Thanks!

Many thanks to anyone who voted for me in the imbibe taste sommelier of the year awards, and thanks to anyone who voted for anyone else too! Im chuffed to bits that I was runner up to Andrea Briccarello from London (Bentleys Oyster Bar?) alongside Joris Beijn from 1901 at Andaz.

Something for the weekend?

Ive started a new initiative in an effort to move some top-end burgundies. Only available on a friday and saturday night, we have two burgundies on offer at cost price plus vat. Yes we are giving away (virtually giving away) Grand Cru burgundy. (The figure is rounded up to the nearest pound, so quite literaly we are making pennies on some of these wines.)

This week we have a Batard-Montrachet from Blain Gagnard, 1999 at £60 and a Drouhin-Laroze Bonnes Mares 1997 also at £60. I sold two bottles of the latter tonight and I must say that the table got a steal of a deal. The wine had a rich feral character with violets, dark earth and red berries on the nose, with a rich underpinning of medium soft tannins. The length was quite astounding, with a rich warming, almost spicy finish to the wine. What a great value wine at £60 , its normally on the list at over £100.

I also sold three bottles of Drouhin-Laroze Chambertin Clos de Beze 1997 at considerably lower selling price than listed. This was a lot more elegant and refined than the Bonnes Mares, less animalistic, more softer red fruit flavours with less violet aromas and perhaps a touch of rosewater about the finish. The tannins were much softer than the BM as well, lighter on the palate, with quite a long finish, but perhaps a touch drier and cleaner.

So the next few months its open season on Grand Cru burgundy, come along, see what there is and make me an offer. If its sensible then you might just get yourself a great value burgundy with your meal!

Me Old Mucca!

This morning I got a strange letter from one of our suppliers informing me that our trade rep - Noel was leaving the company effective tomorrow. It all seemed a bit strangely worded and it made we wonder a bit what was happening. Turns out hes being made redundant. I'll miss Noel, and wish him every success in whatever he turns his hand to when the festival season is over. I dont doubt that I will see him again in whatever capacity he ends up, and Im sure we will keep in touch through facebook!!

The strange thing about the whole affair is the way it seems to have been done. The company in question seems to be surviving the current financial state of affairs reasonable well. They have quite a strong portfolio of popular wines at the right price points. They have even managed to poach a MW from another company to join their board and buying team. So why have they laid off their sales team for the north of england. They dont have anyone covering from Scotland down to London. Now while I can accept that they probably dont have as much business in this part of the country as they do in London, surely the last thing you ought to do in a recession is lay off the folks who are knocking on doors drumming up your business. While times are hard, we may not be buying as much, but we are careful in what we buy. Getting a call from these guys alerting us to bin-ends, good deals on lower priced wines and highlighting some great deals that can be had will endear them to us more. Then when the good times come back, we will give our loyalty more so to those who kept in touch. We repay the faith. By getting rid of these guys, you risk losing the business through a lack of attention.

Well I understand from Noel that he plans to visit Peru and visit Macchu Picchu and follow the inca trail. Good luck buddy and keep in touch.

Support your sommelier.

Imbibe magazine, the trade arm of Square Meal magazine, are holding a competition to recognise the talents of the sommeliers in this country. I ask you to do your bit to help support our role and vote for your favourite sommelier. It doesnt have to be me, although if you would like to use one of your votes for me that would be gratefully recieved!! Ive used mine to recognise some of the UK finest sommeliers - Laura Rhys- winner of this years Academy of Food and Wine Service Sommelier of the Year competition, Franck Gerome of Sharrow Bay - a jolly decent guy and very modest and my old pal Remi Fischer from Gleneagles. I urge you to use your three votes and promote the wealth of talent that is out there, encourage them and make them feel appreciated.

