Confessions of a Wino

I’ve got my comeuppance for slagging off Mark Hughes.  Man City announced that the UEFA Cup quarter final home leg would be a “reward for the fans” and tickets were priced at only £5 so “ordinary fans” could come and watch.  I am obviously not an ordinary fan since, despite numerous calls to the ticket office (engaged tone) the match is sold out and I have to watch on some backwater internet channel.  Shame – I am in Manchester on 16 April when the town turns into a Hamburger for a night.

So perhaps I should be more complimentary about people I have never met.

Everyone knows that it is impossible to mass produce and mass market a decent wine – especially a Pinot Noir.  Trouble is, nobody told Alfred Hurtado.  His Chilean Cono Sur brand is taking over the world and rightly so.

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The primary responsibility of a wine producer is to make drinkable or, better still, remarkable wine.  It is a bit like a restaurant whose benchmark is firstly decent food, then cool atmosphere, warm ambience, decent price, and finally how good looking the waitresses are – oh and the quality and price of the wine list helps!

Fundamentally I care about our planet and I am very much in favour of reduced carbon emissions.  Irrespective of whether you believe the global warming doom mongerers, you would have to be a nincompoop of Victorian standards not to accept that pumping out all this shit into our precious H2O is simply a route to premature apocalypse.

However, is there really a need to shout so loud about your green credentials?  I expect as a matter of course that winemakers use ever more green and efficient production methods.  So I am always suspicious about any product that claims to be “greener” – it is the Toyota Prius effect applied to the wine industry.

This “green” one from Virgin at £8.99 wasn’t undrinkable but it was unremarkable.

I’ve sacked Mybloglog.  What is the point when Facebook (you see, no need to provide a hyperlink) is taking over every social interaction on the web.  I like to think that LinkedIn looks after business interaction, but Facebook’s success in the social space has undoubtedly been due to its open platform.

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Some gadgets are adorable and some are practical.  None are both.

My iPhone is adorable but lacks practicality on so many levels.  It is missing some very basic technical features like cut and paste.  I keep dropping it because it is too smooth to hold.  It always looks like it’s been pawed by a jello wrestling dog that has just walked across a skid pan.

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As taste sensations go, there is little to beat a hunk of well seasoned Argentinian beef, chargrilled and accompanied by a glass of decent Malbec.  Chewing on the salty, aged and bloody meat causes a tingling in your gums as if a bovine mouthwash.   This then undergoes some kind of chemical reaction with the deep, moody, spicy wine that leaves you digesting the meal for a whole week.  Sharp pangs – taste reminders – keep haunting you like salivating ghosts of taste past that make you press your teeth together in muscle memory.

As Argentinian steakhouses go, The Gaucho Grill takes the biscuit.  Not only for great steaks with superb ghost potential, but also for awesome (by which I mean sky high) wine prices.  Markups of over 300% are commonplace.  That is four times the retail price and presumably they pay the importer much less!  Is there a venue which matches the steak quality and authenticity, but where the only fleecing is associated with an occasional lamb chop?

In Leeds, a place I dine all too rarely these days, River Plate has appeared on the site once known as the Calls Grill.  The menu looked pretty similar to Gaucho but, to be frank, the wine list looked cheap!

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At some point in your life, birthdays stop being beacons shining light on a promising future and instead become lamp posts illuminating yesterday’s gloomy streets.  A time to look back longingly at your youth and wonder what might have happened if you hadn’t bought that Ford Escort with the faulty brakes, or kissed that fat bird with dentures behind the bike sheds at school.

But the lacerations eventually healed and I was able once again to enjoy eating the sweets of my generation without the nightmare of that mousetrap snog to haunt my tongue.

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I was planning to tell you about another stonking January wine offer.

You might recall my review of Landelia 2005 Malbec last March where I was a Virgin’s thong away from apologising for visible trouser stains.  I love the smooth chocolate and cherry flavours that slip from a glass of Malbec like a soulful line to the ladies from Theophilus T Wildebeest.

But Lenny Henry’s parody of Barry White probably lasts all night, or at any rate, longer than the Virgin Wines New Year sale.

I picked up six bottles of Landelia Malbec for £40.74, or £6.79 per bottle only a couple of weeks ago.

If you want some now, you have missed the boat.  The price is back to its original £8.49.  But even at this level, you would be naiive not to tuck a couple of bottles away, if only as an ingested alternative to Stud Delay.

Smoky, moody, deep, mysterious, bitter, fruity.  All adjectives that, I have been instructed to inform you in no uncertain terms, do not associate themselves readily with my wife.  At least not for 25 days of every month.

Just as well she didn’t visit the Virgin Wines website and pay £5.65 of her hard earned cash for this Adobe Cabernet.

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So, Naked Wines has launched and as the website quips “Rules:  Nudity Optional” but this looks like a serious undertaking to me.

You may recall that Rowan Gormley described it as the LastFM of wine shopping, but there has been some controversy over the half launch of Naked Wines, the latest project from the former founder and MD of Virgin Wines.  Its aim is to match wine makers to buyers directly (well via Naked Wines to be precise).  True to his irreverent style, Mr Gormley claims that winemakers “would rather be with their vines than in a Travelodge waiting for an appointment with Tesco”.  This is what the internet was invented for.  Look at the effect it has had on auctions, travel agents, banks, electrical stores, estate agents, bookstores.  The internet is the world’s cyber-wholesale Exchange & Mart.

On the other hand, orders still need to be processed, the wine still needs to be shipped, local duty accounted for, customer service delivered, refunds processed.  In this sense, is Naked Wines really so different from other online wine retailers?

I was invited to join the “tasting panel” and three bottles arrived in the post a few days later.  I was expecting some yawningly predictable staples:  a Petit Chablis, an Aussie Shiraz and a NZ Sauvignon for example.  In fact I got a South African Chenin, a Chilean Cabernet/Carmenère and a Spanish erm….thing.  My interest is aroused but I can assure you I was fully clothed as I tasted the first two – both reds.

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Amongst the longest wine names you can find on a bottle belong to Concha y Toro…

Concha y Toro Winemaker’s Lot 9T Sauvignon Blanc Lo Ovalle Vineyard D.O. Casablanca Valley by Ignacio Recabarren 2007 is all the information you get on the front of the bottle.  There is a little more info on the back but it’s all claptrap by the Wine Society who charge £6.95 for an odd shaped bottle of this Chilean white wine.

Actually, the wine is super value for money and would give many a NZ Sauvignon a run for its honey, although this one was more grass, gooseberry, grapefruit and red cherryade.  The only thing missing is a good dose of cat’s piss (yes, just one this time).

Once again – Concha y Toro proves itself to be one of the big wine brands to trust.