Confessions of a Wino

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!

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If a bottle of wine costs more than £20 then I take it seriously.  I am tight as a gnat’s chuff after all, being from the north of England.  My recent visit to Nicolas on Berwick Street (in the grim South of England) resulted in £23.50 being added to my overdraft and the harsher penalty of ridicule from some readers.  The stakes placed on this St Julien are high.

Since I discovered Nicolas in London, I’ve spotted new branches appearing more frequently than Caffé Nero coffee shops.  It’s like buying a Ford Mondeo then realising that everyone else on the road also owns one, and most chose the same colour as you.  Reading around, it seems that the famed wine “corner shop”, revered by French drinkers possibly since Napoleon was in shorts, bought venerable British institution, Oddbins and had started converting stores to the French brand in large number.

The restructure brought about by the new owners of Oddbins was not without controversy.  The Nicolas brand was not so popular in the UK.  Accused of being bland, arrogant, and too Franco-centric it was the very cliché of the British view of les bleus.

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I’ve been waiting for this to happen so I can blog about it.  I opened a bottle of Clos de Marquis 2001 (after dutifully fridging it for half an hour) only to find it was corked.

Fortunately I had another bottle so opened that and joy of joys – it was perfect.  So what was the difference?

Both bottles are shown in the picture below-  which do you think was corked?

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