Confessions of a Wino

I stumbled across this branch of Nicolas in bustling Soho.  Wine shops are magnets to my liver and I felt the power dragging me across the street and in through the door like I was a hypnotised automaton.

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So, the worst kept secret in football has finally been revealed.  Sven-Göran Eriksson has been sacked by Manchester City.  I am always one to say I told you so, but on this occasion I have evidence.  I did predict that it would all end in tears.

Now, the rumour mill has turned up Mark Hughes as the top candidate.  At this point I have to stand up for Sven.  He had a horrific end to the season, results-wise, but he still ended up 9th in his first season in charge of an otherwise relegated club.  The Premiership “superstar” in charge of Blackburn Rovers finished an astonishing 3 points and two places higher, after several years in charge of his club.  In what sense does that promise a better performance next year?  I have two resolutions if Mark Hughes is appointed

1.  I will only attend the first home game of the season next year and I vow to sing “Sven-Göran Eriksson” for as long and as loud as my voice will stand.

2.  I will not be deflected from my world tour of Pinot Noirs.  Meet Zarcillo.

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…at promoting themselves, but I still seek them out as often as I can.  Especially those that share my values, humour and, above all, pure enthusiasm for food and wine.  I find the content of most such British blogs to be informative, amusing, and interesting.

My latest find could equally well have been named Confessions of a Foodo, but in fact, the author chose the equally witty title Gastroplod.  I think her stomach is in Provence and her liver in Burgundy but her head is clearly in England.

Well worth a glance.

How do you eat mussels?  As a child on holiday in Nantes, I was taught to eat them by breaking the shells apart, using one half to scoop out the flesh in the other, then to use the remnants to paint a Lautrecian masterpiece.

I don’t buy the noncy idea of using one full shell in a pincer movement like a crustacean Pacman, that is for Londoners.  One area you and I probably agree on is that to dispense with the shells in the small waste bowl requires some imagination, some organisation, and demands some artistic endeavour.

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I was tagged not only by Robert, but also Catavino with a totally pointless chain blog-mail asking me to nominate 7 great music tracks that I am listening to right now.  But who can resist sharing their music choices with the world?

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Late May and a well deserved holiday for me and the missus.  So we left gardening chores to be done next weekend and took the train to London.

You can read about our exploits over coming weeks as I write up the notes.  In the meantime I would just like to say thank you to the Park Plaza County Hall Hotel who looked after us superbly well and even treated us for Fred’s birthday with a complimentary platter fit for any wino.  Thanks guys….

Many people have contacted me asking why it is so difficult to find recommendations on my site.  Sample quote, “I just wanted to find a decent red to take to a dinner party and I had to page through the whole bloody site!”

I am generally against rating wine because it is so subjective.  Who am I to judge whether you will like a wine or not?  However, I can judge whether I like a wine or not, so I use a binary rating scale.

1 = I like it
0 = I don’t like it

So I am not going to award 5 stars, or 90/100 points, or even a top ten.  But I have decided to start a favourites page where I will highlight wines that I tried recently and really liked.  Some food venues are also covered.  It is completely subjective and totally at my discretion how long an item stays in my “favourites” and demotion does not mean I no longer like it.  It’s just a fun way of sharing my thoughts, albeit somewhat randomly.

You can find Wino’s Favourites under “Pages” (see top right on the home page).

Any feedback is appreciated.

You may have noticed I was having problems with my ISP until recently.  This was driving me to drink which is, fortuitously, a pastime in which I am experienced and capable.

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I’ve just returned from the opening night of the Opera North production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s play reconfigured as an opera by melody dodger, Benjamin Britten, whose proud boast seems to be never to have written an opera in a major key.

I normally love Opera North (full disclosure, I know one of the chorus quite well), but I am not a Britten fan.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream reminded me of all the negative aspects of the earlier, and otherwise superior, Peter Grimes.  Incessant horns and strings in deliberate discord, keeping the audience on its edge in the same way Hammer House of Horror films used organ fugues to build tension.  Britten never seems to let go, though.  It was like sitting on a train, delayed because of a fatality on the line.  One feels sorry for the victim (or cast in this case) but I just wanted to get home as quickly as possible.  Listening to a gauntlet scratching up and down a blackboard would have been more entertaining, and arguably, more musical.

The humour (what little existed) was 50 years old and could probably only have been written by a tortured homosexual of the repressed mid 20th century.  There were clearly a few from that era in the audience, occasionally chortling and even applauding.  I watched with the same cringingly embarrassed feeling of watching a Carry On film from the Beatles epoch.  Fortunately, to avoid total boredom, I was simply able to stare up at the awesome ceiling of Leeds Grand Theatre, the home of Opera North, and surely one of the best theatres in the world for architectural detail.

Just round the corner from the Grand Theatre is Lounge Bar and Grill, and that is where we chose to eat before the performance.  With 25% off, the bill for two with a bottle of wine came to only £40 plus service.  Even for Leeds that is cheap.

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If you are looking for more wine related weblogs, you could check out the “other good sites” list on the right of my home page.

Or you could try a new site aggregating blogs across the web http://wine.alltop.com.  Here you will find links to the latest posts from a wide range of quality blogs including most of the ones I read regularly.

The weblog world has been accused of being unreliable, even corrupt.  The key to getting the best information is to read around and not take one person’s view as gospel.  The blogosphere, in my opinion, is no more corrupt (and may be less so) than professional journalism on average.  However, it is true that we bloggers are not held to the same benchmarks as published authors in the regular press.  This is both an advantage and a disadvantage of the blogosphere.  It enables us to speak freely without fear of advertisers pulling lucrative contracts, but conversely does sometimes allow un-researched opinion to be presented as fact, so it is worth reading around for the aggregated view.