Whiskey geeks will already know this, but Irish whiskey is enjoying a bit of a moment. Rightly so, because the best of them can hold their own against your favourite bourbons and scotches. No longer the stuff reserved for drowning your sorrows or for lacing your coffee, top-tier Irish whiskey is creating it’s own buzz. The…
Three hundred years ago in the City of London, people were mostly drunk. By some accounts as many as one in three houses had a still, producing some pretty nasty gin to satiate the average Londoner’s 14 gallon – yes, you read right. Yes, that includes women and children – a year habit. Nowadays one…
Will Rogers was its honorary mayor, Nixon said we didn’t have him to kick around anymore, Jane Fonda went for the burn. Where? Beverly Hills, that city synonymous with luxury, eccentric wealth, palm trees and shopping. Or, as Steve Martin once sang, “The hills are alive… with the sound of money”. Yes, it’s true:…
Ruby Murray, the Northern Irish popular singer who gave her name to rhyming slang’s favourite cuisine, was herself a big drinker. But probably not this classy. ‘A journey along the Grand Trunk Road is a bewildering mix of the past and present, tripping back and forth between the mundane and the momentous,’ writes Tim Smith…
Four years after the death at 59 of Dr Christopher Penfold in 1874, an Australian journalist discovered that his widow Mary blended ‘the wines when they are two or three years old’, a process that ‘is done under Mrs Penfold’s personal supervision, not in conformity with any fixed and definite rule, but entirely according to…
On a blustery Sunday that looked almost mild enough to ditch the coat but windy enough to blow the change out of your pocket, I braved the in-between season to venture into the haven of the Four Seasons hotel, where a warm welcome was all that was needed to shake off the chill. Outside, the…
Ten quid. What’ll it buy you? A starter in an OK restaurant. A decent martini. One day’s congestion charge in London. A 72-inch inflatable shark. Back in 1824, it would buy you a license from London to distil Scotch whisky, so a Mr George Smith decided to skip his average starter, forgo any inflatables and become…
Some people think golf is a boring sport. If you’ve ever Googled ‘fun facts about golf’ you might agree. But after all that fist-pumping at Gleneagles last weekend we decided it was utterly gripping. Besides, it’s the only sport we know where practice doesn’t make perfect; it doesn’t seem to help at all. Which means Ryder…
The visceral thrill of a not-so-brief encounter is made more piquant by Bill Borrows’ refusal to dine down market. Despite the fact that Queen Elizabeth II was born just up the road at number 17, The Square does not suggest any degree of elitist indifference. Oh no. The Square style is ‘correct’, and that is an…
Having inhaled the estery fumes of practically every still house for each category of spirit several times over, I was surprised to realise that I had never once passed the threshold of a Scottish distillery, despite their relative proximity to myself in person as well a having somewhat of a soft spot for the spirit in question. As a…