Late May and a well deserved holiday for me and the missus. So we left gardening chores to be done next weekend and took the train to London.
You can read about our exploits over coming weeks as I write up the notes. In the meantime I would just like to say thank you to the Park Plaza County Hall Hotel who looked after us superbly well and even treated us for Fred’s birthday with a complimentary platter fit for any wino. Thanks guys….
Many people have contacted me asking why it is so difficult to find recommendations on my site. Sample quote, “I just wanted to find a decent red to take to a dinner party and I had to page through the whole bloody site!”
I am generally against rating wine because it is so subjective. Who am I to judge whether you will like a wine or not? However, I can judge whether I like a wine or not, so I use a binary rating scale.
1 = I like it
0 = I don’t like it
So I am not going to award 5 stars, or 90/100 points, or even a top ten. But I have decided to start a favourites page where I will highlight wines that I tried recently and really liked. Some food venues are also covered. It is completely subjective and totally at my discretion how long an item stays in my “favourites” and demotion does not mean I no longer like it. It’s just a fun way of sharing my thoughts, albeit somewhat randomly.
You can find Wino’s Favourites under “Pages” (see top right on the home page).
Any feedback is appreciated.
You may have noticed I was having problems with my ISP until recently. This was driving me to drink which is, fortuitously, a pastime in which I am experienced and capable.
I’ve just returned from the opening night of the Opera North production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s play reconfigured as an opera by melody dodger, Benjamin Britten, whose proud boast seems to be never to have written an opera in a major key.
I normally love Opera North (full disclosure, I know one of the chorus quite well), but I am not a Britten fan. A Midsummer Night’s Dream reminded me of all the negative aspects of the earlier, and otherwise superior, Peter Grimes. Incessant horns and strings in deliberate discord, keeping the audience on its edge in the same way Hammer House of Horror films used organ fugues to build tension. Britten never seems to let go, though. It was like sitting on a train, delayed because of a fatality on the line. One feels sorry for the victim (or cast in this case) but I just wanted to get home as quickly as possible. Listening to a gauntlet scratching up and down a blackboard would have been more entertaining, and arguably, more musical.
The humour (what little existed) was 50 years old and could probably only have been written by a tortured homosexual of the repressed mid 20th century. There were clearly a few from that era in the audience, occasionally chortling and even applauding. I watched with the same cringingly embarrassed feeling of watching a Carry On film from the Beatles epoch. Fortunately, to avoid total boredom, I was simply able to stare up at the awesome ceiling of Leeds Grand Theatre, the home of Opera North, and surely one of the best theatres in the world for architectural detail.
Just round the corner from the Grand Theatre is Lounge Bar and Grill, and that is where we chose to eat before the performance. With 25% off, the bill for two with a bottle of wine came to only £40 plus service. Even for Leeds that is cheap.
If you are looking for more wine related weblogs, you could check out the “other good sites” list on the right of my home page.
Or you could try a new site aggregating blogs across the web http://wine.alltop.com. Here you will find links to the latest posts from a wide range of quality blogs including most of the ones I read regularly.
The weblog world has been accused of being unreliable, even corrupt. The key to getting the best information is to read around and not take one person’s view as gospel. The blogosphere, in my opinion, is no more corrupt (and may be less so) than professional journalism on average. However, it is true that we bloggers are not held to the same benchmarks as published authors in the regular press. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage of the blogosphere. It enables us to speak freely without fear of advertisers pulling lucrative contracts, but conversely does sometimes allow un-researched opinion to be presented as fact, so it is worth reading around for the aggregated view.
Readers who idle here more than once in a Preston Guild are sure to have experienced problems accessing the website recently. Regular “500″ errors and database connection problems were almost exclusively caused by my (former) ISP, Streamline.net.
Streamline is cheap but, as in the wine world, you usually get what you pay for. The quality of service from Streamline has been abysmal both in database uptime, and customer service. You can read one of my rants, if interested, at my other blog.
So I have put my metaphorical bottle of Echo Falls in the bin and upgraded to a nice Argentinean Malbec. Well you didn’t expect me to choose an expensive French ISP did you? Here’s hoping that the site is more reliable from now on.
The map looked interesting. Leaving central Manchester on the towpath of the Bridgewater Canal, we would simply walk to Sale, a brief stroll of about 5 or 6 miles. Surely there would be friendly pubs at every bridge? No. Surely it would be an interesting walk through historic architecture and Manchester’s trading history? No. Well, perhaps a decent stroll along a pretty canal path? Thrice no.
Fortunately the walk ended at a quality pub in Sale. The tramstop is right opposite the pub. Can you guess how we got back to town?
After my review of Sam’s Chop House raised a bit of a storm about people’s privacy, I was reticent about reviewing the sibling, Mr Thomas’s. After waiting for about 243 minutes behind a twitcher’s tent, I finally found a moment when the coast was clear and grabbed a quick snap (below). If only the atmosphere inside was as interesting….
It used to snow more often in the north of England. One childhood memory of Cheadle Hulme in the 1970s, had us creating a roadblock from several snowballs as big as a medium sized Yeti monster, only to get caught by one of the parents. It took so much more effort to deconstruct the abominable frozen white barrier without the adrenalin filled laughter that drove and inspired us through the construction phase.
On Easter Sunday 2008, we looked out of the window at 7am - whiteout - awesome….let’s off to the hills for a walk! I have one life rule on walking - I’ll do anything as long as there is a pub at the end. And so we found ourselves at Barley, Lancashire, and the Pendle Inn.
As dark and dingy restaurants go, Simple is amongst the darkest, although to be fair not dingiest I have visited. I admit my eyesight is deteriorating with age, and I struggle to read small text at a distance closer than you would view a computer screen, but we were sat beneath the aircon unit, unlit, and whilst other tables had an odd spotlight to illuminate, even the red candle on our table couldn’t reveal to me any of the menu contents.
Stumble It!