A visit to châteaux Minuty, d'Esclans and Galoupet reveals how Provence’s top producers are borrowing from Champagne, Bordeaux and Burgundy to redefine what serious rosé can be: from house style and technical precision to gastronomy and ageing potential. the-buyer.net/insight/proven…

The new Porseleinberg 2024 proves that this remarkable Syrah from the Boekenhoutskloof stable is a true South African icon – hailing as it does from one of the world’s great Syrah vineyards. Marc Kent on how the wine got started and how it's developing. the-buyer.net/tasting/wine/d…

Fascinating look at Burgundian influence in the Jura with Domaine du Pélican (owned by Guillaume d’Angerville of Domaine Marquis d’Angerville) and Anne-Claude Leflaive’s former Loire outpost, Clau de Nell. So what can they do differently to Burgundy? the-buyer.net/tasting/wine/b…

The role that lower-alcohol wines and consumption trends could play discussed by Garda DOC wine board which has adopted new regulations so low-alcohol wines can be PDO or PGI and retain the quality practices that these designations guarantee the-buyer.net/insight/low-no… @OlioGardaDop

Are you paying attention? "The latest SipSource data from the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America showed U.S. wine volume down 6.8% and revenue down 4.2% in the latest three months through July." However; "Revenue trends improve significantly at $16 and above, with the $50+ segment growing revenue 0.9% over the latest 12 months." You should read this: wswa.org/news/sipsource-july…

Are these conservatives talking about Trump's $5000 handout? Let's play!

Highly educated man vs Insecure trailer park trash. Which uhhh... Which one are you again @realDonaldTrump?

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Watch this brilliant breakdown by Jonathan Pie of how Trump’s brand of politics thrives on destruction, paranoia, and sheer greed—because if we don't laugh at the absurdity of it all, we might just have to cry. “US President Donald Trump has said Canada wants the benefits of being a state without being one after trade talks between the two countries collapsed late on Friday. He's got bored, hasn't he? Because he successfully won the war in Iran this week by simply naming the Strait of Hormuz American territory. Job done. Don't know why he didn't do that on day one. Could have saved himself a whole lot of bovather. But victory is Trump's. Hooray. The reality is, of course, the Americans are running out of ammo and their sailors are trying to jump overboard. But no, he's definitely won the war in Iran. So now he's finished with the Middle East, who's next? Canada, of course. Again, those bastard Canadians. Just a little trade war this time. He'll be talking about invading Greenland again soon. He wants to not just be imperial President of the USA, but imperial overlord of the Western world. Why does he keep doing this? Why does he treat his allies and trading partners like they're the enemy, causing chaos and uncertainty across the globe? Because, of course, Trumpism is built on chaos. He loves chaos. Why? Because he makes money out of chaos. The most openly corrupt president in American history makes money out of the chaos he creates. It's never about what's right. It's always about what makes Trump money. Donald Trump has shattered the illusion of American morality. The $2.1 billion in perfectly timed directional oil bets placed minutes before presidential announcements. Someone, somewhere has made a shitload of money out of this war, and I'm betting that that person is Donald Trump. What about Trump charging Wall Street traders 100 grand a month for faster access to the president's posts on his Truth Social platform, allowing them to profit directly from state-sanctioned insider trading? How that would work, of course, is three or four hours before he does something, he just does a post to all his Wall Street insider traders saying something like, "In about four hours, I am going to fuck with Mark Carney. So go make some money!" What about Trump admitting that his sons benefit from insider trading and then managing to get himself and his sons immunity from the tax authorities, or him trying to get US taxpayers to pay for a $1.8 billion slush fund for January the 6th insurrectionists? An administration who is happy to pardon violent January the 6th insurrectionists, but dare to protest ICE agents, the White House will happily contain you getting shot in the face. A convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist who took a bulldozer to the White House and is building a bunker under it in which he can lock himself when he loses the next election. The man who makes up wars that didn't happen so he can say he solved them, who recently invented a new way of doing percentages, surrounding himself with people too afraid to point out to him that if egg prices drop by 600 percent, it means the chicken is paying you to steal its eggs. A man who gives white South Africans asylum in America because of a white genocide that isn't happening, who believes diet Coke cures cancer, the man who makes monuments in his own name, who names airports and art centers after himself, whose political movement is happy to promote the narrative that the UK has fallen to religious extremists, which amounts to a coordinated propaganda effort against Britain, an attack on our sovereignty by supposedly our closest ally.” 1/2

Brexit as tea. I’d forgotten this one. Superb.

