Demystifying the world of wine

Wine can be a bit like IT or accounting (although a lot more fun): the people who work in it seem to have made it so unnecessarily complicated that no one else knows what’s going on.

Truffles & Tannins Newsletter is for anyone who enjoys a good glass of wine, but doesn’t quite know where to start when it comes to picking a bottle from a wine list or choosing one in a shop. People who might know they like a Chianti or a Cava, but don’t know what’s in them – or what some of the alternatives might be. People who are curious about how food and wine work together, but might worry about getting a pairing “wrong” (in inverted commas because I’m not sure right and wrong exist in wine – at the end of the day, personal taste is just that: personal).

What you’ll get to read

Some of the juicy topics I’ll be tackling include:

• Is it a grape? Is it a place? A beginner’s guide to the world’s most famous wines

• The rosé revolution: why we need to move on from Whispering Angel

• What does “natural wine” mean and why do people love it or loathe it?

• Why French wines should be given a second chance

The person writing all this

I went on my first wine tasting trip to Burgundy with my parents when I was far too young to be drinking, and my later student jobs were all some combination of food and wine - whether it was cooking for private dinner parties, working catering gigs or serving in bars. When I left university, I went into the writing field. And for the past 20 years, my writing has been a combination of food and wine on the one side and corporate stuff like finance and sustainability on the other. I’ve been running a website called Amsterdam Foodie since 2007, and my work has been published by Decanter, The Guardian, New York Times, DutchNews.nl, Olive, Monocle and many more. You can read a selection of my wine writing portfolio here.

I’m also a bit of a geek, so in 2022 I decided to take some recognised qualifications in wine. There’s an international organisation called the Wines & Spirits Education Trust (WSET), which offers wine qualifications at 4 levels. I’ve taken levels 2 and 3, passing both with distinction (I’m gearing myself up to tackle level 4, as it takes a couple of years and costs a fortune!).

With all that under my belt, in 2024 I decided to start my own wine consultancy business, Truffles & Tannins. This newsletter is just one small part of that. The rest involves helping restaurants curate their wine lists, organising private wine tastings and (of course) writing about wine.

Subscribe and get in touch

For the moment, this newsletter is free and I plan to publish articles a couple of times a month – straight to your inbox.

Once you’ve subscribed, you might also want to take a look at my website and get in touch if you’d like to talk about any of the services I offer – or just chat about wine in general. Cheers!