I hardly dare review a Spanish wine after my admonishment at the hands of Lorenza, but I had already purchased this on my way home from Spain in July. There is not much to do at Malaga airport other than mooch around the “duty free” shop, and €16.30 doesn’t sound like a lot for a Gran Reserva.
When dining out, one well known restaurant critic makes a point of asking how the tips are distributed, always leaving cash, and encourages readers to do the same. So I dutifully asked the MO of one waiter at the Cornerhouse Grill and was stunned by his response.
They say that Pinot Noir has barnyard aromas, but this one was more like green manure, just starting to rot away nicely before being ploughed back into the soil to nourish and re-energise.
……..miaow, miaow, miaow, miaow, miaow!
Craggy Range Te Muna Road Sauvignon Blanc 2007 is the very metaphor for cats’ piss on a gooseberry bush. Except these Martinborough cats mistook a pineapple tree for the green and prickly one.
Available from the Wine Society at £12.50. It’s a good slurp but I think there are better value SBs available from New Zealand, and indeed, the Wine Society. Check out John Hancock’s Trinity Hill at only £8.50, for example.
In sleepy Grosvenor Square, just a Molotov cocktail throw from the American embassy, is yet another Gordon Ramsay place. It’s getting difficult to walk down a London street without seeing his name over some restaurant or other.
I was advised that Molotov was not on the aperitif list, but £12 for a tiny glass of Ayala champagne, even if poured at the table, set me off in an explosive mood. I think the sommelier noticed my look of disappointment, nay disdain, as he left me with barely enough liquid to create a damp patch if I spilled it on my trousers (I didn’t). I wanted to dislike this place – I don’t like being ripped off.
The European Wine Bloggers’ Conference 2008 was a massive hit, it has to be said, much to the surprise of the organisers.
So much happened in one weekend of my life, I can barely pick out my favourite bits. Let’s start with the lowlights – landed in Bilbao, bag (including wine samples) landed in Palermo. Arrived back in UK, bag arrived one hour later, one bottle of wine smashed, clothes ruined and bag stunk of wine, had to drive home overnight with a blood stained handkerchief wrapped around my finger, nearly sliced off from glass shards.
OK, that’s only one lowlight really. The rest of the weekend was awesome – here are my top 11 highlights:
11. Teaching Ryan Opaz (US citizen and all round good guy) to say “arsehole” instead of “asshole” – what is the matter with Americans? I suppose we could agree to use “George W Bush” for the same meaning.
One weekend in La Rioja is not anywhere near long enough to enjoy the fruits (and tannins) offered up by this part of northern Spain. I was, therefore, extremely pleased to see a visit to Marqués de Riscal winery, one of my favourites, on the itinerary of the European Wine Bloggers’ Conference.
Riscal is a traditional old winery yet some experimentation is being dared, such as the inclusion of increasing quantities of Cabernet Sauvignon in this Tempranillo dominated region, and talking of innovation (a noun to which Riscal aspires) it is hard to ignore the stunning architecture of the Frank Gehry building. Although supposedly representative of the wines of Riscal, I suspect Gehry may have been influenced by something more hallucinatory than wine when he sat at his drawing board at the turn of the millennium. Very impressive though it is, I spat rather than swallowed, the argument that it “blends in” with the surrounding landscape. I think its very beauty is that it blends in like a spaceship placed next to the Houses of Parliament. Come to think of it, when is the London Eye scheduled for take off?
And now for something completely different. I picked a few bottles up at the Leeds branch of Majestic recently (before the fire), including this Montes Pinot Noir for £7.99. I wasn’t looking for the Spanish Inquisition, and fortunately I didn’t need my Hungarian phrase book.
With apologies to Cilla Black, the European Wine Bloggers Conference is over and I have made some terrific new friends – Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, even American, but I am left wondering what it’s all about.
A group of people got together with some overlapping interests, basically an enthusiasm for wine and an opinion itching to be aired via digital means. We discussed what blogging is, its importance to the wine industry, how to monetise blogs, quality and ethical standards, and whether rating systems are relevant to the wine blogosphere. Of course, since the conference was handily located in the famous Rioja wine region of Spain, there were ample opportunities to sample wine and food from the Iberian Peninsula.
As you might expect the laptop is mightier than the sword, and opinion frothed like a breakfast cappuccino. A tidal wave of wine testosterone streamed through alcohol thinned veins.
Wine and computer geekdom collide somewhat incoherently in a region where tradition stretches back hundreds of years. And yet, we heard leading wine producer, Santiago Vivanco, say that the internet is a new door to wine, albeit that only hours later his brother was explaining how long it takes to innovate in the wine world – tradition is fiercely protected in most of the old world wine regions.
On the final evening of the conference, a handful of remaining souls, including the organisers, sat in the market square in Logroño over a beer (yes beer) and wondered what we had learnt. Sure there was goodwill. Friendship. Trust. Confidence. Enthusiasm. But a lack of clear direction.
Everyone has some idea of what they want from this new group and there is always a temptation to quickly place rules around a situation like this. A mission statement; constitution; membership qualification criteria; communication protocols and platforms etc. But I think this is putting the cart before the horse. There is room for some serendipity here. Group behaviour is an entire subject in its own right and I don’t intend to attempt to understand it, but I do think that if the group is cohesive and finds a purpose it will survive and thrive. If there turns out to be no more common purpose than a willingness to read each others blogs and share an occasional glass of wine, then the group will ultimately split.
There is a danger in this type of “first” conference being a bit too introspective. We need to consider the outside world, and allow a bit of time to find a common purpose. Something that will unite the group and deliver value much more than the sum of its parts, not only to the bloggers, but also the wine industry, wine drinkers and even those that simply like to read about wine.
I am going to hang around to find out what this might be.
The death of Robert Mondavi, in May of this year, caused a wine world reaction akin to the British mourning the death of Princess Diana, the 11th anniversary of which is today.
Credited with transforming the Californian wine industry, I wonder what this “colossus” of the wine world would have been like to meet.
I had a mad dream that I walked into Costco in Leeds and Mondavi was a guest wine guy for a day. Admittedly this is a bizarre dream since I have never seen any sort of wine guy at the Leeds branch. I hear tell of such wondrous myth in the stores of our transatlantic cousins, but here in the UK, Costco wine shoppers are left to their own devices.
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