Buying an iPhone is a bit like getting married to Pamela Anderson and then finding out she’s done a porno. Almost everything is exquisite, near perfect, round, supple and enticing. But you quickly start finding out that a few assumptions you made were wrong, and everyone knew but you.
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.
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’ve held my tongue for a while. I don’t want to sound like yet another whinger that told you so, but I was never in favour of Mark Hughes being appointed manager of Man City. I admit that I reneged on my promise to turn up at the first game of this season and shout the Sven mantra. I actually turned up at Eastlands yesterday to see Man City suffer a humiliating 2-1 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur, albeit after some questionable refereeing and grim Manchester weather.
But whilst luck and refereeing even out over a season, we have a number of more fundamental weaknesses. Dunne is looking disastrous, Vassell is just not in the same class as his team-mates, Zabaleta still has to convince me he is even close to Corluka who left for Spurs in August. Worryingly I hear rumours that Hughes’ intentions of splashing the Abu Dhabi cash in the January transfer window are targeted at a handful of his Blackburn ex-employees. The ones who helped him reach the astonishing heights of mid table obscurity, admittedly at low cost.
Sometimes, though, if you have the money, you need to aim a bit higher. I am not exactly rich so it was a stretch for me to fork out £21 to the Wine Society for this Kanzem Altenberg Alte Reben Riesling Spätlese, von Othegraven, 2007 from the Mosel. A mouthful in every sense…
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.
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?
I’m always on the lookout for a bargain but I have had my fingers burnt a few times when trying to shave a few pennies off my sparkling wine budget. The closest I have come to success is Freixenet Cava (although some maintain that this is only good for washing the dog). Freixenet retails at less than £6 at places like Costco and Tesco which I think is a bargain….until I spotted an Italian mare at less than a fiver on Tesco’s sparkling shelves!
……..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.
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.
Stumble It!