Best Restaurants|Restaurant Reviews|Fine Wines|Spirits|Liquor
There are restaurants you walk into, and there are restaurants you make an entrance at. Quaglino's has always been firmly the latter. Pause at the top of that sweeping staircase, look down across the room, and you understand at once why this place has drawn royalty, writers, film stars and London's café society since 1929.
It’s a concept that remains as practical and innovative as it was when Vagabond Wines opened their first outlet in Fulham back in 2010: giving guests the freedom to tap and pour at their own leisure from a selection of 100+ wines by the glass, so you can seek out your new personal favourites at your own pace.
Independent bottlings themed around the cosmos can easily risk leaning into gimmickry, yet the ambition behind The Whisky Exchange Zodiac Series has always been rooted in cask curation rather than mere novelty. Rolled out across three four bottle instalments, the twelve bottle project sets out to match the traditional archetypes of astrological signs with distinct flavour profiles from across Scotland.
During a recent visit to Witchmark Distillery in Wiltshire, the team made no secret of their ambition: when their inaugural spirit emerges from cask, it is intended to compete squarely as a super premium single malt.
Yet in spirits marketing, "super premium" is a term thrown around with easy confidence. What does it actually mean in practice?
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.
Anyone who has made the pilgrimage to Campbeltown knows the journey demands commitment. Stepping off the Twin Otter, a rugged propeller plane with a single seat on either side of the aisle and not an overhead locker in sight, onto that exposed coastal tarmac feels like crossing into a different era.
High on the South Downs, Weyborne Estate looks across the Sussex countryside from slopes that rise towards a thousand feet above sea level. Its history reaches back to around 1600, when an early ironmaster used local ore to forge axes and spikes. By the mid seventeenth century, the estate was held by William Yaldwin, a Parliamentarian who hosted Oliver Cromwell during the Civil War.
Loch Lomond possesses a distinct aura that few bodies of water can match. As the largest expanse of fresh water in Great Britain, it straddles the Highland Boundary Fault, splitting the calm pastoral Lowlands from the rugged wilderness of the north. Its eastern shore belongs to the raw solitude of the West Highland Way, while the western banks harbour quiet enclaves of extraordinary wealth and discretion, most notably the ultra exclusive Loch Lomond Golf Club, where billionaires and world leaders arrive by boat or helicopter, shielded behind gated lochside paths.
Anyone who has spent time along the River Spey knows that its surface can be wonderfully deceitful. It slides through the Scottish hills with an easy, polished grace, yet beneath that mirror lies a muscular undertow.
It is an apt metaphor for the latest arrival from House of Hazelwood: Calm Waters 1992, a vintage blended malt.
Every 15 May, Chile marks Día del Pisco – a national toast to the grape spirit that has been distilled in the Elqui, Atacama and Coquimbo valleys since the sixteenth century, and which carries its own Denominación de Origen protecting the name for producers in those regions alone. It's a spirit built on sun: high-altitude vineyards, some of the clearest skies on earth, and Muscat grapes that ripen into something intensely aromatic before they ever reach the still.