Link is https://squaremeal.wufoo.com/forms/taste-sommelier-award-sponsored-by-imbibe/

Thanks

Dalmore 40 year old whisky

I was sat in the office earlier on, working on the wines for New Years Eve, when our F&B director asked me to join him in the drawing room. He was there meeting with a rep from Whyte & Mackay who was introducing a range of malts to him from Isle of Jura and Dalmore. Now Dalmore is a whisky that I havent really seen much of, except for a really rare and exclusive bottle of 50 year old that we had when I was at Gleneagles. A ludicrously expensive cut glass decanter with an eyewatering price (off the top of my head I think it was over £300 a glass). So it was interesting to see the range and have the opportunity to taste a few of them. The one that stood out was a 40 year old Dalmore. The sample was quite dark in colour, almost mahogany in tint with a most amazing nose of spicy chocolate. It reminded me of the hot chocolate that they make in Peru from Maya Gold chocolate bars - dark cocao, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, rich warming spices. The strange thing about the whisky was it was a cask strength one, coming in at a surprising 40%abv. The whisky was as smooth as a smooth thing on the palate, lingering spicy tones on the finish and the most amazing length. It kind of spoilt the rest of the tasting, because the flavours seemed to linger, even after trying three or four of the others.
Im not really a whisky drinker, in fact Im not a whisky drinker at all, but truthfully, I wouldnt be upset if someone gave me a glass of this.

The presentation of the whisky is quite superb, the bottle is quite plain and understated, with a metallic stags head emblem attached to it, and a very discreet label indicating what it is. It comes in a fabulously decadent leather trimmed box, with the usual tasting notes etc. By now you can probably imagine that the price is going to be somewhat scary. You would be right, it goes for over a £1000. So I wont be buying one for myself, but Id still like to list it.

Crappy Websites

What is it with crappy websites for wines/wineries? As a sommelier I live for information - I want to know how the wine was made, was it steel fermented or barrel fermented, cultured yeasts or natural, has malo-lactic fermentation taken place or not, new oak or old oak, the list of questions goes on and on. Yet finding this information from websites is incredibly difficult. Ive just spent the last ten minutes waiting on a winery website loading an excruciatingly slow flash presentation that presented me with no option whatsoever to bypass it. And the end result after waiting so long, was that Im still no more knowledgable about the wine than I was before. I gave up trying to navigate the ridiculous menu that was more about being cutting edge and less about providing me with what I wanted - ie info.
Argghhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


To any wineries/pr people etc who might still read this, or may well come across it, here are a few suggestions to keep you on the right path.
1) make your webiste easy to navigate. Sounds simple, but so many seem to get it wrong. Going back to a home page is one thing that is most often negected.
2) Flash is a pain in the arse to navigate, slow to load (Im working here on a dedicated high-speed networked system and its still dead slow, feel sorry for the poor suckers on crappy broadband packages!)
3) Provide pdf files of information on your wines, sommeliers love this!!!!!!
4) Dont try too hard to be the next Bonny Doon website - be creative but remember why people are visiting the site - to find out more about your wines.
5) WTF is up with the bullshit about having to be 18/21 to access the website??? You hosting hard-core pron or something? Since when did licenscing laws prevent access to information about alcohol? I dont get id'd when I buy a copy of Robert Parkers wine guide or the latest Decanter magazine. You can encourage responsable drinking by being more open about alcohol, teaching people about what it is, how it affects your body/behaviour etc, not hiding behind some ridiculous restrictive access.

Champagne

Champagne is the one drink that seems to signify celebration, it makes most of its appearances at happy moments in our lives, engagements, weddings, birthdays, promotions, new jobs, new houses, lottery wins, the list is almost endless. And despite the best efforts of the champagne houses to convince us that champagne is a versatile wine that be served throughout a meal, it remains almost exclusively an aperitif, drunk before a meal.


Of course now that we seem to be stuck at the beginning of what could turn out to be a major financial econopocalypse there are fewer and fewer reasons to celebrate. The major champagne houses are starting to shit themselves, their caves sit full of wine, the orders from the UK have almost halved, and the next "batch" of NV is ready to be bottled. As last years vintage is ready to go to bottle, the cellarmasters are wondering where it will go, with their cellars backlogged with previous vintages no-one wants. Apparently one major house has decided to put the whole of the 2008 vintage into NV as they are sitting on a backlog of four vintages they cant sell. When you consider that by law, champagne must mature in the bottle for a period of 36 months, they are working on wines that will appear on the market in 2012.


Champagne is quite interesting in that they have the almost unique safety net of being allowed to blend the wines of multiple vintages together to create NV champagne. So in years when the weather conditions provide a challenging vintage they can blend away any challenges with reserve wines from other vintages to create a homogenised wine. Each house has its own style that defines it and for many people they will quite happy provide a loyal following. I personally prefer the more Pinot orientated styles of champagne - Pol Roger, Perrier-Jouet, Bolly and Im a sucker for a grower champagne too - Aubry, Egly-Ouriet and Jacquesson being amongst my absolute favourites. For NV I think one of the best is the Perrier-Jouet Brut, and I was fortunate enough to visit the house earlier this year and had an amazing vertical tasting of the Belle Epoque with the winemaker Herve Deschampes.


