The 2016 vintage
Forget the Olympics. Wine should guide Britain’s approach to Brexit
“I LOOKED at my dad. We couldn’t believe it,” says Simon Roberts. Mr Roberts and his father, the founder of the Ridgeview vineyard, were at the Royal Opera House for the Decanter World Wine Awards in 2010. They had assumed they had been seated too far from the stage to have won. Champagne makers had always nabbed the “top sparkling wine” award before. It was stated that the winning wine was a blanc-de-blancs (a sparkling wine made only from white grapes). The Roberts family were baffled: that described none of the French wines on the shortlist. It was only when the announcer remarked that the wine was English that the penny dropped. Ridgeview had become the first ever non-French wine to win the prize.
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “The 2016 vintage”
From the August 27th 2016 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionDiscover more
The slow death of a Labour buzzword
And what that says about Britain’s place in the world
Britain’s Supreme Court considers what a woman is
At last. Britons had been wondering what those 34m people who are not men might be
Can potholes fuel populism?
A new paper looks at one explanation for the rise of Reform UK
Are British voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks?
How the idea of false consciousness conquered the governing party