news just in! The Japan Spirits & Liqueurs Makers Association has announced new tighter Japanese whisky regulations. That means some of our favourite Japanese whiskies will no longer be classed as ‘Japanese whisky.’ Confused? Read on.
It’s something of an open secret in the drinks business that much whisky that is labelled Japanese contains spirits from other countries, mainly Scotland and Canada. At Scotch whisky distilleries, it’s common to see huge plastic containers full of whisky to ...