While at Perrier-Jouet we had quite an interesting discussion over dinner one night with Pierre-Aymeric du Cray, who holds the wonderful title of Marketing director for Pernod-Ricard/Perrier-Jouet. We were discussing the challenges of selling Vintage champagne over NV and what a customers perception of the differences were. From my own experiences, we find it quite difficult to sell vintage champagne unless it is a prestige cuvee - by which I would define a pc as Dom Perignon, Cristal, Belle Epoque, Krug, Comte de Champagne, Cuvee Louise etc. I know from speaking to my peers and colleagues in the industry that I am not alone in this. Many of them struggle to sell a vintage champagne outside of the top cuvees. Im not sure, but I am starting to believe it is down to the relative inconsistancy of the vintage compared to the individual house style. One bottle of PJ Grand Brut is pretty much the same as any other bottle of PJGB but there is a world of difference between a bottle of PJ 96 and 98. I dont think that your average customer can get their heads round that. But maybe im wrong, and its purely a price driven issue. It was an interesting discussion, alas one that alcohol and time have erased most of the salient points from my memory.

Recently I began to think about it again though. I must try and conduct some research amongst our customers and see what they come up with. Who knows maybe it could become the focus of my dissertation one day should I ever decide to go for the WSET diploma.

Champy, Beaune 1er Cru "les Greves" 1972

By all accounts this wine should be bolloxed. I mean it is 37 years old, only a year younger than I am. Champy pere & cie are fairly consistent and reliable producers, but by no means at the top of the league. So it is fair to say that it kind of took us a bit by surprise to find out that the wine is simply stunning just now. And not just one random bottle. Weve knocked out over a dozen of these bad boys in the last three months, and we have yet to come across a stinker. The corks are really soft and crumbly, so it aint going to cellar for a great deal longer. Without a butlers thief, they are real bastards to remove from the bottle. Once pulled the wine is a very pale, almost rose hue with a rusty brown colour to the rim. The nose has a faint aroma of soft red fruit, mainly strawberries with some redcurrant too. But surprisingly the aromas grow, and develop strength over a period of minutes in the glass. There is a touch of brambly vegetation to the nose and a hint of blackcurrant leaf. With game birds, especially squab, its quite a lovely combination. Only 40 more bottles to shift now!!

This month I am loving....

bin ends. We are in the process of streamlining the stock and using up all the odds and sods downstairs. In part it has enabled me to bring in my carafe idea, albeit on a smaller scale. Ive incorporated a page into the wine-list with a suggestion to complement the tasting menu by the 250ml carafe. Luckily, cheffie is playing along so far and has been designing a menu which is very conducive to me removing a lot of stock from the cellar. Unluckily, we are also running a special invitation menu at £45 for three course including coffee and petit fours, and bugger me if it isnt filling the restaurant through the week. The end result is that we are doing an average of 25 covers a night tuesday to thursday (full as usual friday and saturday) but everyone is taking the £45 menu. Its great to get all these bums on seats, especially during a recession, and even better is that is seems to be new faces for us. Hopefully we can convert some of them to new customers.

Hallmark Holidays

Tomorrow marks the motherlode of Hallmark Holidays, St Valentines Day. My loathing of HH's is, I would think fairly evident. Quite hypocritical, Im sure you might think, given that I work somewhere that will benefit considerably from the "festivities" tomorrow. But there is a reason that I hate them, passionately. For tomorrow night (and indeed tonight) we will generally be full of people that wouldnt normally dine here. Normally that would be a good thing, after all it is exposing the restaurant to the potential customer of the future. But Hallmark Holidays bring a different sort of person out into restaurants. Over the last few days the phones have been ringing frantically with all sorts of people DESPERATE to secure a table tomorrow night. In some cases so desperate that they are willing to resort to threats, begging and all kinds of measures in order to get what they want (except of course the obvious one of being organised enough to get a table booked more than the day before!). I find it a sad reflection on the state of modern humanity that people rarely resort to niceness. If they cant get what they want they start namedropping (I know xx or Im best friends with Gerald - yes right!), or they threaten to go over your head ( I want to speak to the manager/owner/managing director/whatever).

