Confessions of a Wino

If you want to enter a declining market and make a meaningful dent then you better innovate.  Naked Wines is doing just that and gaining publicity by the jeroboam.

Rowan Gormley’s latest stunt was to hold a “crowd taste off” with AU$100,000 of Naked Wines purchase orders available to the winning wine makers.

The tasters were the 50 most active customers of Naked (fully clothed, I believe).  The winemakers were selected by The Government of South Australia and the Australian Trade Commission.  After rounds of tasting and price estimating, the final coup de théâtre was the winemakers themselves in a reverse auction to adjust their prices to see how much of the $100k they could take in orders.

I managed to get my paws on three of the winners that will be going on sale via the Naked Wines website in the next few weeks:

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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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As I stare at the bottle and write this, I have no idea how much the wine costs, nor how well reputed it is.  I have not read the label on the back and I have no record where I got it from (presumably a present then).

It is always interesting to attempt to not be swayed by a label, but given a Château Lafite 1787 and an Echo Falls Merlot in each other’s bottles would I notice?  I might rate the sickly lifestyle brand, with almost certainly the British & Commonwealth record for slowest and most annoying website ever, the best wine.  Maybe I am a Label Mabel.  A brand junkie.  Or just a marketing and packaging enthusiast?

My prejudices say this wine is cheap.  The colour is dark and much too purple.  The taste is jammy.  Specifically blackcurrant with a wipe of strawberry.  There is also something tangy and sharp.  But actually I quite like it.  At 13.5% not as blockbusting super-jammo as I feared.  Yes, quite tasty.  I think it would compare favourably to a £7.50 Chilean Cabernet.

So how much is it then?  Off to Google.  Tesco.com have it for £6.17 a bottle (in cases of 6).  That sounds fair.  Bit better than a cheapy, not in the same class as a 10 quider but drinkable with the right food – in this case Marmite on white toast is the perfect match.

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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I have long argued that a rising tide floats all boats, but I forgot about the leaky ones which sink paying no regard to ebb or flow.

2005 was the tsunami of tidal years in Bordeaux and almost every wine I have tasted from that year has been superb.  So I was looking forward to receiving a case of Côtes de Bordeaux from the Wine Society which promised a tour of some less well known communes.

My first sample, Château Godard Bellevue 2005 Côtes de Francs, stood up to the “unknown” moniker.

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Remembrance Sunday (and Tuesday) saw me observing a total of five minutes of silence – that’s a miracle I hear you cry!  The first two at the anointed hour of 11a.m. Sunday, somewhat bizarrely, in a queue at our local Tesco store, the third at the Man City vs Spurs game, and the fourth and fifth driving across the Pennines on Tuesday morning listening to the Ken Bruce Show.

It’s amazing how time flies.  I remember about 1976 when I first commemorated the war dead.  I never imagined I would still be here 32 years later.

Château Soutard has a recommended drink by date of 2040.  I am certainly not going to wait and see if I live another 32 years to try the first bottle of the case I bought en-primeur from somewhere at about £21 per bottle.  St Emilion wines being mostly Merlot (in this case 70%) compared to the rougher, and tougher when young, Cabernet Sauvignon, are generally more approachable in youth so I was determined not to die before I sampled the Soutard.

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Château Durfort-Vivens Margaux 2003, a deuxième cru from Lucien Lurton who also owns another 2nd growth Margaux property, Château Brane-Cantenac,  82.3784% Cabernet Sauvignon with 9.632% Cabernet Franc and the remainder Merlot.  20 months in oak.

If you want to read stuff like this go somewhere serious like www.decanter.com.  If facts bore you and you prefer the experience of wine, then why not join me having fun as I learn.

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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?

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What happened to global warming?  I write this on Sunday morning in Manchester, and it’s another rainy July day.  We’ve just had the coldest June since 1999, but we are still smiling.  Dunkirk spirit eh?

Although it is cold and wet, I sense that we have had much less rain than last year’s “summer”, the one that kept every reservoir in Britain at mid winter levels, and hosepipe bans a fond memory of childhood days.

We Brits are famous for talking about the weather too much, but our islands are prone to such regular and rapid changes, that it actually makes interesting conversation.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
The sun has got his hat on, shout hip, hip, hooray!

Literary references all, proving my case that weather is interesting because of its variety and inherently unexpected nature.  In that sense perhaps it is a lot like wine, another subject I talk about too much.

I was so impressed by Landelia Malbec that it is still recommended on my favourites page.  Recently, I went back to the Virgin website to top up my stocks but the cupboard was bare.  However, my search threw up another wine by Landelia, this one a Cab Sauv from 2005.

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Another weekend in London and another opportunity to knock off a “trophy” restaurant – this one from the effing Gordon Ramsay stable.  If you swear by food as much as I do, then you start to appreciate that London is really the place in the UK to do fine dining.  There simply isn’t the demand for it in Manchester, for example.  Not one Michelin star in the city!  Sure, there are plenty of good eateries, but the overall experience is just better in London, and surprisingly, not always that much more expensive.

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