Confessions of a Wino

A mate, and former business client, used to take me to Rafa’s El Rincon in Manchester (I always paid).

When it came to whistle wetting tapas oil, Marqués de Riscal was our weapon of choice, partly because it was bloody good, partly because it was bloody and good, mostly because the bill payer knew it was bloody good value.

Taking good note of my cyber-mate, Rob‘s evaluation of the 2003 Rioja vintage, I popped into Sainsbury’s in Manchester and after a bit of mooching, selected a 2003 Marqués de Riscal Reserva at only £9.99, apparently £3 off (but I remember Rafa selling this stuff for less than 20 quid – not much of a mark-up!)

I wonder if the reduction is because most of Sainsbury’s customers had read Rob’s comments about 2003 and have already moved on to looking for the reputationally better 2004 and 2005 vintages.

I was not put off.  The wine, to me was top notch, tasting mostly of blackberry and apple crumble with cream and vanilla pods.  I always look out for Riscal in Spanish restaurants in Manchester, Spain and other places.

What’s in a name?  Or the way it is pronounced?  Or the way it is presented?  Hyacinth Bucket was famous for re-packaging her married name as “Bouquet”.  Snob residents of Burnage in Manchester (pronounced burnidge since 1478) are heard to mutter that they come from Burnaaaarj (as the French would pronounce it).

Long ago, the Cockburn family must have realised that their own name needed a bit of thought.  Who is going to buy a bottle of port from a company that sounds like a naked barbecue incident?  And so they became Coeburn by pronunciation.

193 years later, and change is on the agenda again, as Cockburn’s have decided to repackage port to make it more trendy, more appealing to the contemporary drinker, more relevant to the modern dinner table, and perhaps more attractive to the Buckets of the world.

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We met Jeffo and (pregnant) Michele in Didsbury (Manchester) for Sunday lunch.  Jeffo knows these parts well and had tasted his “best lamb ever” at a place on Burton Road – Rhubarb.

It was small and well packed with tables, but pretty full of happy looking customers.  A bistro type atmosphere but with the warming sense that you are visiting old friends.

We rejected the Sunday lunch special menu in favour of the à la carte.  We were only there for one dish, “is the rump of spring lamb on?” Jeff enquired and was advised that we could order anything from the menu.  So we ordered lamb all round.

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If a bottle of wine costs more than £20 then I take it seriously.  I am tight as a gnat’s chuff after all, being from the north of England.  My recent visit to Nicolas on Berwick Street (in the grim South of England) resulted in £23.50 being added to my overdraft and the harsher penalty of ridicule from some readers.  The stakes placed on this St Julien are high.

Since I discovered Nicolas in London, I’ve spotted new branches appearing more frequently than Caffé Nero coffee shops.  It’s like buying a Ford Mondeo then realising that everyone else on the road also owns one, and most chose the same colour as you.  Reading around, it seems that the famed wine “corner shop”, revered by French drinkers possibly since Napoleon was in shorts, bought venerable British institution, Oddbins and had started converting stores to the French brand in large number.

The restructure brought about by the new owners of Oddbins was not without controversy.  The Nicolas brand was not so popular in the UK.  Accused of being bland, arrogant, and too Franco-centric it was the very cliché of the British view of les bleus.

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It’s always a bit risky reviewing a wine received as a present.  This bottle by Maison Louis Max came from my good mate Tony Atkinson and I know he got it from a specialist wine retailer in Liverpool.  It’s really tough to find online and according the website has a select and very limited (and no doubt highly discerning) customer base.

I love the slightly irreverent labels.  Much more lively than the sombre output of the average French label draughtsman.

I also loved the wine although it would be unfair to call it irreverent.  A herby nose of crushed basil, red berry jam and compost is fairly typical Pinot Noir.  The taste is like strawberry jam with tarragon.  Really delicious cutting a dapper line between refreshing and serious.

Top slurp – I’ll keep an eye out for more by Louis Max.

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.

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There was quite a reaction to my criticism of Costco recently.

Whilst I stand by my slight lack of confidence in Costco’s wine buyers, this does not stop me buying a few bottles every now and again, especially when I see something interesting.  This Oregon Pinot Noir, at £9.39, stared at me longingly, “I’m only a tenner” it whispered flirtatiously.  “You look bloody lovely!” I replied a decent number of decibels to the wrong side of audibility.  But a few queer glances from bemused fat folk do not deter me.  I picked the bottle up and took it home, reasoning that a US owned store ought to know a bit about US wine.

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I’ve been on a crusade recently, to try to persuade the public that white wine is almost always served too cold, whilst red wine is almost always too warm.  I have appealed to restaurateurs and bar owners to join my Wine At Right Temperature (WART) campaign, but every single one has responded that they are merely reflecting public demand and, in any case, displaying my helpful acronym in the window of their premises is hardly likely to invite custom.

This is a bit like saying that the media is a reflection of society, when most sane people admit that it plays a leading role in many circumstances, and as a minimum is quick to jump on any bandwagon as soon as it looks like there is any public support.  Take the current credit crunch.  The media, including respected sources like the BBC, are constantly talking the economy into a recession.  Soon enough, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

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On a weekend when Obama is charming Europe and Gordon Brown is being pummelled on the ropes of a certain Glasgow by-election, my thoughts have turned to politics.

Most people’s political maturity curve starts as a radical teenager, transcends into a left wing twentysomething and then slowly but surely keeps bending to the right.  Money and the confidence of age surely plays a part.  So why do I seem to be moving in the opposite direction?

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My world tour of Pinot Noirs was starting to look a bit like the baseball world series in reverse.  In other words I had covered almost every territory except the US.  I even likened Pinot Noir to a French actress (Brigitte Bardot – sexy, flirtatious, but unreliable, and a little bonkers) and insulted American actress, Barbra Streisand who I compared to a Chenin Blanc hmmmm….

As I stand here touching my toes, humbly awaiting transatlantic cyber-flagellation, I offer, in my defence, a review of a PN from about the most famous of US sources – Oregon.

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