As a restaurant, we love Hallmark Holidays because they give us a guaranteed fill. We are charging £180 per person for tomorrow night for a five course set menu with wines to complement, a red rose and small gift from Space NK for the lady. £360 per table. In a recession!! And yes we are full, with five relays. But it is fair to say that we wont see many of those faces back in the restaurant again until the next HH - Mothers Day. Happy Valentines!!

Lealtanza Rioja Reserva Dali Label 2004

Many years ago I went through a phase of being really into art - impressionist (mostly monet), pop-art (lichtenstein and warhol) and of course the surrealist movement spearheaded by Dali. I kind of got into Dali by way of rave flyers, promotional leaflets for all night dance events, for which Dali was ideal material. Works like the persistance of memory and the great masturbator were frequently used for flyers due to their striking imagery and allusions to the underlying drug culture of the day. So when I was recently shown a wine labelled in homage to Dali I was quite interested.

Bodegas Altanza was one of the wineries visited on my recent visit to Rioja with Wines of Spain. It was the last of the wineries we were visiting and we werent sure what to expect really. We had seen the full spectrum of styles from the old school style of Remelluri, to the ultra-modern Baigorri and somewhere in the middle of those two extremes sat Altanza. The winery itself was pretty state of the art, lots of polished steel, temperature controlled tanks, a huge, clean barrel hall with loads of french oak barrels (including a few from Demptos!), with the odd transylvanian, russian and american oak barrels kicking around too, a throwback from when they experimented with different oaks to see what impact it would have on the wines. But when you taste their wines, there is a sense of tradition about them, they seem to sit in the middle of the two "camps" - fresh and fruity characters but structured and complex, with well integrated oak flavours and a touch of the raw meaty essense that I tend to find in old school rioja.

Twice now, Altanza has produced a wine of such complexity, intensity and sheer character, that they have felt it deserved a special treatment. So they decided to honour the great spanish artists, the first to be honoured was Miro, in 2001 followed three years later by Dali. The Miro was bottled in a dense, incredably heavy burgundy bottle, Dali is in a monsterously heavy bordeaux bottle. It is sold in packs of three, each bottle adorned with a label depicting one of Dali's lesser known works (the sheer cost of licensing the images from the Dali estate precludes using the more famous images, besides which the estate controls which images they are allowed to choose from). It would be fair to say that having tasted the wine, if it was given to me blind and I was asked to pair it with an artist, then I dont doubt that Dali would be my first choice. It is an intense experience, rich concentrated flavours seem to jumble across your palate - dark red soft fruits mixed with a touch of spice, vanilla and other oaky influenced flavours all with a definate savoury edge to them. The wine stays with you, working away at your brain, continually assaulting your tastebuds with flavour long after you have put the glass down. Its intense, much in the same was as standing underneath Dali's Christ of St John on the Cross, currently residing at the Kelvingrove museum in Glasgow. Even as an athiest, the immenseness of the canvas (roughly a metre wide by two metres tall) and the perspective of the painting all seem to prey on you long after you have moved on to the next piece. It is easy to see why Dali was chosen for this wine.

Rioja - Palacios, Remelluri and de la Marquesa

I was fortunate enough to be taken to Rioja at the beginning of the week for a brief visit. Organised by Wines of Spain and the Consejo Regulador DOCa Rioja a small group of sommeliers and wine buyers from the UK and one from Sweden were shown around six bodegas across Rioja.

I wasnt sure what to expect at first, when I saw the itinerary for the trip. I decided to not research the wineries in order to go with an open mind to them and not form any pre-judgements. Im glad that I did, for they each had something unique to offer, whether it be in their physical wineries and their methodology, or in their wines that we tasted, and after visiting six different bodegas and tasting something like 50 wines over the two days, its fair to say that its opened my eyes to Rioja as a wine and a region.

We started off with Bodegas Palacios in Laguardia. After being shown around the winery and its cellars, we were given a tasting of eight wines, all quite good, if rather average. The whites were certainly fresh and vibrant, and the reds all starting off with a slightly milky aroma - its the lactic acid our host proudly proclaimed, typical of tempranillo. From that we can deduce that their wines all undergo malo-lactic fermentation in the barrels. Off the six wineries we visited this was possibly the least inspiring, but it was interesting to see their perspective on the methods of production and it certainly is a winery with a long history.

