Rhône Valley: The Smart Traveller's Wine Guide: A Review

 

            I have a particularly serious case of nostalgia for Japan, where I spent several years. I’m aware that I was irritated by many aspects of life there, but the feeling of nostalgia is inescapable.

The river at Arles

        I feel the same way about the Rhône Valley, although to a lesser extent. The memory of the summer warmth and of walks at twilight through the vineyards of Rasteau, or along the river in Arles, stays with me.

        That, more or less, explains why I bought Rhône Valley: The Smart Traveller’s Wine Guide, by Matt Walls. I love reading, and I like drinking wines from the Rhône Valley almost as much; mostly, though, I just wished to indulge in a bit of good old-fashioned nostalgia. I only had a vague notion of writing a book review.

Rasteau

        The short book commences with a brief section about the history of viticulture and winemaking in the region. I sometimes wonder why there’s always a chapter about the history of a country, a region or winemaking in books about travel and wine. Often I skip these pages, and I think I have a greater enthusiasm for history than most. Do readers really care about the history of viticulture in the Rhône Valley? Perhaps.

        ‘Have you ever met a wine lover who isn’t obsessed with food?’ asks Matt Walls in the introduction to the book. Yes, me. I wrote the following after my last visit to the Rhône Valley:

I’m influenced by two factors when I order food: first, how hungry I am and, second, what I want to drink. Maybe the second takes precedence. My aim was to drink only local wine, and it had to be red. This suggested meat, which was in fact essential as I was utterly ravenous every time I sat down for dinner.

        Matt Walls has some interesting things to say about the local cuisine. He remarks that Andouillette, ‘a large sausage’, is ‘an acquired taste'. Its ‘detractors say it smells like faeces’. This reminded me of the time I ordered it in a restaurant in Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, where the waitress seemed to want to persuade me not to have it. ‘You know what it is?’ she asked. I did, and it wasn’t very pleasant.

        ‘It’s not always obvious what to serve Condrieu [the most famous Viognier of all] with, as it’s so rich and aromatic’, writes Matt Walls. I don’t think this is true. I had a bottle of Guigal’s Condrieu a few years ago and I thought immediately that, like other full-bodied, glycerol-rich and low acidity whites from the Rhône, it would be an ideal partner for roast chicken. In fairness to the author, he does go on to say that poultry works with the grape. So, if you see a poulet rôti on the menu, look for a good Rhône white.

        I always enjoy reading about grapes, and there are a lot of them in the Rhône Valley. Not surprisingly, Matt Walls provides a very informed description of the varietals in the region. One of the ‘heady aromas’ of Viognier is jasmine, he comments. I think that’s true, but I’d say that jasmine is in fact rarely detectable in a Viognier. A lot of wines made from the grape are mediocre and disappointing, in my opinion. However, when you do pick it up, the jasmine tea note is both unexpected and wonderful.

        There is of course a lot of information directed towards tourists in the book. As someone who has travelled a lot, I can say that Matt Walls’ observation that taxis in the Rhône Valley ‘are inexplicably, eye-wateringly expensive’ could apply to just about any country. Not that that’s a good thing, of course. The only country where I felt like there was no chance of being stiffed by the driver was Japan. It was pricey, certainly, but I never believed I was being ripped off.

The Pont du Gard

        As I wrote at the start of this article, I have a bad case of nostalgia about the Rhône Valley. I suppose the litmus test, therefore, was whether the book made me want to return. Among the many excellent pictures of the region is one of the Pont du Gard, ‘an ancient Roman aqueduct’ over a river. As Matt Walls writes, ‘you can even go for a swim in the river on a hot day’. I did that once, and when I read those words I wanted to return.

       

       Published in The Wine Merchant, October 2025.

The Wines of the Wachau

 

        Robert Bodenstein wants to visit Wrexham. I could hardly believe my ears when I heard this. Here I was in Weissenkirchen, a village in the beautiful Austrian region of Wachau, and a winemaker wanted to see Wrexham. He had opened a special bottle, so I felt I owed him some candour. As a native of the U.K., I said do not go.

I wasn’t in the Wachau to chat about Welcome to Wrexham, of course, but to see Achleiten, a famous vineyard. My enthusiasm stemmed from a masterclass I attended last year in which the presenter remarked that Rieslings from Achleiten could last forty or fifty years. Then I saw a picture of the place: beneath a forest, green rows of vines spread across a long slope and downhill all the way to the Danube. What a sight this was!

