Michael Oates is reading Chinese at St Anne's, my old Oxford college, although that's not how I know him. It was purple pager Martin Nettleton who knows his uncle and put us together. Michael tells me he is "not, technically, a cellar rat since we have no cellar. I was hired more to translate the website but ended up interpreting for the Australian wine consultants, which involved me in the 'equipping the cellar and producing the vintage' process." Read on.
I am in the unenviable position of someone writing about Skodas in the late 1990s. At this time, the minority...