From their we headed up to Labastida up in the Cantabria hills to visit Granja Nuestra Senora de Remelluri. This was certainly the most beautiful of the bodegas we visited.

Im a big fan of the white that they make, an amazing blend of about nine varieties - Garnacha Blanca, Malvasia, Moscatel, Marsanne, Rousanne, Viognier, Chardonnay and Viognier and finally Sauvignon. So I was really looking forward to this, and the good news was the sun was out, we were having lunch here and the reds were every bit as good as the white. They make four wines - the Blanco, a Reserva, a Gran Reserva and a Reserva Especial - the Coleccion Jaime Rodriguez, named in honour of the owner. All were astoundingly good, but for me the two standout wines were the blanco and the gran reserva. The gran reserva is a blend of 85% Tempranillo, 12% Garnacha and 3% Graciano, richly spiced and concentrated it seemed to last forever on the palate, its flavour greatly complementing the lamb chops grilled over a flame from vine trimmings. After a delicious lunch served in the winery, we took a stroll around the vineyards in the late summer sun, down to an ancient cemetary carved out of stone in the earlier life of the farm as part of an old monastery, the remains of which survive at the top of the mountain looming over us. Looking at the carved shapes in the stone, we got to thinking either the indiginous peoples were very small or the infant mortality rate was exceptionally high. They were tiny.

We left Remelluri as a tv crew was setting up to film a celebrity chefs program as he strolled through the vineyards of Remelluri discussing ingredients and picking fruit. Our destination was the Bodegas de la MarquesA in Villabuena. This was a smaller, family run bodegas trading under the name of Valserrano in the UK. Now in the hands of two brothers, Pablo and Jaime de Simon, one the oenologist and the other in charge of marketing/sales. The winery was probably the smallest of the six that we visited, but had one of the largest ranges of wines to offer. Jaime, the oenologist, proudly makes use of many of the traditional varieties and as such they offer a range of single varietal wines - mazuelo and graciano which were both amazingly different from what one would expect. The Mazuelo had a dark inky colour with a strong violet character on the nose. There was a licorice root element to the finish and a rounded warm spicy end note. With a year in a mixture of mainly french oak, the wine has a well balanced oak influence - vanillin, cedarwood and nutmeg like flavours, and well drawn out silky smooth tannins.

The Graciano by comparison had a much more herbaceous character with dark black tea and green leafy aromas, a touch of roasted nuts and defined dark soft fruit flavours. The tannins seemed bolder than the mazuelo, a little harsher on the gums, but the length was longer, more intense and a touch smoky on the finish.

Then it was time to leave and move on to our next winery. This was such a cool winery I want to give it a seperate post.

Expectations.