        Robert Bodenstein works at Weingut Prager. The winery is on the main road which passes through Weissenkirchen and along the Danube. Being so close to the river, it is protected by a flood wall. This proved to be a blessing in September 2024 when torrential rain hit the Wachau for four days, destroying the cellars at some other estates.

        

I tasted a number of wines from Achleiten at Weingut Prager, all of which were classified as ‘Smaragd’. Such wines are from the Wachau’s top vineyards, must have an abv of at least 12.5% and are the best the region has to offer. Robert Bodenstein told me that he could tell immediately if a wine was from Achleiten. It ‘obviously has this smokiness to it,’ he said.

Prager’s Riesling Smaragd Achleiten 2024 had the Wachau’s characteristic apricot flavour. It also had a shocking amount of acidity – ‘off the scale’, to use my tasting note. Sampling a Grüner Veltliner Smaragd from the same vintage and vineyard was fascinating, for it showed the stark difference in acidity between the two grapes. I also experienced just how good an aged Grüner Veltliner can be when we had a Smaragd from Achleiten from 2011.

Apparently, it wasn’t even a particularly great year. 2021 was ‘the most beautiful vintage this century’, 2014 was ‘horrible’ and 2013 was ‘really beautiful’, but Robert Bodenstein had to consult his phone about 2011.

I wrote at the time that the wine had an ‘amazing nose’, which I felt incapable of describing, so I asked Robert Bodenstein for his opinion. Honeysuckle and chamomile, he suggested. On the palate, the trademark Achleiten smoky note came in after a while. The mouthfeel was soft initially, but then the acidity crept in, lingering on the front of my tongue. As for the finish, it seemed never-ending. It was the best Grüner Veltliner I’ve ever had.

They make another Grüner Veltliner Smaragd from Achleiten called ‘Stockkultur’ at Weingut Prager, which means ‘pole culture’ in English. All the vines are trained on poles, rather like the stakes used in Côte-Rôtie. This part of Achleiten is by the woods and above the fog line. The oldest vines were planted in the 1930s. The wine was even more acidic than its counterpart made from grapes further down the slope.

Five minutes along the road is Dürnstein, where the arid slopes behind Domäne Wachau feature the stone walls for which the Wachau is famous. Rows of vines are planted on the terraces atop the walls. I was told at Weingut Prager that thirty to forty sections in their vineyards were damaged in the Biblical rains of September 2024.

As the biggest name in the area, Domäne Wachau of course makes wines from Achleiten. I tried two young Grüner Veltliners, both classified Smaragd, but from different vineyards: one from Achleiten, the other from Kirnberg, a vineyard on the opposite side of the Danube. The one from Achleiten, I wrote, was ‘smoky and mineral’, with much higher acidity than the one from Kirnberg. I also tasted two Rieslings: one from Achleiten, the other from Singerriedel, a vineyard in Spitz, at the western end of the Wachau. Remarkably, the harvest in Spitz occurs two weeks after the grapes are picked in Dürnstein, despite the negligible distance between the two villages. I wrote that both Rieslings were ‘super dry.’

I didn’t get to see Achleiten, sadly, as I simply ran out of time. When I got back to the U.K., I went to Majestic Wine and cleaned them out of Domäne Wachau’s Grüner Veltliner Smaragd Achleiten 2021. If a branch near you still has some stock, I suggest you do the same.

 

The Less Famous Veltliner

 

        I was standing on a bank by the side of a sloping and narrow kellergasse (a road bordered by old wine cellars) in Fels am Wagram. Franz Leth Sr. of Weingut Leth was showing me the loess (pronounced ‘lurse’ in English) soil, which rose like walls on either side of the road. A compacted mélange of wind-blown sand, limestone and clay, it crumbled as I squeezed it between my thumb and fingers. Close by was a very short row of vines.

        ‘What grape is that?’, I asked him.

        ‘Do you work with wines every day?’

Like most people I met in Austria, he spoke excellent English. It didn’t occur to me at the time that he probably meant ‘vines’, though, so I said yes.

        ‘What do you think it is?’, he asked.

