SPNS dinner, 20th October

On Tuesday, it was over to the Savile Club for the next Swiss Pinot Noir Society event. Thanks to the trusty Victoria and Central Lines, I arrived at 7.30 on the dot to find no sign of the other participants. A tour of the sandpit, the bar and the garden revealed no fellow Society members and I was starting to wonder if I had the right day when fortunately P and D appeared - P having been on a similar tour of the building looking for the rest of us. G showed up shortly afterwards and as ACC and T had sent their apologies, proceedings could now commence!

We kicked off with this champagne from Morel Pere & Fils provided by P (NB that website may cause vertigo). None of the rest of us were familiar with it, but it turned out to be quite a hit.

It could only be described as effervescent, although "wild bubbles" was also used. It was generally regarded as very pleasant and well-balanced with some maturity and yeasty notes, and seemed like a steal when P told us what he paid for it.

We went upstairs for dinner and this Meursault-Genevrieres 1er cru 2006 from Michel Bouzereau et Fils was my contribution for the evening - the third of the trio I got at auction. I was delighted to get them, as am a big fan of this domaine, and once again this was top stuff.

It looked wonderful in the glass and was lovely, mature Meursault, not too fleshy but still typique. Another example of how producer trumps vintage when it comes to Burgundy. We thought it was impeccable and G and I agreed that it merited a 10 on the Premier Cru Project scale.

Then it was on to G's offering - a magnum of Chateau La Lagune (probably) 1985. The reason for the doubt over the vintage was that the label had torn off. It was hoped that the cork would reveal all, but sadly this was not to be. However, apparently this magnum came from a case of magnums of 1985 so it seems highly likely that it was also from 1985.

This was proper, mature claret with the classic cedary / cigar box nose - described as "school desk" by one participant. I wonder if Baron McG had been there whether he would have said "library book". It was generally enjoyed by all but there was a lot of it given there were only four of us, and it possibly started to go downhill towards the end.

A brief digression: I had this stuff on my Welsh Rarebit - had never heard of it until a recent episode of Jay Rayner's excellent radio programme the Kitchen Cabinet. Apparently it's a great source of local pride for the citizens of Sheffield. It was certainly good with Welsh Rarebit.

To finish, D had brought along this bottle of 1976 Tokaji Essencia. This was amazing. It had a heady, slightly volatile nose reminding some of pedro ximinez and others (me) of Turkish delight. Raisins, figs, prunes and toffee were all present and correct, and it was the perfect complement to our dessert of figs in a red wine sauce. It was very sweet - diabetes in a glass! - but there was no doubt that this was something very special indeed, and it walloped the competition to win the Wine of the Evening award. But there were no duffers on this occasion. Thanks to everyone for your contributions - another splendid evening.

Sunday night at mine

D came round on Sunday night for another evening of fine wine.

We started with this Pouilly-Fume from Oroncio aka La Maison Romane. This benefited from half an hour in decanter beforehand and showed as well as ever. We had it with some smoked trout which G had got from Borough Market and the challenge was not to guzzle it all while G carried out a lengthy dissection in order to avoid any Queen Mother-style fishbone incidents.

Then, it was on to the reds...

In the blue corner was this Opus One 1985 brought by D.

In the red corner, this bottle of Chateau Latour 1979 provided by G.

The Opus One is on the left in the photo above, and the Latour is on the right. The OO was slightly paler in colour and was drinking very well. It had a lovely silky texture, ripe plummy fruit, and I got a hint of pontefract cake. It was relatively easy-going and approachable but possibly started to fade towards the end.

After the 1968 Latour which we had fairly recently, the 1979 was a return to form. It was far more typical: big, majestic stuff, with the classic cigar box nose and formidable intensity. Apparently 1979 was not well-received when it first came out and one can understand why - this must have been a monster difficult wine in its youth. At 36 it was drinking very nicely.

I wouldn't say there was necessarily a clear winner, but it was particularly exciting to drink the Opus One as we wouldn't be able to find that over here.

With the cheese, we moved on to this Harveys Oloroso, bottled in 1953. G got this (not to be confused with Harveys Bristol Cream) at a recent auction and we weren't sure if it would be all right; fortunately it turned to be fine. It was quite dry on the nose but opened up on the palate and was well-rounded with notes of walnut. It went down remarkably quickly, always a good sign. Thanks to D and G for a great evening!

Friday night at mine

On Friday night, ACC joined G and me for dinner. I finished work, ran round the 'Trose, put on my AduV Party Mix, whipped up a batch of gougeres and made some pesto for the first time in my life. G rocked up and got the cremant on the go just as ACC knocked on the door. Perfect!