I got to thinking about some wines last night, wines that had exceeded my expectations and consequently became more prominant in my recommendations, and wines that had failed to meet my expectations and therefore been a disappointment. There have been all too many of the later over the years - one of the most prominant being Krug's Clos de Mesnil when I first tried it several years ago for a Krug Dinner that we hosted. It had been so exhalted and placed on such a big pedestal, that when I tried it, angels failed to sing praises on my tastebuds and I felt let down, and disappointed. I guess I was a bit niave about it too, because at the time I wasnt conscious of its cost. When I found out how exhorbitantly expensive it was that only added to the sense of disappointment. Anyway several years have passed and having recently had the chance to taste the new vintage of Clos de Mesnil Im glad to say that my opinion has been slightly revised.
Which kinds of leads to the point of this posting.
Last night we were host to the Champagne Academy's Northern Dinner. The last time we hosted the dinner was in 2005, and much has changed in the meantime. The Westminster suite has had a complete refurbishment, Ross has been through the Academy's program and is now an Old Boy, and weve all grown a few years older, a few inches wider and experienced many hundreds of wines in the time that passed. This years dinner was presided over by Krug - the current presidential house, with Lanson the incoming (and hence Vice-presidential) house and Veuve the departing (and also Vice-presidential) house. At one time they all fell under the LVMH stable, (for the four months that it took LVMH to strip Lanson of its premium vineyards before being sold to the Mora family.)but now only Krug and Veuve are stable mates, Lanson being a family owned business. And it is here that the expectations come into play, but before that I guess I ought to divulge the wines that we served.
The starter wine was Lansons Noble Cuvee Blanc de Blancs 1998. My expectation of this wine was quite low, because, well, it was Lanson. Thankfully, for me anyway, it exceded that expectation and was actually pretty good. Considering its youth it was pretty damned good, the acidity levels were high enough to suit the dish it was paired with (a crab meat press with cucumber jelly and caviar dentelle).
For the intermediate course we poured Krug Grande Cuvee. There were a lot of folks disappointed with this wine. I think it was because their expectations are higher than the wine could deliver. Krug is a league apart from most other champagnes - not only in price, but in every little thing that they do. They ferment the wines in french oak barrels. They vinify the parcels of wines individually. They mature the wines for six years on the lees (the mandated minimum is three years. Many houses do not mature beyond that minimum). This gives the wines an incredible richness of flavour, depth of character and a whopping price tag. But I guess it also sets them up to be knocked down.
The main course was paired with an Argentine Malbec from Terrazas de los Andes - LVMH's pet winery in South America.
The Cheese course was paired with a Veuve Clicquot La Grand Dame 1998. This was a bit of a disappointment for me. It didnt distinguish itself enough apart from Yellow Label to justify the price difference. I reckon it was too young, personally, Im assured that this wine comes into its element after about 10 years of additional ageing, so I would expect it to be reaching its peak from about 2015. But a few people raved about it, so it just goes to show its all horses for courses.
The meal concluded with the Krug Rose. I have mixed feelings about this wine. Having first tasted it when we served the Champagne Academy menu tasting back in July, I was impressed but un-enamoured of it. Then in August I had the chance to visit Krug and got to sample the rose with a dessert at lunch in the middle of the Clos de Mesnil Vineyard. The wine was divine, from the amazingly oxidized looking copper brown colour of the wine, to the rich densely flavoured nose with soft red fruit, floral tones and a touch of membrillo jelly, this was one serious, serious rose. We discovered from our hostess, that the bottle we were being served was probably in excess of 12 years old. So having spend 6 years maturing on the lees before it was disgorged and labeled, it then spent another six in the cellars of Krug before being served to us with lunch. I was hooked. I became determined to procure a few bottles and lavishly lay them down with strict instructions not to open until 2014! And then reality came home to roost, when I realised that Krug Rose isnt cheap. Now I realise that there are cost implications with Rose - there is a finite amount of red wine available to blend with the white to create the rose style of wines favoured in champagne. This scarcity often means that Rose champagnes cost a fair bit more than their white counterparts. But Krug Rose is extortionately expensive. Eyewateringly expensive. Way more expensive than DP Rose, and thats a rip to start with!! So, barring a lottery win, it aint going to happen. And that is why I think most people felt that the Krug Rose was a let down for them. Yes it was good, and yes it paired well with the dessert - an autumn carpaccio of orchard fruits with blackberry fool and coconut macaroon. But is it good value? I dont think so.
So our expectations obviously shape the way we percieve a wine. For me thats quite important. I sell wines by creating a link between the wine and the food. I make them more attractive to people by personalising them, creating something that the customer can relate to, giving them some little nugget of information that identifies that wine is some small way to something they can understand. And in doing so, I will often, perhaps unwittingly, raise their expections of the wines. Which means that if I get it wrong, the effect can be far more disasterous than it needs to be.

So much happening.

Ive been neglecting my blog of late. There are a few reasons for this, some are personal, but the main reasons are a lack of inspiration, a lack of opportunity to some extent, but primarily I havent felt the need to vent as much, and that was one of the primary reasons I started the blog. It was a cheap alternative to psychotherapy.
I plan to try and do a lot more on the blog now. Not because i need to vent again, but I want to try and prepare an "escape plan". Much as i still love my job, Im slowly coming to a realisation that I dont want to do this for the next ten years or so of my life. I figure that I want to spend no more than three more years on the floor, and if my wife had her way it would be about three more months! But I have targets that I want to achieve before I can move forward to different pastures. I would seriously like to achieve the next step on the Court of Master Sommeliers program which would be to pass my advanced course. I would like to build on this blog, and maybe take the writing to another level, perhaps get some freelance articles done. After seeing this years winners for the AA winelist awards, I want to win that. Ive got the Hotel Cateys awards dinner coming up next month, and Ive been shortlisted again for the Food and Beverage Service award (fingers crossed!!). Then in January the Michelin Guide is released and we are all hoping that we will find ourselves promoted to Two michelin stars. God knows cheffie deserves it, the menu is as good as it has ever been, and I think the whole front of house team has put every effort in to ensure that we deliver the best possible experience to all our diners. So much happening, and I want to try and keep on top of it all and continue to grow in my knowledge and experiences.