        The berries were small and green, having not yet gone through véraison, when the grapes change colour. I’d been told a couple of hours earlier by Horst Kolkmann Jr. of Weingut Kolkmann, another noted Wagram estate, that over 60 percent of his family’s vineyard was planted with Grüner Veltliner. Ergo, it was most likely Grüner Veltliner.

        ‘No’, Franz Leth said, with an air of disappointment. ‘It’s an American hybrid.’

        I’d never seen an American hybrid. Nor, if someone were to show me one today, would I recognize it. I would, however, be able to tell them plenty about Wagram and the grape Roter Veltliner, thanks to Franz Leth and other winemakers I met in Austria.

        Wagram is a green, peaceful and bucolic area to the west of Vienna. After the mind-blowing stress of driving on what was, for me, the wrong side of the road in the capital, it was a pleasure to head through the flat and sparsely populated countryside. Vines and other crops like corn and sunflowers grew to the north of the motorway and a wall of mountains loomed on the western horizon. Frost being an issue in Wagram, the vines were planted on the hillsides.

        I was here to try a lot of Roter Veltliner, which, despite its name, is used to make white wines. Nor is it related to the Austrian superstar grape, Grüner Veltliner. I was intrigued by Roter Veltliner, for it’s a wine which is rarely seen in my home country, the U.K.; in fact, I don’t think I’d ever tried one. Wagram is the main area for the grape, which is one of the three varietals in that region which can be used to make single-vineyard wines (Riedenwein).

        Roter Veltliner is nicknamed ‘the diva from Wagram’, according to Horst Kolkmann Jr. He reeled off the reasons why it has this reputation. In the vineyard, you need to ‘work double the time’ on it compared to Grüner Veltliner. Rather than growing upwards, the shoots grow out to the side or sink. It's prone to mildew and requires a green harvest after flowering and careful canopy management. Half of each bunch needs to be removed to promote ripeness. In other words, fifty percent is dumped. Franz Leth showed me precisely what this entails by pulling off the bottom half of a bunch in front of me.

        Roter Veltliner is evidently worth the considerable effort, for the wines can be really outstanding. As Rainer Christ of Weingut Christ in Vienna expressed it, the grape is ‘very interesting when you have the perfect terroir’. The growing environment in Wagram suits this late-ripening varietal, which demands dry soils and a warm climate. South-facing vineyards like Ried Scheiben and Ried Brunnthal are exposed to abundant sunshine and the region’s deep loess soils drain water very well, while retaining sufficient moisture for the vines.

        Having tasted a substantial number of wines in situ, I can report that Roter Veltliner has ample acidity, which endures even in old bottles. The wines do not lack weight in the mouth and it’s highly aromatic. It has a lovely flavour reminiscent of tropical fruits, coupled with some kind of spice, which I found hard to pinpoint.

I had read that Roter Veltliner could be disappointing when young, but that was not true of the bottles I tried. It clearly ages well, for I had a number of older wines which were wonderful. I have to mention Kolkmann’s Roter Veltliner Vision 2013 in particular, for it brought a smile to my face. From Ried Scheiben and aged for 12 months in acacia then 10 months in used oak barrels, its super ripe nose and flavours brought to mind a late harvest wine, but it contained just 3 grams per litre of residual sugar. The finish was never-ending.

        My final visit in Wagram was to Weingut Josef Fritz, in the tiny hamlet of Zaussenberg. As was often the case during my time in Austria, I couldn’t find his winery, and had to enlist the help of a tough-looking and shirtless man.

Josef Fritz is renowned for producing Roter Veltliner, and he was amused by an old press clipping on his wall in which he was described as a Traminer specialist. He was emphatic that Roter Veltliner has great potential for ageing. He said that he’d done a vertical tasting going back to the 2010 vintage, and the only year that didn’t show well was 2014, a wet year. (The many winemakers I spoke to in Austria were unanimous that 2014 was a bad year, with one exception.)

A genial and generous man with a fabulous cellar of wines, Fritz opened a bottle of his 2006 Chardonnay from the limestone-heavy Ried Steinberg. Beads of condensation were on the bottle, but the wine was astonishingly good, medium-bodied with a subtle smoky oak character. I found it almost impossible to believe that the harvest was nineteen years ago. The name of the Steinberg vineyard can no longer appear on the label, because from 2021 only wines made from Riesling, Roter Veltliner and Grüner Veltliner may be labelled as Wagram DAC single-vineyard wines. Look for his Chardonnay Grosse Reserve instead.

