Oeno-File, the Wine & Gastronomy Column

by Frank Ward

Posts Tagged ‘Tolstoy’

More Writers on Wine : Tolstoy, Strindberg, Hemingway

Posted by Frank Ward on August 16, 2013

August 2013. Hugh Johnson, our foremost wine writer (and, indeed, one of the English language’s finest stylists), suggests that wine may have originated in the Caucasus – southern Russia – some 6000 years B.C. Close to 8000 years later the world’s greatest novelist, Leo Tolstoy, describes harvest time in a Cossack community in the region of the Terek River, in that part of the Caucasus close to Chechnya. Picking had started as early as August….

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English cuisine today – Farewell to the “goo anglais”

Posted by Frank Ward on January 2, 2013

December 2012. Winston Churchill, when First lord of the Admiralty, is quoted as saying, “British naval tradition? Nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers, and the lash!” Had he been asked about British culinary traditions, he might well have characterised them as “fry-ups, ketchup, and orange tea” (he never did so, however). Only recently has cooking in Britain started to recover from the devastating effects of the industrial revolution which, of course, started in these islands.

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