Still life with decanter brush

With our main course of salmon with the afore-mentioned pesto, we had a bottle of 2006 Meursault 1er cru Gouttes D'Or from Moret-Nomine. I've already written about this but this bottle was the equal of the first, like Meursault squared, heavyweight, nutty and powerful. Pretty to look at, too.

With our cheese course, ACC produced this fine bottle of Maranges from Maison en Belles Lies. I tend to think of Maranges as quite rustic and thought this would go very well with sausages, but it is at the more charming end of the spectrum as one would expect from biodynamic wine-maker Pierre Fenals.

In other news, I have continued my Duolingo French training and am now allegedly 47% fluent, a figure that would make anyone who has heard me trying to speak French chortle, I suspect. Fortunately we have now moved on from obscure animals and it is becoming more like a work of hardboiled detective fiction with sentences such as "She drinks, so I drink" and "If he talks, we talk". I wonder if there is much call for private investigators in Beaune?

Recent drinking round-up, 10th October

As so often happens, various things have been drunk but not properly recorded so some catching-up is in order.

I picked up this Vieux Calvados in Magnum in Beaune last year. We were doing some shopping on the Saturday morning and I was outside the chocolate shop next door attempting to avert disaster as a bottle of marc had made a bid for freedom from its bag - memo to self: beware string handles whose knots have a tendency to come undone! - when my phone rang. It was ACC telling me to get to Magnum tout suite. Seconds later, I arrived to find a bunch of random things sitting on the counter which were clearly recent arrivals. They included some old Roulot marc and this bottle of 1945 Calvados. An offer was hastily made for the pair of them, and I became the happy owner of this rarity.

It was so rare, in fact, that no entry could be found for this vintage on Wine Searcher or anywhere else but I knew that Calvados of this age is very, very expensive and subsequent research revealed that the 1937 vintage is available for 2,500 euros! Ouch. Fortunately for me, the proprietors of Magnum had not yet gone onto the internet to research market prices and I paid less than £100. I put it aside for a special occasion but then plans for said occasion were abandoned so it was decided that it could be opened after all. Hurrah!

Of course, I failed to make notes, but it was discernibly Calvados, with appley flavours and a slightly green tinge, as opposed to some of these old spirits where the boundaries between e.g. marc and brandy start to diminish as time goes on. I was surprised by how fiery it still was. We enjoyed it but I think my yearning for old Calvados has now been sated.

A few weeks ago I placed another order with the Wine Society mostly consisting of sherry and treated myself to a 50cl bottle of this Osborne Sibarita 30 year old oloroso. I brought a bottle of this to the SPNS last year (reported here) and enjoyed it very much. I enjoyed this bottle very much too! It really is something very special - seriously intense and complex - and although it costs £21, that price is better than anywhere else, and 50cl is a convenient size. After drinking this, it's been a struggle to go back to bog-standard normal sherry.

This Cremant d'Alsace finally arrived (thanks to the Burgundy Portfolio) and G and I have drunk one bottle so far. It's made by Vignoble des 2 Lunes who are a biodynamic operation, from Pinot Auxerrois grapes. I found it fresh, clean, and elegant with hints of apples and cream. It went down very easily and made a good aperitif. The back label indicates that it is from the 2011 vintage and while I don't think there's any rush, it's good to go and I doubt whether it will improve with age.

At the other end of the scale, as it was quarter end the other night, G decided it was time for another bottle of Latour and contributed this 1968 from his stocks. I hadn't done any homework on it so it came as something of a surprise - it didn't shout Latour in the way that Latour normally does. It was very smooth with a nice viscosity but there was basically nothing going on until you got to the finish when it blossomed. It was a very nice old claret, but not what I was expecting. Latour is normally majestic, complex and cerebral and this wasn't. We thought it went better with food and that it filled out slightly towards the end - it had been decanted about half an hour beforehand. G said that 1968 was a "minor vintage" and that this was considered the best of the wines made that year. It was interesting to have it, but I don't think we'll be rushing to buy any more.

Finally, we recently received some much-awaited halves of wine from Emmanuel Giboulot and naturally a vertical tasting ensued! This was the Bourgogne Hautes-Cotes de Nuits en Gregoire and the label has undergone some changes between 2009 and 2012. When comparing two wines the likelihood is that one will be go down better than the other and in this case I was surprised - I was expecting to prefer the 2009 but in fact the 2012 had it. The 2009 was quite earthy whereas the 2012 had that pure, scintillating quality that we associate with Giboulot's wines. I'll be interested to try more of both of them and see if this was due to bottle variation or if it applies more generally.

