This one does exactly what it says on the tin: black cherries, spice, mint, plums. It’s like chewing gum and walking….through a French orchard on a wet autumn day.
It cost me £9.99 from Virgin and is one of the better ten quid bottles from their stable.
Serve cool (not cold). It accentuates the mint. The perfect antidote for drab football matches, and a great partner for pizza.
If you are a UK based champagne glugger who buys the brands you might want to check out Virgin Wines who seem to have some pretty sharp prices right now.
I haven’t done extensive research but bog standard Moet is £23.99 which is about the same price as Tesco and if you subscribe to the Virgin Wine Bank* there is an effective 25% discount on that. Other champagnes look similarly discounted.
*Wine Bank asks you to make a regular monthly contribution (I pay £20 for example) and every quarter a monthly subscription gets added. So I have just spent 6 months of contributions (£120) on £160 worth of bubbly. Luvvly jubbly!
No, I didn’t go for the Moet, I did include some Perrier Jouet and Mumm in the mix though.
I assured some French friends who visited recently, that ignorant southerners who claimed that it rained in Manchester 24 hours a day were plain wrong. In my experience the average precipitation is a considerably more modest 23. I am looking forwards to tomorrow between 8 and 9am when we are promised a refreshing spot of light cloud.
Most successful software is never the real deal until version 3. This is the version that appeases the early, and even late majority, and therefore wins the market. I have just downloaded the 3.0 operating system for my iPhone and it was worth the wait.
OS 2.0 had holes the size of moon craters. If you own another brand I bet you can cut and paste. I bet you can send multimedia messages. I bet you can capture voice recording. I bet you can remotely wipe your phone if it is stolen. (OK this last one is fairly unique). These yawning gaps have been filled in 3.0 and without having to download any more apps. Need meteorite strike insurance? There’s an app for that….
That having been said, the single greatest strength of the iPhone is that is has learnt, ironically from Microsoft, that to create a successful platform you have to create a community and allow them to expand your platform by building applications. This happens much faster than you could ever build applications yourself so the usage of your platform spreads like wildfire.
Witness Steve Jobs who, a billion application downloads later, must be wondering if he will catch up Bill Gates in the software wealth stakes before the decade is out.
In honour, I was hoping to bring you a wine that tastes of apple, but this one is pure lemon.
Well at first sight, you have to admire a man with cojones the size of decanters. Rowan Gormley, not content with taking on the mighty Direct Wines (owners of the Laithwaites and Virgin Wines brands) at selling wine, is now considering a legal defence in the light of a provocative press release that Rowan put out on behalf of Naked Wines to which DW took offence. Offence that was duly passed to their lawyers who promptly threatened to sue his ass.
Rowan’s blog offers the viewpoint of a man on one side of an argument that is undeniably exacerbated by the fact that the Virgin Wines founder left the employ of Direct Wines last summer under a compromise agreement (another word for a cloud). The word “bollocks” is used to dismiss Direct Wines’ allegations. Maybe storm in a teacup is better phraseology.
But before you dismiss this as a spat between two former lovers and tell them to grow up and get a life, be aware that this is a business tactic straight from the Virgin playbook (remember Virgin Atlantic/Richard Branson’s long term, bitter and very public fight with BA for example?). Rowan certainly learned something from his years at Virgin.
Naked Wines needs publicity and hasn’t got a big advertising budget. If I were Direct Wines, I would shut up and get on with running a successful business and starve Naked of PR oxygen. Every time they react to one of Gormley’s prods they are adding fuel to his fire.
On the other hand, if I were Rowan Gormley, I would probably continue to aggravate my former employer and provoke whatever reaction I could. The general public loves an underdog, especially one that looks like it is being grievously mistreated by the older school bully.
After Mad Cow disease and Foot & Mouth, those of us living in the pig free zone of West Yorkshire are pleased to see an agricultural problem that does not affect us directly. I started feeling sorry for the pig farmers in Wiltshire until I realised that a sneeze in Mexico was like a butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong, or a banker collecting his bonus on Wall Street. In any case, the impact on the world is (potentially) awesome.
So while I sit indoors in my H1N1 isolation with a super strength face masks in 100 packs, in an ante-pandemic panic order, my only consolation is yet another Spanish wine, a nice Albariño from Virgin Wines at £9.99.
Smelling of perfume (which makes a change from flu), grapefruit, parma violets and the sort of mixed flavours you get from cheese and pickle, this is a dry wine that does well as an aperitif, or with barbecued belly of pork.
A tissue please…..sneeze into it, bin it, wash your hands, drink lots of wine, survive the pandemic (hopefully)…….
In order to test my hypothesis that it is possible to contract Deep Vein Thrombosis whilst watching an opera, I went to see the 3.5 hour epic Don Carlos at Leeds Grand Theatre last week. But way back in 1867, Giuseppe Verdi must have foreseen that the seats in the balcony of this fine theatre would be designed for pigmies and children only. Although there was only one interval, he thoughtfully planned the opera in four acts with a total of six scene changes. My calves yelled with delight each time the curtain fell and I was able to stand for a few brief but exquisite seconds.
As an opera, Don Carlos has it all. Intrigue, deception, death, war, royalty and of course, adultery, all of which delivered by a huge cast. I know you southern types have Sadlers Wells and the Royal Opera House, but up here where it’s cold, wet and cheap… Well we have got Opera North and we are justifiably proud. This was one of the best productions I have seen with the pick of the cast being William Dazely as Rodrigo, veteran of equally excellent ON productions of Let ‘em Eat Cake and Of Thee I Sing where he was a great President – John P Wintergreen.
Anyway back to Spain where Don Carlos (son of Philip II King of Spain) had to suffer the ignominy and heartache of having his promised love, Elisabeth de Valois, marry his father in a political settlement, and as you can imagine, that makes for a promising start to any story.
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.
I’ve sacked Mybloglog. What is the point when Facebook (you see, no need to provide a hyperlink) is taking over every social interaction on the web. I like to think that LinkedIn looks after business interaction, but Facebook’s success in the social space has undoubtedly been due to its open platform.
Have you ever been haunted? The name Teyssier has been my stalker recently. It has bought out the best of Virgin Wines and contemporaneously the reason why they often ever so slightly under-achieve. Well, nobody can please everybody every day!
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