October 2026

One of the things I enjoy most about writing Drinks Diaries is that there really are no boundaries to what might end up in my glass. This time we travel from the vineyards of West Sussex to the shores of Lake Geneva, through Tuscany, Austria, Portugal, and the far south of Italy, before heading north to Islay and Skye. There are familiar grapes in unfamiliar places, including a Tuscan white from a region better known for Sangiovese, alongside Chasselas from Switzerland, a country whose wines we rarely get the opportunity to drink in the UK.

The Suzuki GSX-S1000GT is Suzuki's sport-tourer that replaced the older GSX-S1000F. It takes a legendary superbike powerplant and houses it in a sporty but comfortable, long-distance chassis built for high-speed touring and spirited backroad scratching, and boy, does it deliver.

My bike was the GT+, which includes factory colour-matched 36-litre hard panniers (capable of holding a full-face helmet in each side), and heated grips as standard.