The Journal

But Where Is the Rice? Explaining Raclette to My Indian Parents

It is November in Beaune, which means the raclette machine has come out of the cupboard and nobody in this house is pretending otherwise. There is a wheel of cheese melting under the grill, a bowl of steaming potatoes, cornichons, a few slices of jambon cru, and a bottle of something white and sharp on…
Who Gets to Call It French?

A few days ago I posted a carousel on Instagram, about Henry Sidambarom, the son of a Tamil sugar worker who spent nearly twenty years fighting the French colonial administration so that Indian-descended children born in Guadeloupe could be recognised as French. Within hours, someone in the comments asked whether his name was originally Chidambaram.…
India’s Chinatown, Tibetan Kitchens, and the Curry Powder Myth

Chinatown is one of my favourite places in India. Whenever I tell people about its history, or simply that a Chinatown exists in India at all, they are surprised. The West does not associate India with Chinese settlement or with Tibetan culture. So let me start where the whole thing starts. There is a red…
The Art of Eating with Hands: A Culinary Perspective

I served a dinner course few years ago that was designed to be picked up. A small thing, the guest lifted it with her fingers, ate it, and reached for the towel that had been placed there in anticipation of exactly that. The room cost several hundred euros a head and the whole sequence had…
The Role of Women in Bourgogne’s (Burgundy’s) Wine Legacy

Every visitor to Beaune photographs the same roof. Those glazed tiles on the Hôtel-Dieu, geometric and impossibly green and gold, are the postcard the whole town runs on. Stand under them long enough and you will hear a guide explain that Nicolas Rolin, chancellor to the Duke of Bourgogne (Burgundy), built this place in 1443…
Is the Fine Wine Club a Boys’ Locker Room?

There is a particular sound a room makes when a woman walks into a fine wine tasting and someone assumes she is the plus one. Hostility would be easier to name. I have been in that room in Beaune, in Delhi, in Paris where I was judged as someone’s plus one but well jokes on…
Why 2026 Marks an Unusual Wine Harvest in Burgundy

There is a conversation I have every single August, and I suspect I will have it until I die. I mention that the harvest feels early this year, and usually someone lovely, usually someone who has been around vines far longer than I have, tells me that early harvests are nothing new. They say, the…
Why ‘Asian Food’ Needs a New Wine Pairing Approach

Ask almost anyone who has read a wine column what to drink with “Asian food,” and you will get the same two words, in the same order, with the confidence of a catechism. Riesling. Gewürztraminer. A Moscato is occasionally permitted to join if the person is feeling reckless. It does not matter what is actually…
The Colonial History of Curry Powder

There is no dish called curry in India, and there never was. I said as much on Instagram recently and watched the post detonate, because most people have spent their entire lives using a tin of curry powder into pots without ever suspecting that the tin, the word, and the whole idea behind them are…
How Vineyards Tackle Extreme Weather Conditions

There is a romantic idea, still surprisingly common, that great wine is simply a matter of a good site and a patient grower waiting for the seasons to do their work. If you spend any time in a vineyard now and that illusion falls apart quickly. Across the world, winegrowers are fighting an increasingly physical…