Jonathan Ray

Alsace is my favourite of all French wine regions. There, I’ve said it. Bordered by the Vosges and the Rhine, it’s achingly pretty with rolling, wooded hills and exquisite medieval villages. The food is sublime (26 Michelin-starred restaurants), the climate benign (second lowest rainfall in all of France) and the wines, well, they’re stunning, from

We had the first of our new season’s Spectator Winemaker’s Lunches last week and what a rip-roaring, shirt-popping success it was. Held in the Jacobite Room of Boisdale Belgravia (our extremely congenial temporary home while the unfortunate flood in our boardroom dries out), it featured the extraordinary wines of Joseph Phelps Vineyards in California and

My longed-for trips to Greece and Spain are booked, England thumped India in the third Test, Spurs are top of the league (and Arsenal are bottom, that’s to say last, 20th out of 20, the back marker), and, having long abandoned any attempts at Alcohol-Free August, I’ve been drinking the wines of mighty Mas de

I keep pinching myself. After the misery of the last 18 months, things really do seem to be on the up. Everyone I know is double-jabbed, they’re all desperate to carouse and I’ve been out on the toot five nights (and three lunches) on the bounce. Spurs beat mighty Man City in their season opener

I have quite the spring in my step as I write and no, clever clogs, not just because of my regular mid-morning sharpener, satisfying and restorative though it was. What do you take me for? No, it’s because I have nothing but good news to impart this week and I’m confident that your happiness is

Klaxon alert! Calling all wine lovers! Whatever you’re doing, stop it this instant and read this immediately for we have a bona fide belter of an offer this week: an exclusive on the newly released 2015 Chateau Musar. Thanks to our chums at Mr Wheeler and their longstanding relationship with the estate, Spectator readers have

We’re looking back so as to look forward this week. It has been such a rotten 18 months that in order to greet our longed-for freedom in appropriate bottle-draining style, we’re revisiting highlights of past FromVineyardsDirect offers. Previous vintages of all the bottles below have been huge hits with readers and I have every confidence

Robin Yapp, the dentist-turned-wine merchant who founded Yapp Bros in 1969, used to scare the pants off my poor father on forays to France. A somewhat insouciant driver, Robin would belt along in his ancient right-hand-drive estate car, foot to the floor, with his mind on other things. Every now and then, mid-anecdote, he would

After a monumental, liver-challenging but heart-lifting and even tear-inducing 12-hour lunch with Fuzzy, Nigel and co, we’re back with a bang. We drank, we danced and we hiccoughed our happy way home as if Covid and the long, spirit-sapping lockdowns had never happened. And so, jabbed and double-jabbed, drinks in hand, here we are strolling

I haven’t been to Le Marche for yonks. Heck, I haven’t been anywhere for yonks. Who has? My last jaunt abroad was an overnight flit to Paris in February last year. It was huge fun, with the opera followed by such an exhaustive bar crawl that I needn’t have booked a hotel. I only went

After the debacle of my crash landing at The Griffin the other week, Mrs Ray has been keeping a frustratingly close eye on me and I’ve been forced to take it easy. It turns out that I’m on some sort of probation and spend much of my time on the naughty step alongside No. 2

I think it’s fair to say that I overshot the runway at The Griffin the other day. So excited was I to be out and about, large glass in hand, mixing with much-missed mates on the East Sussex gastropub’s fabled ‘Serengeti’ terrace, that I foolishly didn’t keep as close an eye on the speedometer as

We’re so nearly there. This time next month, groups of six will be able to dine the night away indoors and then, just five weeks later, we’ll be free. Hurrah! Happy days are here again, the skies above are clear again, dum-de-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. I simply cannot wait. I miss my mates, I miss the bottles we

Crikey, I worked up quite a sweat putting this one together. But you know me, always the team player. After selflessly draining dozens of bottles on your behalf, I finally cracked it with this bumper Antipodean selection showcasing two countries, seven regions/producers and ten different varieties/blends. Don’t say I don’t try. We in the UK

The last time I drank mead was 7 April 1978. It was my 18th birthday and —unforgettably — it was snowing heavily. My chum Mark had bought me a bottle of Lindisfarne Mead which I knocked back on top of several Tequila Sunrises, a bottle of Black Tower and a few Brandy Alexanders. This toxic