I had admired his wines but never met Tom Carson, lauded winemaker at Yering Station in the Yarra Valley near Melbourne, so I jumped at the chance of catching up with him over lunch at Zuma, the snazzy Japanese restaurant in Knightsbridge, London. (I got the impression he enjoys food just as much as wine – a good sign.)
A graduate of James Halliday’s Coldstream Hills in the early 1990s, he must have tasted a few peerless burgundies from James’s cellar and is now an unreformed Francophile. In fact he married a Frenchwoman and will be spending three...