I have a short trip to Burgundy planned at the end of October to see how the 2014s are coming along. In preparation, I've been trying to improve my French using an online programme called Duolingo. This is quite fun although I'm not sure that my new vocabulary of sharks, whales, turtles, bees and monkeys is necessarily going to be much help in the cellars of the Cote d'Or. Fortunately I have a copy of Bourgogne Aujourd'hui to even up the balance! À bientôt!

Trip to Umbria, Sept 2015

Apologies in advance as this won't be a particularly wine-related post but I feel the need to write about What I Did on My Holidays and post some nice photos.

So, last week my mother and I went to Umbria on an art tour. I met Mum at St Pancras on Monday morning and we travelled to Heathrow Terminal 5 where we met up with Catherine Fletcher, our tour leader for the week. Catherine is a history professor and provided just the right amount of information and guidance during the week. We also met Yates, who was the assistant for the trip, and was in his early 20s. The flight was fairly uneventful. Mum hadn't had much breakfast and I'd confidently told her that we'd get lunch on the flight but this turned out to be a small pastrami roll and an iced bun. I expected more from BA!

Somewhat ravenous, we landed in Rome, met up with the other people on the tour (six couples and a lady by herself) and a bus took us to Perugia where we were staying at the Hotel Brufani Palace. This is at the top of the hill, which meant we had an amazing view from our room.

We had "welcome drinks" and even more welcome canapes, and then a four-course dinner at the hotel with our fellow tourists. I'd been making jokes beforehand about how the tour would be full of old people and that did indeed turn out to be the case except that Catherine was around my age and Yates brought the average down considerably.

On Tuesday morning, we had breakfast in the hotel, which put on an extensive buffet, and I enjoyed the terrible musak - it seemed that they had just one tape which repeated itself every hour or so. Then it was time for a look round Perugia. We went down the steep Via dei Priori to the church of San Bernadino which was lovely, inside and out.

We had a quick coffee break and then visted the Board of the Exchange with some fascinating and grisly artwork, and had a trip round the National Gallery of Umbria which was stocked with treasures such as this (this is a photo of the postcard, not the real thing).

In the afternoon, we had free time, so we had lunch at a little pavement cafe and then did some further wandering round Perugia.

We had been excited beforehand about the Etruscan ruins supposedly visible from the transparent floor of the hotel swimming pool. Sadly the swimming pool was closed while we were there, but we were able to pop down and look through the floor at the ruins, and steal some much-needed water from the water cooler as opposed to paying 5.50 euros a bottle from the minibar in our room.

In the evening we gathered on the terrace of the Brufani Palace for a complimentary drink. Everyone was ordering glasses of wine but Catherine went for an Aperol Spritz and I followed suit. The arrival of these bright orange cocktails caused some excitement among the old members of the group who didn't seem to have come across them before. We then went to a nearby restaurant, Altromondo which was able to accommodate eight of us at short notice, did decent food and was good value.

On Wednesday we visited Todi to look at a church briefly. I liked the symmetry of it but the interior wasn't my kind of thing.

Then it was back on the bus for a trip along some very windy and picturesque roads to Orvieto. Mum and I liked Orvieto, possibly because we had a large glass of the stuff with lunch!

In the afternoon, we visited the cathedral which sadly had scaffolding up outside but was pretty impressive inside.

Then we wended our way back to the funicular railway. There was time for a quick shot of the vineyards.

That evening, we had dinner together as a group at La Taverna which was very jolly - another four course meal with plenty of wine!

Thursday was "Piero" day beginning with a trip to a tiny museum in Moneterchi, a little village with just one fresco which had been taken from the local church.

I have to admit I didn't know much about Piero della Francesca previously but I now see the error of my ways!

After that, it was on to Arezzo where we enjoyed wandering round the shops and regrouped after lunch for a look at the church, and in particular the Legend of the True Cross which was very impressive. There was a lot going on. This was one of the nicer bits, involving the Queen of Sheba.

Finally we stopped off at Sansepolcro to look at the Resurrection. This was in the process of being restored and first we had to wait for the lights to come on, then found that there was a sort of pulley-bucket arrangement impeding our view, which seemed rather unnecessary as nobody was actually working on it at the time. The painting is quite remarkable though.

We got back to Perugia quite late, and that evening Mum and I and the other lady travelling by herself went to a slightly shabby but honest pizza restaurant in a little alley where the pizzas were 5 euros and the Montefalco wine was 13 euros a bottle. There was a music festival going on and we walked past a brass band playing some great music. Generally the atmosphere in Perugia was quite lively and youthful, due to the university there and the good weather!

On Friday, we visited Spello to look at frescoes by Pinturrichio. We really liked these, and I bought a couple of postcards for my desk at work. I particularly like the Holy Spirit, in avian form, divebombing Mary.

