My favourite gastro-pub in the whole wide world is situated in the Yorkshire Dales near Skipdale (for Emmerdale fans that is just a few miles from Hotton). Back in the real world, Hetton village is a mere cockstride from Rylstone, famous for bra-less jam-makers.
It is all too easy to be sniffy about the major wine brands when you’ve had your nose in the books of Parker and Robinson. But have you tried anything from Chilean producer Concha y Toro lately? Or the sub brands Cono Sur and Casillero del Diablo? Interesting stuff and generally high quality, but in the UK, I remember the Australians as being first in the queue to bring wine to the proletariat via supermarket and pub alike.
Aside from the ubiquitous Jacob’s Creek, I recall Hardy’s as being a brand leader. So when my neighbour, Peter, brought a bottle of Varietal Range Chardonnay round to my barbie, I was first insulted, then dismissive and finally intrigued. Obviously, in Peter’s presence I sniffed at it, parked it in the corner and turned to open a bottle of something exclusive and French (albeit cheap and ropey).
Curiosity got the better of me this evening and I opened the bottle.
If you want to enter a declining market and make a meaningful dent then you better innovate. Naked Wines is doing just that and gaining publicity by the jeroboam.
Rowan Gormley’s latest stunt was to hold a “crowd taste off” with AU$100,000 of Naked Wines purchase orders available to the winning wine makers.
The tasters were the 50 most active customers of Naked (fully clothed, I believe). The winemakers were selected by The Government of South Australia and the Australian Trade Commission. After rounds of tasting and price estimating, the final coup de théâtre was the winemakers themselves in a reverse auction to adjust their prices to see how much of the $100k they could take in orders.
I managed to get my paws on three of the winners that will be going on sale via the Naked Wines website in the next few weeks:
If you like to listen to something achingly, teasingly left wing, politically correct, family friendly and yet, despite all that, extremely listenable, I can recommend The Chronicles of Modern Life by Henry Priestman. Clearly I am not that left wing (although I am not 100% sure what that means these days) but I am over 40 and, if you are too, I defy you not to cast a wry smile at Henry’s astute observations on wrinkle gathering.
On the other hand, if you prefer to ignore the effects of ageing and address your sagging brow by drowning your sorrows, you probably drink too much Aussie Chardonnay. I don’t drink anywhere enough so I was pleased to receive this Burnmore as part of a STWC crisp refreshing whites case (£60) several months ago.
It is difficult to have high hopes of a wine that costs less than a fiver including shipping all the way from Oz.
As a Semillon Chardonnay blend, I suppose it is no surprise that it tastes like 10 parts St Veran and 1 part Sauternes. Lemon and honey and much better than the price tag indicates. If you happen to have a bottle in your cellar, I would drink it right now to see if it really will cure your wrinkly neck.
The primary responsibility of a wine producer is to make drinkable or, better still, remarkable wine. It is a bit like a restaurant whose benchmark is firstly decent food, then cool atmosphere, warm ambience, decent price, and finally how good looking the waitresses are – oh and the quality and price of the wine list helps!
Fundamentally I care about our planet and I am very much in favour of reduced carbon emissions. Irrespective of whether you believe the global warming doom mongerers, you would have to be a nincompoop of Victorian standards not to accept that pumping out all this shit into our precious H2O is simply a route to premature apocalypse.
However, is there really a need to shout so loud about your green credentials? I expect as a matter of course that winemakers use ever more green and efficient production methods. So I am always suspicious about any product that claims to be “greener” – it is the Toyota Prius effect applied to the wine industry.
This “green” one from Virgin at £8.99 wasn’t undrinkable but it was unremarkable.
At some point in your life, birthdays stop being beacons shining light on a promising future and instead become lamp posts illuminating yesterday’s gloomy streets. A time to look back longingly at your youth and wonder what might have happened if you hadn’t bought that Ford Escort with the faulty brakes, or kissed that fat bird with dentures behind the bike sheds at school.
But the lacerations eventually healed and I was able once again to enjoy eating the sweets of my generation without the nightmare of that mousetrap snog to haunt my tongue.
Is the Sony brand dead?
I used to be a Sony snob – hifi, TVs, Playstations, Walkmans. OK I admit I never had a Betamax, but I know early adopter friends who did. In the 1970s our household was the first in the street with a colour TV. In the 1980s we were last to invest in VHS technology, albeit by virtue of Radio Rentals and with a third of my first adult weekly paycheque as a deposit.
I am currently watching a Sony TV from the 1990s which is fab. I also own a Sony TV from 2007 that is total tosh – picture quality, software, remote control - all about as user-friendly as a Doberman shaped perambulator.
I am quietly pleased that I have finally managed to get this weblog onto a new platform, a new ISP and new publishing software. I am still using the excellent Wordpress, but have upgraded to version 2.5.1. My previous version (2.1) was error prone and insecure – spam was starting to appear in my scheduled posts! I strongly recommend anyone using Wordpress to upgrade.
The new Wordpress platform is pretty good, but it is much less intuitive than I expected. Loading and managing pictures for example, is in theory much easier, but in practice I think there are still a few bugs that need ironing out. I can also see that many of the new improvements have been aimed at non-technical users like me. However, as with all open source software, it is ultimately designed by techies who don’t quite understand how us Muggles think.
As with all software upgrades in my experience, the problems arise in the database conversion. This is something to watch out for if you are moving up several Wordpress versions in one go, like I did. I had numerous problems that a friend with some SQL knowledge kindly sorted, in exchange for a couple of bottles from my inner cellar.
To celebrate my new platform I am drinking an unoaked Chardonnay from Virgin Wines. Pensilva Estate The Cross 2006 Coonawarra Chardonnay is not what I expected. Does it hit the bulls eye or should it merely be hung out on a crucifix to die?
Another from Virgin and you may recall me sampling a range of wines from a mixed case I took as an introductory offer. The results of my samples have been mostly good and my conclusion on Virgin is that for everyday glugging wines, if you choose carefully you will find value rather than fine wines, drinkability rather than complexity, down to earth language rather than pretension.
This Chablis, though, tasted most unlike Chablis.
Have you ever slept under the railway arches? It’s not typically a pleasant place. Certainly not a place you would choose to sleep. But if it’s raining and you have no fixed abode, well, everything is relative.
I nodded off under the arches near Oxford Road station on Whitworth Street in Manchester. Thankfully, someone had been thoughtful enough to build an Italian restaurant around me that was warm and welcoming (not that I would have noticed given the amount of alcohol canoeing through my veins).
Stumble It!