Another Jon Ossoff moment from Atlanta not getting enough attention came when he addressed Trump’s remaining supporters DIRECTLY: “He promised to lower prices on day one. You remember that? … I want the president’s remaining supporters to hear this because it was all a lie.” Then he laid out the betrayal: “Under Donald J. Trump, it costs more than ever to stock your fridge… to power your home… to make a cup of coffee, to buy school supplies for your kid, or a tractor for your farm.” And then Ossoff went for the throat: “They made you pay more for everything and took us to war on lies and spent most of last year trying to cover up for the world’s most famous pedophile while the crook president… and his crook family raked in billions.” His conclusion was fucking devastating: “They are literally the elites they pretend to hate.”

People of Clacton, @ByDonkeys have absolutely lifted the lid here. You pay Farage £94k to be your MP. He’s hardly ever there. Meanwhile his 12 other jobs have paid him £1,182,498 since the election, Mayfair gold dealers, tax-avoidance passport hustlers, US anti-abortion outfits, thousands of Cameo videos, the lot. He who pays the piper dictates the tone. When the bigger cheques come from multimillionaires and foreign interests, what makes you think he’s representing you? x.com/ByDonkeys/status/19827…

How long before it sinks in Farage, Brexit and Trump are all the same profoundly destructive thing? Carole in 2018 well ahead of the curve here or just more courageous or willing to acknowledge the ugly truth?

One of my longest-standing arguments is that we are not living in Orwell’s 1984, where truth is centrally suppressed and censored by force (that’s former communist societies, modern-day China, Russia, North Korea). We are living in something much closer to Huxley’s Brave New World. The truth is not hidden - it is almost always readily available. But it is buried beneath an industrial quantity of noise: propaganda, outrage, half-truths, conspiracy theories, influencer theatre, algorithmic rage bait and an endless stream of content designed not to inform us, but to keep us emotionally stimulated. The modern information system does not need to censor the truth when it can simply drown it in noise. A fact no longer has to be disproven - it only has to be surrounded by a hundred competing claims, stripped of context and nuance, turned into partisan ammunition and pushed into the same feed as celebrity gossip, memes and 15 second videos engineered to deliver the fastest possible dopamine hit. By the time the truth reaches us, it appears as just another piece of content competing for our attention. That is the more sophisticated form of control: not preventing people from knowing, but exhausting their capacity to care. Orwell feared a world in which people would be deprived of information. Huxley feared a world in which they would be given so much distraction, stimulation and triviality that they would lose the desire to seek it. The defining struggle of our age is therefore not simply between truth and censorship, but between truth and indifference.

🚨Mayor Mamdani just kicked off pool season by jumping in the pool with kids from Harlem. This is the guy MAGA and Trump are spending all of their energy trying to make voters fear. It isn’t working.

Imagine telling someone in 1999… The year is 2026. The President is Donald Trump in his second non consecutive term. The richest man in the world is PayPal cofounder Elon Musk… but not because of fintech or Paypal. Because of rockets, electric cars, AI, satellites, brain chips and something called “Boring Company”. Apple is worth trillions but its main business isn’t computers… its selling glass rectangles everyone stares at for 9 hours a day. People don’t watch TV. They watch teenagers explain geopolitics, finance, and relationship advice in ~60 second videos. The biggest taxi company owns no taxis. The biggest hotel company owns no hotels. The most powerful media companies are social networks where everyone argues with strangers for free. Kids are making millions filming themselves playing video games. AI Robots write emails, code, legal memos, songs, essays, and breakup texts. The internet is mostly bots arguing with humans who are trying to prove they aren’t bots. You can summon a car, groceries, a doctor, a date, a private jet, or a dog walker from your phone. People pay real money for invisible currencies, digital monkeys, AI girlfriends and pictures that disappear after 24 hours. The richest companies in the world don’t sell oil, steel, or cars. They sell attention, compute, data, and addiction. And somehow, after all of that everyone is still using Excel.

Sir John Major, "Brexit has been very damaging" "Most people think of the economic damage, but that's only part of the argument" "It has as a country made us weaker, more isolated" "Before Brexit we were the principle ally of the US, that's debatable now" "We were also a leading member of the European Union that had 500 million people" "Both of those have gone' "We're now 70 million in a world of 9.5 billion" "And we have considerably less clout, and friendship in times of difficulty, than we had before"

Embarrassing. Peter Doocy: “A wise man once said, in January 2020: ‘Iran has never won a war, but has never lost a negotiation.’” President Trump: “Who said that?” Reporter: “Donald Trump.”

A long and very nicely written and argued piece with which I wholeheartedly disagree. Wine is not one thing. Some of it is wonderful cultural stuff. Some (actually quite a lot) of it is supermarket Pinot Grigio which IMHO is no nobler a beverage than most beer.

Sbarbatelle is a non-profit association of women wine producers aged under 40 from all over Italy. It started in 2017 at a wine-tasting and has evolved into a significant movement uniting over 200 young women wine producers. We met them to find out more. the-buyer.net/people/produce…