Planeta Cometa 2007

Last night was the second gourmet evening in the newly re-opened Simon Radley at the Chester Grosvenor (henceforth known as Radder's).We were showing the wines of Planeta, based in Menfi in Sicily. Unfortunately we couldnt get any of the Planeta's over, so Stephen, our account manager from Enotria played host for the evening. The evening was a great success, the guests were very happy with the food, the service and of course the wonderful wines. For me the highlight was the Cometa.
The Cometa is a 100% Fiano, a grape normally native to Campania on the mainland of Italy, but Planeta have taken it to their hearts and have produced this wonderfully aromatic - citrus and cream - almost fresh lemon curd, crisp wine that packs a punch of flavours including a herbal/floral finish that puts me in mind of a herbal tissane. This proved to be one of the more popular wines last night, but that was before people found out about the price. Its bloody expensive!! Id love to get some more in, but I doubt it would sell very well. Shame though cause it was a bloody good wine.

Andrew Will - Two Blondes Vineyard Blend, Yakima Valley, Washington 2005

Ive been on the Andrew Will mailing list for a number of years, and despite never being able to order anything from it, it is a useful source of information about the region and vintage. In fact for the last three years or so, Ive been desperate to order something from it, but have had neither the money nor the American address to get it sent to. But that shouldnt have stopped me really, because for a number of years, Morris and Verdun have had a small selection of the wines on offer in the UK. And again lack of fiscal resources has stopped me. So earlier this year when I was trying to find a theme for a gourmet dinner to replace a rejected idea, I decided to try and put on a Pacific Northwest dinner. After all it is an area that I have a considerable interest in, it is also an area that you dont see very often coming up on wine-lists in this country, for reasons of which I would discover as I tried to source the wines for the dinner. I was pleasantly surprised when the boss said yes, and lo and behold we were doing a Pac-NW dinner.

Now when we plan these dinners I have a spreadsheet where I plot out the wines that I would like to show, and cost them all out, breaking it down into the usual consumption etc, finally arriving at a cost per person for the wines. From this we can calculate our selling price for the dinners by adding on how much the menu would be (£60) then working on a reduced margin we multiply out the cost giving us a selling price. This is where we hit our first hurdle. Browsing through my supplier catalogues it became evident that there were few Pac-NW wines available in the UK, and those that are are expensive. VERY expensive. So we were faced with the choice of doing a dinner for a relatively unknown region in this country for the princely sum of £160 per person. It doesnt take a genius to know that you wont sell many tables for that one. So we dropped the price down to £120 per person, which was just breaking even. And in the end, it was a very good evening with a total of 23 people there, a little less that I would have liked, but still a good atmosphere and really pleasant service.

Anyway the highlight of the reds for me was the Andrew Will Two Blondes Vineyard blend from the Yakima Valley in Washington. A bordeaux blend with 36% Cab Franc, 35% Cab Sauv and 29% Merlot it was bursting with blackberry flavour and cassis, with a touch of green vegetation at the back. This was served with a cannon of herdwick mutton on smoked aubergine with ewe's curd and olive praline. Everyone raved about it. Job done!

Didier Dagueneau RIP

I found out this afternoon that Didier Dagueneau died yesterday afternoon in an accident. It seems he was in a paraglider that stalled and dropped to the earth, killing him and injuring one other person. He was only 52. A tragic loss for the wine world, and especially the Loire.

Visiting Krug - in the cellars.

So with eyes like pissholes in the snow, I woke up a silly o clock in the morning, showered and made it down for a lovely breakfast in the morning. The sun was shining, the gardener was out raking the gardens and clearing up the corks we had fired off the balcony the previous night. Mine was the winner, out on the grass, while mark managed to hit the patio and penny barely made if further than the end of the balcony sill. After indulging on fresh croissants and pastries we were met at the front by our genial chauffer and whisked off to the maison. The Krug domaine is rather discretely placed off the main roads behind a set of imposing black gates. As we entered the courtyard the place was filled with oak barrels being washed down and soaked with water, preparing them for impending use.


