The cult 1980s British film withnail & I has many quotable lines.

Over the past 12 months I have had the pleasure of spending a considerable amount of time in three of my favourite cities – Glasgow, Dublin, and Louisville.

In the middle of a europe-wide heatwave Geneva airport is not the place to kill a couple of hours before catching a flight home.

Who would have thought it? After decades of dabbling on the margins of the fashionable bar trade, rum is enjoying its most successful spell in the limelight since the early ’90s, when spiced rums swept all before them.

Here we go again. when japanese specialist retailer dekanta released a special bottle of Japanese whisky to mark its third birthday in June, the twittersphere predictably rose up in anger and indignation.

Few days before writing this article, i came across an old piece by Robert Parker, written in 2004, in which he made 12 bold assertions about how wine would look by 2015.

About 15 years ago, while I was the editor of Whisky Magazine, we teamed up with cutting-edge bartender Nick sSrangeway to hold a whisky cocktail competition, encouraging the use of Scottish single malt whisky.

Dubai airport-based retailer Le Clos’ partnership with the macallan has to be one of the most successful operator-supplier relationships in the history of duty free liquor.

How do you market a region? it’s hard enough getting a message right if you’re a one-man band or family firm processing a single or handful of opinions.

A while ago i was walking through Glasgow Airport when I saw a bottle of single malt on offer.

Protectionism. It's a word that has been beyond the pale in the mainstream discussion of politics and economics of the past 30 years.

Twenty five years ago, when I was the features editor at The Publican newspaper, I went with an actor friend to see how pub licensees responded to complaints from customers.

It’s one of the worst PR disasters to have hit the duty free industry in the almost two decades i’ve been covering the business.

Voting in this magazine’s redoubtable annual awards for the world’s most admired wine brands has forced me, as it does every year, to think about the subject of wine brands properly for a change.

If you want proof that alpine whisky is set for its place in the sun, then you need look no further than the 2018 alpine whisky competition held in February.

What is the most important component of a wine brand? What makes it what it is, or, put another way, what can it not do without?

There is a refreshing sense of optimism surrounding the travel retail business which I haven’t seen for quite a few years.

And so it came to pass. After years of legal wrangling led by the Scotch Whisky Association and the Comité Européen des Entreprises Vins, among others, the UK Supreme Court has had its final say, allowing the Scottish government to go ahead with its policy of setting a minimum price for alcohol.

London Gatwick may not be the most exotic travel retail location for a brit such as myself.

One of the biggest bugbears for any liquor brand wanting to build a presence in duty free is the high cost of entry.

Sensitivity to weather and climate is the very core of wine’s appeal.

Last week, Distell announced that its Bain's Cape Mountain single grain whisky (40% abv), has gone global. So now we have a whisky form South Africa to join the slew of whisky alternatives to good old scotch.

In Cannes last month as I dashed around from stand to stand and from interview to interview amid a whirl of product launches and cocktail parties, I heard one question asked over and over again.

Anybody read Jeremy Clarkson in Sunday's Sunday Times (Oct 29)? I know he is right of Genghis Khan and has a tendency to thump people who don't organise a plate of steak and chips for him. But I defend his right to be totally politically incorrect, to write what many people think but increasingly daren't say - and, by the way, he can write and can be extremely funny, sometimes.

I once had a colleague who said he chose to fly long-haul flights with United Airlines Because at the time –