Confessions of a Wino

Do you know what a Pot Lyonnais is?  If you have been to the Beaujolais region you do.  A pot (pronounced poe) Lyonnais (lee-on-ay) is a 46cl bundle of fun in the form of a wine carafe.  Whilst dining in Fleurie once, I was told that the history of the pot was that it was considered the suitable amount for agricultural workers to drink on their lunchtime break.  Yes, I know what you are thinking.  Imagine if the same rules applied to the munitions factories!  Ka-boom!!

The French are often copied, especially when it comes to wine, and the word on the street is that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  The Greeks must love the French very much judging by the amount of pointless and deliberately misleading French language on an average bottle of Greek wine.  But apart from the French language this is no average bottle of Greek wine.

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The Olympic Games are coming to London in 2012.  Like most Olympic preparations there are rumours of delays, accusations of bribery and corruption, confirmation of massive cost increases, and public doubts that anything will be ready on time.

This is all entirely normal in the run up to any Olympics.  However, unlike other recent hosts, we have contrived to produce the most astonishingly inept logo, and at £400,000, it looks about as cheap as a Northern Rock mortgage.

Rapsani from Tsantali Winery claims to be “The wine of the Gods of Olympos” but I take this with a pinch of salt since, elsewhere on the bottle the label breaks out into a nasty bout of francophilia, claiming the wine to be “Appellation d’Origine de Qualité Supérieure”.

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Greek food, on the whole, is well known to be incredibly healthy, especially when compared to typical English and American diets.  Greek wine by contrast is just not well known at all.  So when I saw a bottle on the wine list of Dimitris in Manchester, I had to give it a try.

Every table had a “reserved” sign, the day we visited Dimitris for Sunday lunch.  Fortunately these were not real reserved signs, but merely little Hellenic white lies, so we sat down.

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