Confessions of a Wino

When you are a wine magpie like me, you tend to lose some bottles to middle age.  Kiwi Sauvignon Blancs from a couple of seasons ago, found looking (and tasting) forlorn in the corner of the garage.  Cheap and cheerful cherry flavoured Malbecs that prove that half lives apply outside the nuclear industry.

I dug out a few old bottles from the bottom of the rack recently and this appeared, purchased from Majestic a couple of years ago.  I feared the worst.  But still opened it, obviously!

I should have trusted Catena (the reliable makers) and Bibendum (the reliable importers) and, in no small part Majestic (the now evergreen but reliable retailer), who despite their various mark-ups only billed me £7.99 for this excellent wine.

Full of smooth zingy fruit, it is still quite ‘in your face’ like a New Zealand Pinot Noir, but somehow with a surprising amount of refinement.  I treated myself to a bottle at about 15 degrees with beans, bacon, mustard and watercress on toast (I know what you are thinking…..phwaaaarp).  YUM!

I got reprimanded on Twitter (I am @tiptoptaps) for slagging off wine brands, when I made a curt comment about Jacob’s Creek.  In response to a question from someone interviewing the head winemaker at JC, whether I had any questions for him, I put my tongue in my cheek and said “yes, could he stop?”  But I am not against wine brands at all.  It is a massive mistake to judge a lady by her dress sense.  Even if you are desperate.

For example, I have always shown affection for scantily clad beach babes from Chilean conglomerate, Concha y Toro, and especially their sub-brand Casillero del Diablo.  OK, it is not fine wine, but this cost me £6.99 from Sainsbury (available from many sources including Tesco and, I haven’t bothered to check, but presumably Morrisons and Asda too, and maybe Somerfields and Co-op).  How is such a ubiquitous and cheap wine so tasty?

Put aside your preconceptions about mass produced wine.  CyT keep demonstrating that large quantities of grapes can be turned into very drinkable slosh.

The Carmenère is always a bit of a bonfire night wine.  Autumn fruits and the smell of real wood fires.  Make sure you stick it in the fridge for 30-40 minutes before drinking to maximise the flavour (see WART).

Last time I wrote about the London food bloggers’ beefy hero of Shoreditch, I was accused of snobbery.  I was unkind to the waiting staff who I described as ‘skateboarders’ lacking coordination and worse, more dishevelled in appearance than most customers.

However, my steak was so mouth-wateringly, drool dribblingly, bib wettingly luscious, that Truly Scrumptious couldn’t have tempted me away from it, even if she had offered to blow my Toot Sweet in the back of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  I had to come back for another try.

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Jersey is the most beautiful of islands but, let’s be honest, it’s a bit Wicker Man.  I feel like I am in a 1970′s time-warp.  Even my beloved and essential iPhone is rendered useless by a lack of suitable networks.  No voice, no data, no life.

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I was mooching through Sainsbury’s wine section looking for something interesting to go with a pork chop dish I have been working on.  I have to say it was a pretty depressing mooch, with very little to trouble the adrenalinometer.  Rescue came in a bottle of Casillero del Diablo Carménère, a wine I have tried before and enjoyed.  It is from Chilean giant, Concha y Toro, the one brand that seems truly capable of producing wines that rise above the lowest common denominator of the North American and Australian market leaders.

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Hotel restaurants always give me a slight sinking feeling. Reminders of 1980s boil in the bag meals; they always smell of stale cooking, probably because breakfast buffets are when they get 90% of their traffic.

The Hotel Russell probably counts early risers 99% of its clientele.  It’s easier to get a table at The Ivy than a breakfast table here.  Dinner, however, was predictably quiet.  A few lonely foreign travellers and one table of two couples from Yorkshire who were asking for more gravy – gravy shortages are punishable by death north of Watford Gap.

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Tonight I am drinking Terrazas de los Andes Reserva Malbec 2006.  A very nice wine and worth every penny of the £8.50 I paid Costco for it.

This is one of the staples of the Gaucho Grill wine list, but when average wine markups in the UK are between 100 and 200% (i.e. double to three times the wholesale price) how come Gaucho thinks it can charge £37.50, a 341% uplift, and that is against the RETAIL price.  Is this a new British and Commonwealth record?

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Where did all the money go then?  In my quest to account for some of the missing credit crunch trillions, once believed to have been squirreled away by bankers, I spotted that £7 billion has been invested in the search for Higgs Boson – the clitoris of particle physics.

But last September, the Large Hadron Collider hit technical snags and some magnets over-heated bringing the search to a premature climax with helium gushing out all over the place.

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I’ve got my comeuppance for slagging off Mark Hughes.  Man City announced that the UEFA Cup quarter final home leg would be a “reward for the fans” and tickets were priced at only £5 so “ordinary fans” could come and watch.  I am obviously not an ordinary fan since, despite numerous calls to the ticket office (engaged tone) the match is sold out and I have to watch on some backwater internet channel.  Shame – I am in Manchester on 16 April when the town turns into a Hamburger for a night.

So perhaps I should be more complimentary about people I have never met.

Everyone knows that it is impossible to mass produce and mass market a decent wine – especially a Pinot Noir.  Trouble is, nobody told Alfred Hurtado.  His Chilean Cono Sur brand is taking over the world and rightly so.

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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.