Tim Atkin’s Blog

Susannah Cibber was a terrific singer, by all accounts. Handel gave her the contralto solos in Messiah, and she had a great acting career as well: she became the highest paid actress in England. What did she sound like? Not the most polished of singers by contemporary accounts, but very expressive, very moving, very sweet, and with a wide vocal range. And that’s pretty much all we have to go on.

Rowan Hooper’s new book, Togetherness, is a fascinating study of symbiosis, what he calls a “neglected silo” of scientific research. The subject might sound a bit geeky and pointy-headed, but it’s central to the way that nature works.

It was entirely predictable that Michelin’s new venture into wine would trigger huffy French recriminations. Its Wine Selection Burgundy 2026, launched this month, awarded nine producers the top accolade of three grapes, another 20 vignerons two grapes, and 33 one grape. A further 32 were merely “selected”. Mais putain! They only gave Domaine Arnoux-Lachaux one grape? The celebrated Vosne-Romanée house publicly demanded its removal from the guide.

By now this is so well-known that repeating it enters broken record territory. The biggest story for Greek wine the past 20 years has been the rise of Assyrtiko. From a Santorinian oddity / best-kept secret to international fame, it did more than any other grape variety to put Greek wines on the map. It also built a certain perception of, and expectation from, Greek white wine: it should be sharp, acidic, mineral.

I recall a conversation I had with one of the new people I met when I first moved to Madrid. She’d found out that I worked in wine. “In wine?” she said with excitement. “There’s a great wine bar in Lavapiés you must try! They sell natural wines, it’s really good.” I took out my phone, pinned it on the map, noted in parenthesis that it’s a natural wine bar. In the two years since, I haven’t been once.

Yeats entitled one of his mid-life poems ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’. The poem is mainly a complaint, about the tangled business of running a theatre (the Abbey in Dublin) and the infuriating difficulty of “management of men”, as opposed to the pure delight of writing poetry. But the title points to something which has impelled the poet to get involved in areas that pose intractable problems.

Why are there so many exclamation marks in the world, and so few hyphens? What spurred this reflection was a menu: a dish featuring ‘Grilled line caught John Dory fillet’. And an unrelated Instagram post enthusing about exclamation marks! They’re such fun!! Aren’t they!?! Well. Exclamation marks are generally unnecessary and mostly silly. Hyphens are essential for clarifying meaning.

Even for opera lovers, it promises to be an odd show. Next month’s Napa Valley Festival stages the premiere of a work bringing Bacchus and Venus to 1970s Paris and Napa, mythological heroes re-enacting the wine world’s most mythical tasting. The Judgment of Paris, the opera, is the latest re-telling of the celebrated 1976 tasting pitting Californian wines against Bordeaux’s most illustrious names.

Twice a year, I help to organise a wine dinner for a group of friends. For the most recent one, in Paris, my job was to bring the sweet wines and a selection of Grenaches. In preparation, I looked at what I have in bond and had a selection delivered to my house. Coravin in hand, I set to work. A three-vintage selection of Domaine Huet Vouvray Moelleux sorted the stickies in minutes. The reds were trickier.

Riding the overground to The Wine Society’s latest panel on labour standards recently, I finished the final pages of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. If you’re yet to read it, the novel opens in 1930s Dust Bowl America and follows the Joad family as they migrate from their barren Oklahoma farm to California, where they have been promised bountiful harvests, work, and prosperity. The reality is very different, of course.