We were told how the Maison came into being, the history of the family and their philosophy for champagne before being taken down into the cellars to see for ourselves.

We were in heaven, millions of bottles of Krug all stacked up where they wait patiently for six years to reach a level of maturity that Krug feels is essential to its being. We get the full tour of the cellars, walking past racks of bottles, the chalk boards written in a code identifying which wines they are. I keep my eyes peeled for the Clos d'Ambonnay, but fail to spot any, or its sister vineyard Clos de Mesnil. We did however find magnums of vintage 98 and even a few jeros. As we descend deeper beneath Riems we come to the vault holding the reserve wines. Specially designed double decker steel tanks hold the reserve wines going back to a 1996 Bouzy which we are told was the oldest wine blended in this years "batch" of Grande Cuvee. In six years time when the wine reaches the market, that component will be 20 years old! We struggle to get our heads round the idea that someone can select a blend of so many different vintage wines and somehow seem to know how it will turn out after six years of maturation. And while the main selection of the blend is done by a core team, that many other people at Krug are involved on the periphery.

While in the cellars we get the chance to watch their cellarmaster riddling the bottles, and Mark takes the opportunity to have a go himself.

As the cellar tour ended we wandered upstairs for a spot of elevenses - a cheeky wee (wee being the operative word) glass of Grande Cuvee before we departed for a tour of the vineyards, more specifically the vineyard of Clos de Mesnil.

Like a pilgrimage to Mecca - the visit to Krug. Day one.

Ive had my pilgrimage, got to see two of the most precious vineyards in the whole of Champagne and Im one seriously happy camper!
Mark, Penny and myself flew out from Manchester on Monday afternoon after nearly two hours delay and were met at Charles de Gaule airport by a chauffer carrying a Krug sign - cool!! We were whisked from the airport in a swanky new merc to the Hotel Les Crayeres where we were staying overnight. After a quick shower we met down in the lounge for a crafty pre-prandial flute of something before heading into Riems to Brasserie Flo for something to eat. Being the beginning of August and actually sunny somewhere we got to eat outside on the terrace, although I think they stuck us in the tourist corner as we seemed to be surrounded by English people. Penny got the trip off to a good start with a cheeky little bottle of Ruinart Blanc de Blanc (despite our effort to get her off of choosing LVMH products she wouldnt budge!) Still cant complain, it is one of the best value Blanc de Blancs on the market., and a damned fine drop of fizz. We all started with something fishy, myself with 6 langos and Mark and Penny opted for the Hommard (Lobster) with fresh mayonnaise. We had all opted for the classic brasserie dish of Steak frites for out main course, although we underjudged the size of the meat a bit and all ended up a bit stuffed. That was washed down with a bottle of Krug Grande Cuvee, the richness of the wine coping admirably with the tender rare meat. Its a little know fact that Krug Grande Cuvee works magnificently well with Fish and chips!! Penny was now full to the gills and it was left to me and mark to sample the creme brulee. That was my mistake, finishing it was even worse. I was so full my stomach felt like it was going to burst. I havent felt that full ever! I couldnt even take another drink I was that full. So after a brief walk up the main road we settled down in a bar and I watched them two chugging G&T's while I slowly digested my dinner. Then we headed back to the hotel and onto Penny's balcony where we caned three bottles of champagne we had cleverly brought along, while playing silly drinking games and watching the stars. A bottle of Pol Roger Vintage 96, a bottle of Dom Perignon 99 and a rather disappointing bottle of Veuve Rose. Guess which one Penny brought! Penny also pitched in a bottle of Hennessy XO, but I knew when my limit had been reached and at 4:30am I sloped off to bed determined to get at least three hours of kip before the morning.

Krug minus 2

Just two more days until I go to Krug. Well technically its three as we dont actually visit Krug until Tuesday morning, but by this time on Monday we will be in Riems at the Hotel Crayeres and I cant wait. Ive been looking forward to this jolly for six months. We have a tasting on tuesday at 10am followed by a tour of the Clos de Mesnil. Hopefully we can persuade them to take us to the Clos d'Ambonnay as well, before lunch and then returning home. Short and sweet. Then Im off for three weeks while the refurb happens and the Arkle is turned into Simon Radley at the Chester Grosvenor.