There was time for a walk around the village and Mum and I enjoyed spotting this old Fiat 500 carefully parked.

Next up was Spoleto. A market was being held which meant that the bus couldn't stop where it had been planned, and we ended up going up the hill on the other side of a great ravine and then walking across the bridge. I'd been to Spoleto before, four years ago, but never made it into the centre of town on that occasion!

My cousin had recommended a restaurant called Il Tempio del Gusto, which we thought we were very unlikely to find, but amazingly we found ourselves walking past it so we went there for lunch. This turned out to be a pretty fancy place with serious food. One of my courses involved a sesame brandy snap filled with goats cheese which was particularly delicious.

The only downside was that we might still be there right now as they didn't bring the bill despite multiple attempts to make eye contact. My mother suggested that we should try to pay at the desk, and thinking of my experiences dining out in fancy French restaurants, I said we couldn't possibly do that as it would be very offensive to all concerned. About 20 minutes later one of the waitresses came over and told us to pay at the counter. Huh! The bill was a mere 50 euros for two courses, a generous glass of white wine and coffee (which came with petits fours) - can't argue with that.

In the afternoon, we visited the Roman House which we liked very much with its lovely mosaics. It was three euros well spent!

We still had some time to kill, so decided to attempt to find the Roman amphitheatre. This involved walking down about 200 steps and when we got to the bottom, we found the approximate site but it didn't seem to be open to the public. The pressure was on as either we could walk back up the 200 steps (in the midday heat) or I needed to find the escalator. Fortunately my navigation was up to it and this very welcome sight appeared, the first of about 5 escalators up the hill.

Then we met the rest of the group and had a look round Spoleto cathedral, which was wonderful.

That evening, the group went to Osteria a Priori where we sat on a long table upstairs and had the tasting menu. This was great fun and the Sagrantino di Montefalco red wine was particularly fine although on inspecting the label I discovered it was 15% alcohol!

On Saturday there was a trip to Assisi. We'd heard about Assisi from my aunt, and so when the opportunity to come back at lunchtime was presented, instead of staying there for the whole day, we grabbed it with both hands. This turned out to be a wise decision as it wasn't our cup of tea at all. It was over-run with coach parties, and there was a huge basilica with an overwhelming amount of art, but you're not supposed to talk inside, so Catherine wasn't able to explain any of it to us in situ. There were various ecclesiastical flunkies with microphones who every now and then said "Silencio" which made me think inappropriately about Mulholland Drive. The contradiction between what St Francis stood for and this ghastly theme park was startling, and we couldn't wait to get out of there.

Back in Perugia, Mum wondered what was happening with the Labour leadership election and amazingly we were able to watch the results live online on the BBC News site on her ipad. Then we had lunch at a little cafe perched on the cliff-side next to the lift which takes you down to the metro. A glass of Grechetto accompanied our slice of pizza very nicely, and I spotted a little lizard hiding in the bushes. We did some more walking around Perugia in the afternoon but also enjoyed the opportunity to have some reading/sleeping time. In the evening, we had a pre-prandial drink on the terrace. Aperol Spritzes all round!

That evening we went back to Altromondo for dinner, and found several other members of our party dining there too.

The last day of touring was Sunday, when we visited Gubbio.

It was quite a steep walk up into the town, although there were also some lifts. We visited the Ducal Palace which was impressive.

Then we wandered around a bit. Mum was looking for something depicting the story of the Wolf of Gubbio, which was a bad wolf that went around eating people until St Francis had a word with it and it saw the error of its ways. We did manage to find several really tacky depictions of this but nothing remotely tasteful!

We found a nice cafe on a square to have lunch at, and halfway through lunch a long succession of vintage cars went hurtling past, honking and causing much excitement.

Soon after that, the heavens opened, for the first time on our trip, so our lunch ended prematurely and we were quite relieved when the bus arrived to take us back to Perugia.

That evening we had a quick aperitif in the hotel bar - I had a Negroni this time just to ring the changes, and Mum had a glass of prosecco - and then we had our final dinner in the private room of the hotel restaurant. It was another jolly evening and I have to say the others on the trip were extremely nice and everyone got on well.

On Monday morning I went to check out and pay our bill, and discovered a random 35 euro bar charge. Either Mum had been ordering bottles of prosecco behind my back, or there had been some mistake. To their credit, they refunded it fairly speedily, but I think in future I'd probably pay my way rather than charging drinks to the hotel room.

Our trip back to the UK went fairly smoothly and although our flight was delayed, my mother was able to catch her train home and I returned to AduV Towers and had a final Negroni of the hols.

It had been a great week, and this beautiful view will stay with me for some time!