Four letters. One syllable. Infinite capacity to make intelligent people run a finger under their collar. 

 

Wine arrived in my life the way it arrives in most lives in new wine cultures -unexpected, slightly baffling, and impossible to ignore once it turned up. I did not go looking for it. It showed up at dinner tables, on airline menus, in duty-free shops, and at enough social occasions to make avoidance impractical.

 

So, I did what I do with most things I do not entirely understand: I looked down my nose and started paying attention. That intrigued me enough to uncork some key credentials - WSET Level 2, California Wine Certification, Certified Wine Pro, Introduction to Barossa, Winemaking in India. Somewhere along the way, my love for writing blended with my curiosity, and I started writing about wine.

 

The "paying attention" turned out to be worthwhile. In 2025, it produced an award. But that is another page.

 

What interests me about wine is not its greatness. It is its behaviour. What it does to people when it arrives somewhere new. What it reveals about aspiration, anxiety, and the performance of sophistication in cultures that never grew up with it. Why a glass of the right thing at the right moment remains, despite everything, one of life’s more reliable small pleasures - and why that simple fact has been buried under centuries of elaborate ritual, impenetrable vocabulary, and the quiet tyranny of the expert.

 

Wine is arriving rapidly in the cities of India, the Gulf, and South-East Asia. It is being received with curiosity, anxiety, aspiration, and occasional hilarity. Nobody has quite written about that from the inside. That is what The Second Pour is for.

 

Wine is a four-letter word. So, depending on the occasion, is “bill.”

 

Pull up a chair.