Hugh Johnson: ‘There is real excitement to be found among neglected grape varieties’
Hugh Johnson on the merits of forgotten varieties...
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Hugh Johnson: ‘At what level you start getting your claret kick is a personal thing’
Hugh Johnson on the appreciation of claret...
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Hugh Johnson: ‘Château-owners’ secret, they always said, was in their special soil’
Hugh Johnson on what creates a wine’s flavour...
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Hugh Johnson: ‘Today it’s a palo cortado, a relatively elusive midfield player’
Sherry: the great failsafe favourite option...
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Hugh Johnson: ‘A comatose customer is not in a position to order another bottle’
Hugh Johnson on the differing alcohol levels of wine...
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Hugh Johnson: ‘Veteran wine books are by modern standards short on facts’
Hugh Johnson on the merits of wine books past and present...
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Hugh Johnson: ‘I’ve formed a bond with Grillo and flirted with Verdicchio’
Hugh Johnson talks about his lockdown wine choices...
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Hugh Johnson: ‘What can irritate me is change for change’s sake’
Hugh Johnson's latest column on the wine world...
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Hugh Johnson: In praise of half bottles
why we should be drinking more half bottles...
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Hugh Johnson: Dreaming of my perfect restaurant
Hugh Johnson considers his restaurant 'wish-list'...
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Comment: Time to look beyond what you know
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Hugh Johnson: 'Sheer curiosity drives me to taste every English bubbly I come across'
Should Champagne be worried?
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Comment: Is 'fear of the unknown' costing you money?
Just because it's rare, doesn't mean it's good...
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Hugh Johnson: When bottles surprise you
Wine can be hard to predict...
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Comment: Has wine quality improved?
Are wines today better than past greats?...
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Hugh Johnson - ‘Once in a while I stand among the vines and think “this is special”’
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Hugh Johnson: When in France, drink lesser-known wines
Wine stands tall amid gastronomic decline, says Hugh Johnson...
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Hugh Johnson: Do we need a natural wine alternative?
Hugh Johnson on natural wines....
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Hugh Johnson: November 2012 column
I can’t remember an English middle-class dinner party where no one raised the cheese-before-pud or pud before- cheese question. ‘You can’t surely…?’ ‘Oh, but in France…’ go the explanations; ‘…you finish your red with the cheese’. How tedious it gets.
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Hugh Johnson May 2011 column
How would Bordeaux fare if all we saw were big brands?
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Hugh Johnson November 2010 column
What price luxury?
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Hugh Johnson September 2010 column: Raise the Teutonic!
Perhaps they should make it stronger. Or make sure it doesn’t have that give-away taste of fresh fruit. What are the Germans doing wrong to put us off their wine? We drink oceans of mediocre stuff from far-flung countries but turn our noses up at some of the world’s freshest and most characterful. Is it that Germany doesn’t conjure up visions of glorious meals? Or that not many of us go on holiday to its quaint wine towns? Is it the language?
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Hugh Johnson May 2010 issue column
Dear Decanter reader, I hope you don’t read all the stuff they’ve been saying about Australia in the trade press. That the wine industry has totally messed up. That they’ve planted hundreds of square kilometres of unnecessary vineyard. That they’ve run out of water. That they’ve prostituted their best brand names.
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Hugh Johnson January '10 column
It’s a problem not many of us are troubled by, but the prices of the wines that set the ultimate standards (and which we all like to refer to and lust after) have become positively embarrassing. Embarrassing for a new reason. If you are one of the lucky ones with a few Lafites or Cheval Blancs in your cellar, who can you serve them to? Their amazing prices are becoming common knowledge. The first reaction of any of my friends or acquaintances (not the spoilt wine professionals among them) to my pulling a cork on hundreds of pounds is all too human: What is the agenda? What does he want from me?
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Hugh Johnson March '10 column: Skip lunch? That's for wimps
Wine merchants have developed, along with a robust strain of hyperbole, a nicely nuanced vocabulary of mild disparagement for wines they hesitate to describe in superlatives. ‘Elegant’ means ‘on the lean side’. ‘Interesting’ can mean anything you like. ‘Lunch wine’ (or more pretentiously, ‘luncheon claret’) means a decent wine, even a classic one, but with a hint of dilution that would cost it, in the brutal world of scoring, a vital few points. Or does it even mean that much these days, now that lunch has joined smoking, drinking, Irish jokes and querying climate change as beyond the pale?
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Hugh Johnson - February 2010 column
What if I were to tell you that they have decided to make Dijon Airport a cargo hub for eastern France, and that Ryanair is stationing its French holiday fleet there?
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The Mosel: A bridge too far
A plan to build a bridge straight through one of Europe’s most famous wine regions has enraged hugh johnson, who believes that it is both unwanted and unnecessary
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Hugh Johnson's speech at the mosel bridge protest
I heard about the high Mosel bridge so many years ago, that I honestly forgot about it. I thought that it was a folly of the 1960s and ‘70s which had gone the way of follies in the history – that it would never come back. again.
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Sauvignon and Semillon: Hugh Johnson's Column
Sauvignon and Semillon – Bordeaux’s white wedding
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New Zealand's vineyards: Hugh Johnson Column
New Zealand should go the whole Burgundy hog
