Optima Magazine

• Drink
• Farming & Production
  • A Sparkling Success
  • First Catch Your Cocoa Beans
  • Holy Smoke
  • Look Beyond The Label
  • Made In Middlesex
  • Milked Dry
  • Much Ado About Chocolate
  • Spoilt For Choice
  • Well-Oiled
  • Where's The Beef?
• Food News
• Healthy Eating
• In The Larder...
• Interviews
• Kitchen Gadgets
• Personalities
• Recipes
• Restaurants

Harvest time in an English vineyard. Pic courtesy of Chafor Estate; credit: David Blaauw Photography

• A Sparkling Success 20 May 16

  “And now, let me introduce you to this little chap here. This is Bacchus,” says Steve proudly. A tall man with a broad smile, Steve’s soft tan and broad shoulders bespeak a man far happier... Read More

• Holy Smoke 2 Jan 15

  “Once I’ve explained what’s gone wrong with the industry, you’ll spot it a mile off,” Lance Forman declares, pulling up in the backyard of an unassuming wood-clad building. It’s 7am, and... Read More

• Well-Oiled 28 Mar 14

  I’m browsing in a food market near Brindisi and I don’t speak Italian. A stallholder invites me to taste a black jam-like substance, made from grape juice. I buy a jar. He wants me to try the... Read More

• Made In Middlesex 28 Feb 14

  Middlesex. We love it, of course, but it’s not exactly a culinary hotspot. It hasn’t the heritage of Lincolnshire, say, or the aspirational feel of Cornwall. When the 2012-13 Great Taste... Read More

• Look Beyond The Label 15 Nov 13

  Recently I was chatting with an independent London baker who, the previous week, had received something of a spreading from a customer outraged that he charged over £2 per loaf. She’d told him... Read More

• Spoilt For Choice 5 Jul 13

  It all used to be so simple. A nice roast on Sunday; cold meat and salad on Monday; Tuesday – mince up the rest of the leftover meat and knock up a nice, comforting pie. A few staple recipes to... Read More

• First Catch Your Cocoa Beans 6 Jul 12

  Chocolate: Ask a European, and it’s confectionery made with the finest cocoa and butter and sold in chic chocolate boutiques. Ask a Brit, and it’s a bar of Dairy Milk or Galaxy from the corner... Read More

• Milked Dry 7 Oct 11

  The last farm in our Buckinghamshire village is facing closure. Johns Lane Farm, in Ashley Green near Berkhamsted, has been in Brenda and Kevin Fancourt’s family since 1937 but is now struggling to... Read More

• Much Ado About Chocolate 26 Aug 11

  With the astonishingly rapid rise in interest in ‘real’ food over the last few years you wouldn’t think that there was a niche product as yet unexploited… but two local women... Read More

• Where's The Beef? 28 Aug 09

  One of the happiest farmers it was my pleasure to meet, earlier in this decade, lived in a remote part of Exmoor. As we drove up the high-banked roads that climbed to the farmhouse, a dark... Read More