Henry Jeffreys

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 ...

Today, we are weighing into one of the great debates of the booze world. Families have fallen out over less. The issue is whether the Gin and Tonic can be considered a cocktail. So, drink helmets safely strapped on, in we go!
Is the Gin and Tonic a cocktail? I put the big question to Twitter and the results were startling: 67% against and 33% for. If only all public votes could be so decisive. Bearing in mind that most of my followers are drinks nerds, does that mean that the G&T is officiall...

It’s marketing week here at Master of Malt. Yesterday Millie Milliken looked at the evolution of drinks adverts. And today we ask whether the Scotch whisky industry is missing a trick by ignoring older people in favour of the youth market.
There was a report published this month by Our Whisky examining the representation of women and minorities in whisky marketing. Looking at all the pictures used to publicise the report, it looks like the industry has a problem with another group: older peop...

With the news that Amanda Garnham is ‘stepping back’ from her role at the Armagnac Bureau, we talk to the woman who for the past 18 years has been the face of the spirit for the English-speaking world and beyond.
In what sounds like the plot of a film, Amanda Garnham left England with four children between the ages of five months and seven years, two labradors and a husband, and moved to the Gers region in south west France. She had fallen in love with Gascony on a previous visit, so in 1997,...

This week there’s been a whisky focus at Master of Malt what with World Whisky Day coming up, whereas next week it’s all about gin. So for our Cocktail of the Week, we’ve combined the two with a Suffering Bastard. Oh, and it’s World Cocktail Day tomorrow. Will the fun never end?
The great thing about cocktails is that you can sling all kinds of things together and if they taste good, then that’s all that matters. I mean who could have predicted that Campari, vermouth and gin would work such m...

This week we’re shaking up one of the snazziest-looking cocktails we’ve seen in a while. It’s sexy, it’s spicy and it’s called the Disco Picante! And for the second week in a row, we’ve mentioned Tom Cruise in Cocktail. There must be something in the air.
There’s something that just screams ‘80s about a blue cocktail. It’s Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, summer holidays in Tenerife or Tom Cruise in Cocktail. In that film. Cruise shakes up a drink called a Turquoise Blue, aka a Turquoise Dai...

Bit of a change of pace today. This is something I wrote based on the life of a relative who died a few years ago. It’s very lightly fictionalised.
Uncle Peter wasn’t really an uncle. The day he called to invite me to lunch at his club in St. James’s was the first time he described himself as such. I told him I could take off an hour and half at most from work. ‘Nonsense my dear boy, we won’t have started eating by then,’ was his reply.
We agreed to meet the following week. I took a day’s hol...