The fun of sitting around Pangong Lake with 40 guys around a fireplace, having a glass of wine... staying in one camp together... that's an experience. Waking up at 5 in the morning, watching the sun come up. You don't do these things in Bombay.
My first trip to Japan, in 1998, began with an enormous crowd of Japanese paparazzi and television crews, all waiting for me to clear customs in Tokyo (a first-time experience for this wine critic). Over the next five days, the attention never waned.
Funny you mention my dinner parties when I have just suggested that inviting close friends over to share a meal with candlelight and wine at your table could be a form of religious experience for some people. To me it's a form of sacrament.
Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
Thanks be to God. Since my leaving the drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company.
I have the ability to create and be in touch with God. I can't change bread and wine into body and blood, but I can take the scum or the slime of the earth and make it into a man or woman.
Cooking and eating at home is made even better by the fact that you don't have to worry about driving after a couple of bottles of very nice wine. For me that's the ideal combination: working hard and enjoying the fruits of your labour.
'Dandelion Wine' became one of the few books that I returned to time and again, and while not anywhere near the story crafter as Mr. Bradbury, I hope I managed to absorb by osmosis some of his techniques.
Whoever would have guessed that in the land of cheap sausages and mashed potatoes there could be such a change which would actually bring the French from Paris every weekend to invade Britain en masse to eat great food and drink great wine.
We go to Italy every winter, and my husband's mother has a bingo party on Christmas. Every woman brings a dish: lentils, cavolo nero, tons of beans, polenta, every type of cheese, bruschetta, fresh vegetables, and local olive oil and wine.
I still indulge in a glass of wine or chocolate - treats are mandatory. Without deviating from the day-to-day healthy diet once in a while, it wouldn't be sustainable for me, and that's what I wanted: an approach to eating to last my entire life.
Look I eat really well and I work out, but I also indulge when I want to. I don't starve myself in an extremist way. You're not taking away my coffee or my dairy or my glass of wine because I'd be devastated.
I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.
One of the things that I'm really proud of is that I have really good timing. It's very easy for me to see what's coming up and it's no coincidence that I went headfirst into wine and then headfirst into new media - none at all.
Selling wine is all about sizing people up, and it takes a certain amount of chutzpah. The tableside bottle sell is a very funny thing - you take a look at the guy's blazer, what kind of shoes he's wearing, what kind of broad he's with. Is he trying ...
With learning lines, before I had Alfie, I'd put it off and think, 'Oh, I'll just have a glass of wine and then do it later,' but when you've finally got a child to bed and you know you've only got an hour, then you achieve so much.
I usually eat in my friend Tom Corcoran's place - the Siam Thai in Monkstown. I go there for a very large plate of beef in red wine sauce.
And much as Wine has played the Infidel, And robbed me of my Robe of Honor Well, I often wonder what the Vintners buy One half so precious as the stuff they sell.
The first time I had sat down to a meal I had grown on my own, along with a bottle of wine that we had made, I burst into tears. To be in touch and be in tune with that is an extraordinary gift.
Basically, I go to the local farmer's market and decide to what to cook then, depending on what I find. Either my wife or I cook, and we usually finish a bottle or two of wine by the time we are done cooking and eating.
What is wine? It is the grape present in another form; its essence is there, though the fruit which produced it grew thousands of miles away, and perished years ago. So the object of many a tender thought may be spiritually present, in defiance of sp...
