Sunday Roast. Mmmmmmm. A weekend in London and it’s been a while since the last legendary Wino Sunday lunch. Time to make repairs but in a relaxed Sunday style. A quick flight at my favourite London wine bar. The Jubilee Line to London Bridge. A soupçon of jazz.
It’s Christmas Eve and I am enjoying some rump. But that is enough about the wife.
I dug out a 2005 St. Emilion that looked like it might go with a bit of bully.
The prevailing wealth of rich winter spices is a constant reminder that we are less than a stock market “correction” away from Christmas. I love seasonal spicy tea blends but this year’s Fortnum & Mason was a bit of a dog compared to last year’s Harvey Nichols’ hot stock.
The wine equivalent may well be Château D’Aiguilhe 2005, Côtes de Castillon. This Merlot dominated Bordeaux blend is spicier than an investment banker’s underpants the morning after splashing the year end bonus on a (high class) Indian meal.
I am Legend. Well, not so much me as Will Smith. Yes, I’ve just watched the film about the British scientist who inadvertently cures cancer with a virus that mutates into a killer strand that genocidinates the humans of the world (and for the purposes of the film, the World is New York). One American male and a dog are the sole survivors charged with finding a cure. I thought I could guess the ending but actually it finished rather suddenly, which was a shame as the plot was hugely promising and I was just starting to crap myself.
The last time I was genuinely scared at a horror movie was a David Cronenberg double bill of Rabid and Shivers at the Manchester Odeon in 1979.
Surely it’s a W? Why do I seem to disagree with most leading economists, investors and politicians? In my wine tainted mind, a double dip recession is more certain than ever. In the UK, at least.
We have temporary low purchase tax, temporary hyper-low interest rates and temporary Bank intervention, pumping money into the economy on a scale not seen since RBS started furnishing Sir Fred Goodwin with his pension.
Silence please. There is a time and a place for a little reverence. I have just opened my first bottle of a very important wine. Château Lynch-Bages 2005. A wine that even en-primeur, cost me over £50 per bottle.
The Sunday Times Wine Club advised me to wait until 2010, but I could be dead by then and I am an impatient man….oh and I have 12 bottles so I can afford to experiment early. So Fred had a placed a fillet steak on the skillet and I released the special one from its enclosure.
At £17.50, this must one of the bargains of the whole wine world. The catch is that you have to be a member of the Wine Society. But don’t worry, they let anyone in these days. You don’t need to roll up one trouser leg and hop through the door like when I joined. No entrance exam, you don’t need to know anything about wine. You can even have an empty bank account, as it is one of the best value (only budgies go cheap) wine retailers in the UK.
With its rich history and extensive storage, frequent offers of interesting, old, and remarkably priced wines regularly appear in my email inbox. I have neither the storage space, nor stomach capacity, or indeed material wealth to buy them all so I am extremely selective.
Occasionally I like to take a break from Progressive House and listen to a couple of real “Old Skool” albums. Tonight I sampled Counting Crows’ “August and Everything After”, Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life” and David Bowie’s experimental and innovative (at the time) “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”. Top stuff, and could show those young whippersnapping beat stealers a thing or two.
Not everything old is implicitly good though. Most old wine goes off sooner or later, so drink it before it does!
Signs of ageing are mostly self generated and excepting wrinkles, are usually related to the people you socialise with, the places you go, and the material goods you consume. I discovered what seems like yonks ago that BBC Radio 2 plays better music than Radio 1. In fact it plays much the same music as Radio 1 did in the years when I used to listen in to Simon Bates and Noel Edmunds. I swapped my exciting Toyota sports coupé for a boring Mercedes Saloon about the same time (and yes, the interior was beige). Two cars later I have accelerated through an automatic gearbox, which took me a while to get used to, into full-on middle age – yes, a diesel automatic.
I like to think I have taken all this in my stride, but today I realised that I have just passed an altogether much more serious milestone. I have never seen anyone under 50 wear Ralph Lauren but I looked in my wardrobe today and found five shirts by this venerable, if ageing, New York designer. And what is worse, I actually like wearing them.
Beans on toast. One of life’s staple meals. So simple, so healthy, so cheap, so erm, studenty? Of course there are only two types of baked bean, Heinz and shite. And there are only two types of toast, the type that sets my smoke alarm off, and the type that is undercooked and flabby. The absolute secret to beans on is to make sure the toast is as crispy as possible before you soggify it with the beans. Also helps if you cook the beans over a low heat for a decent amount of time to reduce the sauce.
So sitting in the flat to the tuneful, albeit duotonous, harmonies of Manchester Fire Brigade’s finest, my mind inevitably wanders. My challenge over the last couple of years has been to find the perfect wine match for this honourable meal, and I think I may have just succeeded in Spades.
Stumble It!