The last wine I tried in Wagram was not even from the region. It was a half-bottle of the storied Ruster Ausbruch dessert wine from Burgenland, which had been kindly gifted to me. It tasted like a Sauternes, but contained only 7 percent alcohol. Like many wines I had in Austria, it was stunning. On my next visit I’m definitely going to Rust.

The Wines of Central and Southern Spain: A Review

              The first book I bought in the Classic Wine Library series was Richard Mayson’s Port and the Douro. I used to read it in restaurants around Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square when I was preparing for the Fortified Wines paper of the WSET Diploma. It was a book I enjoyed immensely, Port being one of my favourite wines as well as the one which had provoked my worst hangover. The book is now somewhere in Italy, never to be seen again.

        Since then I have read many of the books which followed Richard Mayson’s fine work, the latest being The Wines of Central and Southern Spain by Sarah Jane Evans, a Master of Wine and an authority on Spain. I was excited to read this, for I have travelled widely in Spain and like many of the wines a lot.

        This follow-up to 2018’s The Wines of Northern Spain is divided into six sections, starting with Catalonia. The writer notes that although this region ‘sits in northern Spain, its history and character is altogether Mediterranean. Hence its presence’ in the book. I’m not particularly interested in Catalan wines, but I make an exception for Priorat, which can cast a spell on any lover of wine: a remote appellation of hills and mountains encircled by another, and loaded with old vines. The book’s back cover features an image of the village of Poboleda, revealing the majesty of the setting.

        The section on Priorat is a microcosm of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. There is plenty of useful information and some lovely prose:

        The early morning journey had taken me from Barcelona along the coast and up through the clouds, with the hilltop villages of Priorat appearing above the cloud, and the magical Montsant mountain.

        Very evocative! The general discussion of Priorat, however, is restricted to four pages, whereas ten are dedicated to notable producers making the wines. I think it should be the other way round. There’s so much to say about a place like Priorat. We read, for instance, that there are ‘12 village sub-zones’ which comprise the Vi de Vila (village wine) category, but there’s very little here about them. It’s a pity, for it’s a really fascinating subject. (Admittedly, this skewing of the text in favour of producers is common to all of the titles in the Classic Wine Library series.)

        A chapter is devoted to sparkling wine. Again, it’s not a style of wine that appeals to me, but I learned a great deal. I was also pleased to read that Sarah Jane Evans shares my feelings about Macabeo, deeming it a ‘too-often plodding’ grape. 

      I enjoyed reading about ‘the heart of Spain’ very much, for it’s an area whose wines receive scant attention in the U.K, and it reinforced my desire to go there. Places like Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha, both part of ‘España vacía’ (empty Spain) hold a fascination for me. In the author’s words, La Mancha is ‘a remarkable landscape’, where ‘vineyards extend as far as the eye can see’.

        One of the curiosities of the wine regions in central Spain and the Levante (the focus of chapter four) is the unexpected presence of certain grapes. I learned that the aforementioned Catalan grape Macabeo, for example, is the main white grape in D.O.s like Manchuela and Utiel-Requena, and that Albariño has migrated south to feature in the latter. Indeed, the book is full of interesting facts: Picapoll Blanco is not the French grape Piquepoul, sweet Monsatrell is made in Alicante and Jumilla, and ‘a plague of spiders’ brought a halt to organic production at an estate in Ribera del Guadiana in 2017.

        In my opinion, sherry could be the greatest of all wines. Reading about it was somewhat chastening, though, for I realised that parts of my recent presentation about the wines were in fact incorrect! It filled me with a strong urge to return to Jerez, however, for the prospect of trying an Amontillado with ‘an average age of 50 years’ at Bodegas Emilio Hidalgo left me salivating.

        To sum up, The Wines of Central and Southern Spain is a very well-written work which will appeal to lovers of Spanish wine, WSET students and those planning a trip to Spain. Only one thing is missing: a chart of vintages. I will continue to rely on a rule of thumb I picked up somewhere: if the year ends in the number 3, it probably wasn’t the best vintage in Spain. Or maybe that’s Rioja.

Published in The Wine Merchant, August 2025.

The Other White Burgundy

        I’ve sometimes wondered if people in Champagne are aware that the name Bouzy sounds funny in English. Probably not! Nor is it likely that vignerons in the Burgundian village of Bouzeron realise that the name has a somewhat comical ring across the Channel.

