Invited over to Darryl and Jayne’s for a bit of Scouse spicy scram and a few bottles of wine, Darryl was not surprised to see me turn up with a couple of bottles of Riesling.
Our mutual mate, Tony, calls Riesling sugary shite but that is unsurprising from a man whose wine sophistication is measured by the fact that he thinks Beaujolais should be served at 25 degrees centigrade.
Under pressure from my peers at work to get a push email device, I quickly rejected the Samsung Omnia and, less readily, the Nokia N96, so that left me with a technological fruit cocktail to contend with:Â Apple or Blackberry.
I’ve been a Nokia man since I switched from an ancient Ericsson in the early 1990s. I was an early adopter of mobile phones on account of working in a disaster planning role. Oh how we laughed in those early days as we ate in a curry house in Bingley enduring super slow service. I had an idea. I pulled out my brick shaped device, telephoned the restaurant and ordered the bill to much guffawing from other customers. Doesn’t sound so stupid nowadays but phones then were primitive, and I was the only person in the resto, possibly in the whole village, that had such a bulge in my pants.
I keep trying to review Rieslings for the next part of my wine education, but I think I may be addicted to Pinot Noir, because I keep regressing. Just one last biscuit before I put the tin away. One final mission of Grand Theft Auto before bed. One more email before I leave work.
This caught my eye whilst mooching around Tesco. Based on my last positive experience with Louis Max, and more importantly, being a northern bloke who likes a bargain, (Tesco had marked it down from eleven quid to £8.80), the bottle made a gazelle like leap from the shelf to my shopping basket.
My first sniff bought strong memories of coffee grounds to mind, with a small stack of damp chipboard and bowl of greengages (or maybe unripe plums).
It tasted of wild strawberries and chicory leaf. I love most Pinot Noir to be served at somewhere between 12 and 16° Celsius. It makes for a most refreshing drink, and this Santenay went excellently with a Sikh kebab from La La’s curry emporium in Batley.
Highly recommended, especially if you can still find it at the price.
It has taken me a bit longer than I expected to start my exploration and learning of the noble Riesling grape. You may remember my world tour of Pinot Noirs resulted in me comparing the grape to Brigitte Bardot: beguiling, sexy, temperamental, bonkers.
I have not yet drawn a metaphor for Riesling so I better get my tasting boots on and march over to Analogy Square to see whose flagpole is at full mast. This bottle came from Virgin Wines at the noble price of £9.99.
Pungent nose, zingy flavour but slightly flat aftertaste – like a Szechuan hot and sour soup. Not as fruity as some NZ Sauvignons but this Martinborough wine is appealing nonetheless. Slightly different style with a bit of steel and hints of Chablis in that sense. Palliser Estate Sauvignon Blanc 2007 used to be available from the Wine Society for £9.50 but a quick search of their website reveals rien. Perhaps it’s out of stock.
When I was a kid growing up in Cheadle Hulme, a post war suburb of Manchester, there were shops everywhere. Within just 10 minutes walk of a fair sized shopping centre in the village, was another conurbation of shops based around the Kenilworth pub. On one t-junction there was a chemist, a newsagent (RS McColl), a greengrocer, a post office, two bakers, two butchers (Breens’ and Pimlott’s), a toy shop (Playland), a Chinese takeaway, a Shell garage (gas station), a hardware shop, a small grocer and, rather bizarrely, a garden centre (Spreadboroughs – donkey’s years ahead of its time).
Thinking back, it’s amazing that we allowed Tesco and the other major supermarkets to put virtually all these businesses out of business.
Good evening credit crunchers, how are your bank shares doing? Yes I know, mine too. With the sole exception of HSBC. With a much higher than average capital ratio, HSBC shares have risen 4% this year, whilst other banks (e.g RBS, HBOS) have tanked to one fifth of their recent value, and my old mate, Mr Bradford is owned by the British Government whilst erstwhile Mr Bingley has emigrated to Santander in Spain. Luckily I sold B & B at about £2 while the credit crunch was a mere cream cracker. They traded at 20 pence on the day they were nationalised. I would have sold all my shares, but which bank could you trust your cash with?
It is not just banks, all capital expenditure has been frozen at a corporate and personal level. How many people do you know buying a new car at the moment? A new phone? A new TV? Heating oil? Food? Chateau Latour? Nope. The world is frozen with fear and we are riding an apocalyptic stallion of self fulfilling prophecy into a deep depression.
And if you want to dig yourself out of a depression, you will need cheap alcohol as your spade. You could do worse than trying to cheer yourself up with this New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, at £8.95 from the Wine Society, a mere fraction of the price of the Cloudy Bay you used to drink in better times.
Auntsfield Long Cow 2007 is pale, grassy and full of cats’ piss. (For the keen grammatinarianisticians amongst you, the pungency is such that I think there was more than one cat). The acidity, though, is good and there is plenty of white fruit.
For the few remaining bulls amongst you, if your bank shares are still heading south, (and you can no longer sell them short), why not take a long position on this cow?
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.
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.
There is a lot written about matching wine to food. There are some basic rules which I tend to follow and it’s never as simple as white with fish, red with meat. It’s more about trying to find a balance of complementary styles. For example, have you noticed that cheese is often served with sweet fruits like grapes? So, no big surprise that sweet wine goes excellently with most cheeses.
On the occasion of a barbie on the balcony, I was trying to balance simply barbecued sardines with dill and lemon, fresh spring lamb chops with rosemary, and a warm summer afternoon.
Stumble It!