 

In fairness, I imagine that very few wine drinkers in the U.K. have ever heard of Bouzeron, let alone drunk a bottle of the wine. I knew next to nothing about the village or the grape Aligoté when, always eager to learn about wine and practice a bit of French, I signed up for a webinar on the subject run by Vins de Bourgogne.

Bouzeron was only granted AOC status in 1998, becoming the sole village appellation in Burgundy to be dedicated to the grape Aligoté. (There is also a more extensive appellation called Bourgogne Aligoté, which allows higher yields and takes grapes from inferior vineyards on the plains and on valley floors.) Bouzeron covers a small area and is situated next to Rully at the northern end of the Côte Chalonnaise, in a small valley flanked by two ridges. The grapes are grown on marl and limestone on the upper parts of the slopes, with the more illustrious varietals planted further down.  

There are no premier crus in Bouzeron, I learned, but the appellation does boast 26 lieux-dits. The climate is semi-continental, with southern (méridional) influences. Expositions vary owing to the hills and rifts in the land. Recent vintages (2020, 2022 and 2023) were solar and hot, with the cold weather in 2021 serving as an exception, as in the Rhône Valley to the south.

Robin Kick, the Master of Wine leading the webinar, explained in admirable French that, surprisingly, six percent of the vineyard area in Burgundy is planted with the grape. It’s therefore more significant than you might expect in this kingdom of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Compared to its famous white counterpart, Aligoté is more acidic and ripens later, which are distinct advantages in hot vintages.

Vins de Bourgogne was kind enough to send participants six samples of wine from Bouzeron in the post, to enable us to get a flavour of the appellation. I can tell readers that Aligoté does indeed have a ton of acidity – not quite at the Riesling or Albariño level, but very significant. The wines also had a lot of weight in the mouth.

At least a couple of the people involved in the online tasting deemed the grape to be ‘aromatic’, with white flowers, almond and stone fruits used as descriptors. Personally, however, I found it something of a challenge to pin down the aromas and flavours. My tasting note for one of the wines, for example, was that it was ‘like sniffing water, or Muscadet’, with maybe the faintest touch of lemon evident on the nose. Some of the wines definitely had a saline/mineral edge and the citrus character cropped up more than once in my notes, but that was about it. Either the French are just better at tasting than me, or the grape is in fact pretty neutral. I'll go with the latter. 

The ability of Aligoté to retain its acid, even in hot conditions, means that we may be seeing more and more of it from Burgundy in years to come. According to one vigneron who spoke in the webinar, it’s also ageworthy, and can be kept for a decade or more. I’m not sure about that. I can imagine it being like the mature Albariños I’ve had, which tasted very similar to the young wines but with less acidity.

At any rate, the future may well be bright for Aligoté in the British market. After all, who hasn't encountered a customer who can’t stand Chardonnay but loves white Burgundy?

Published in The Wine Merchant, June 2025.

Sherry

          I think the best bottle of wine I’ve ever had was a sherry.

       Before Covid, one of my former employers managed to secure some gift packs featuring a half bottle each of Bodegas Tradición sherry and Tomatin whisky. The selling point was that the whisky was finished in a barrel which had been used to age the sherry.

The price was great – a steal, in fact – but we couldn’t shift them. This being Scotland, folk were interested in the whisky, despite it being only a half bottle. Nobody wanted to take a chance on the sherry, though. Then some bright spark had a brainwave, we got rid of the gift packs and began selling the bottles individually.

As a sherry fan, I resolved to try both offerings. One of the sets contained a Pedro Ximénez VOS (Very Old Sherry), which had spent over twenty years maturing in casks. This stuff was stunning, and I write that as someone who’s not usually keen on PX. I love dessert wines, but the four hundred grams of residual sugar is too much even for me, and I have a lot of respect for my very expensive dentist. Beyond the typical hit of raisins, there were lovely flavours of coffee and chocolate. Not the elusive chocolate and coffee notes tasters sometimes reach for when sampling red wines, but profound, unmistakable flavours.

The PX merely played second fiddle to the sherry in the other gift pack, however, a VORS (Very Old Rare Sherry) Oloroso, which had been aged for over thirty years. The most remarkable thing about this wine was that it completely changed while I was drinking it. It started with an explosion of nuts which lingered before transforming entirely on the finish, which was endless. I’m a pretty good taster, but I still haven’t managed to pinpoint what was in that second cascade of flavour, and I had about six half bottles!

Alas, despite the sherries being superlative, we couldn’t sell them, except to one customer: me. The half bottles of Tomatin were, needless to say, another matter entirely, and were snapped up by whisky-loving Scots and American tourists, the latter constituting a much-valued clientele in Scotland’s capital.

I trace my enthusiasm for sherry to a trip I made to Seville many years ago with my uncle. One of the first bars we visited was an atmospheric establishment called Hijos de E. Morales, which is close to the city's colossal cathedral. By a wall were barrels bearing the labels Fino, Manzanilla, Amontillado and Oloroso. The gruff and proud-looking men behind the bar would greet us with a loud ‘digame’ or ‘dime’, pour a glass from one of the barrels for about one euro fifty, then slap the change down on the counter. After a couple of lunchtime visits, I quickly learned the value of a siesta.

I have returned to Seville, and Morales, many times since then. If you like sherry, I recommend you do the same. My sole visit to Jerez regrettably involved no more than a change of bus. One day I shall return and remedy that missed opportunity. Perhaps someone at a bodega will even be able to explain what a palo cortado is. 

Jakey Season

             The weather north of the border has begun to warm up. Yes, it can happen, although anyone who visited in 2024, the year of the summer that never was, may be surprised to hear that. With warmer temperatures, we enter ‘Jakey Season’.

Edinburgh

       I wish I could claim the credit for coining this term, but the first time I heard it was from a former manager. My English brethren are likely unaware of the meaning of the word jakey, so I have a definition from Dictionaries of the Scots Language for them. A jakey is ‘a slang word for a down-and-out, especially one who obviously drinks lots of jake [methylated spirits].’ I think this definition can be extended to include anyone with a substance abuse problem, and who’s not above stealing.

       Well, there are a lot of them up north, although it’s of course not a phenomenon limited to Scotland. I noticed an ample supply of jakeys on a couple of recent visits to London (I’ve been away from England for so long that I’m unfamiliar with the equivalent term.) And they do come out into society when the weather takes a turn for the better. Who knows how they fill their time in the long winters.

       I used to work on Leith Walk in Edinburgh, a street which didn’t have the finest reputation. It’s now probably less sketchy than it was, but no eyebrows would be raised if you were to inform someone that you’d run into a spot of bother there. It was here that I became very familiar with jakeys.

       I was generally very reluctant to leave our door open, for obvious reasons. One brilliant summer’s day, though, we took the risk. Within a short time, a tall and extremely thin man reeled into the shop like a zombie. He didn’t respond to my greeting – a bad sign - and walked straight over to the Italian section. He grabbed a bottle of wine, then bolted. My colleague gave chase, but the guy was, shockingly, as fast as a gazelle, even if his trousers did fall down as he was heading up the street.

       My eyes turned to the Italian section to see what the jakey had swiped. It was a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino! My mind promptly conjured up an image of him sitting on a bench in a dodgy park, or perhaps just sprawled out on the grass, swigging that excellent wine straight from the bottle. Talk about a waste.

       Readers would be wrong to assume that the jakey profession is restricted to men. There were a number of lasses with inglorious reputations in that part of the city. I recall another incident – again, on a fine summer’s day – when a female jakey zig-zagged through the open door. My alert level shot up like that of a twitchy cat. I told her I wouldn’t be able to sell her a drink as she was clearly intoxicated. Perhaps I approached the matter the wrong way, but I was trying to follow our legal obligations.

       She ignored me, took a bottle of rose, and held it out as if daring me to grab it. Twice I played her daft game, failing on both occasions to reach it. She backed out of the shop, opened the bottle, poured it all onto the pavement, then legged it.

  

       Alas, dealing with jakeys not only causes you to lose your faith in humanity, it also may result in you doubting the effectiveness of the boys in blue. One weekend, I noticed a couple of jakeys had crashed out side by side on a pallet next to the shop. Across the street was a restaurant, where families would sit outside. Remembering that drunk nuisances used to be dealt with swiftly, I reported them to the police. The officers who visited simply looked annoyed with me, and told me that there was no law against being drunk. A fine example for the children across the street then.

       So, that’s the meaning of Jakey Season. I’d think long and hard before leaving your door open.