Recent drinking round-up

Things have been hectic at A de V Towers of late but today I have a chance to do a catch-up report on what drinking has been going down...

This Santenay from Lucien Muzard & Fils disappointingly turned out to have a fault. It had a lot of volatile alcohol on the nose, on the palate there was a strange graininess and the finish was bitter. We felt it was not as it should be, so that was 19 euros down the sink. It was one of the ones I brought back from the shop in Santenay. C'est la vie.

More pleasingly I can report that this Pommard Vieilles Vignes from Latour-Labille was a stunner. From G's cellar - he wisely picked up a case. It wasn't very Pommard in character which I suppose is a criticism, but if I'd been guessing blind I think I would have thought it was a Chambolle, which is definitely praise. It was a vibrant purple colour and G described the nose as super-charged beaujolais with violet and cinnamon. On the palate it was pretty, elegant, had lovely fruit. I detected victoria plums while G got chocolate orange peel. There was a lot going on! It was drinking now but there's no rush.

Also from G's cellar, a Gevrey-Chambertin 2005 from Huguenot. This had a very distinct nose of pear drops and tasted of liquorice root but was surprisingly easy drinking for a Gevrey (which I am coming to realise I don't like very much except in winter with hearty red meat). It was smooth and remarkably light for a wine from 2005. It had an excellent finish, and went very well with my slow-cooked ragu sauce. Again, drinking but will keep.

I picked up a case of this 2000 Beaune 1er cru Clos du Roi from Domaine Chanson at auction. It's very old school red Burgundy with a hefty dose of the sugar bag. We got stewed plums on the palate. I quite like it, but it's relatively rustic. It wasn't expensive by premier cru standards so I shan't feel guilty necking it on a weeknight as autumn draws in. Originally we gave it an 8 but I suspect it may end up being downgraded to a 7 - the jury is still out.

I brought back this Rully 1er cru Clos St Jacques 2007 from Domaine de la Folie from the shop in Meursault back in January. It was a pale gold colour and had lemon and butter on the nose. It was quite light and refreshing on the palate, with good acidity, and had an excellent finish. We toyed with giving it a 9 but settled for a respectable 8. At around 18 euros it was good value.

Thought I'd better mention this since it's become staple drink of choice over the past couple of weeks - halves of La Goya manzanilla from Corney and Barrow. Argh! It's not on their website any more! I hope this is a temporary blip as I was just about to order some more. It's around £4.50 a half, a snip. Delicious cold from the fridge and best to drink it all in one go if possible as it deteriorates overnight.

And finally, what have we here? This morning I was cleaning my flat and took the rubbish down to the bin room where there's a little shelf where occasionally people leave stuff which other people can then take if they want (usually knackered house plants etc.) This morning I found two bottles of 1982 Chambertin grand cru "Couvent de la Visitation" 1982 from Patriarche sitting there, alongside a half-drunk bottle of Crofts ruby port. I wasn't tempted by the port but swiped the Chambertin and am very curious about it. I wonder if it was an unwanted present. Anyway, very nice of whoever to leave it in the bin room for me to find! The levels don't look too bad for such an old wine and the labels are quite pristine as you can see. It also has a terrible drawing on it of a sort of courtyard thing, which according to the Inverse Law of Labels bodes well. I think I shall try one with G and see how we get on - I shall report back. If all goes well, the other could be a perfect candidate for a Swiss Pinot Noir Society dinner...

Dinner at the Gilbert Scott, 25th May

I'm not sure what happened in May, but things went a bit crazy. If I'm giving the impression that I constantly eat out at fine restaurants, that is not the case at all, but there just seem to have been a run of them lately. It'll be back to porridge, as granny used to say, shortly.

I'd been aware that the St Pancras Hotel was about to re-open in the near future and in an idle moment at work googled it to find that the restaurant had in fact just opened. It's called the Gilbert Scott after the architect of the hotel and is run by Marcus Wareing although he seems remarkably reticent about it and there's little mention of him on the website.

My only previous visit here was a few years ago when the hotel was derelict. G and I went on a tour of the building and it was an absolutely magical experience. I remember the staircase being stunningly beautiful, and it was sad to see this wonderful building rotting away, so I'm thrilled that it's been restored, and in my not-very-expert opinion, they've done a smashing job.

C and I agreed to go there for the "early supper" deal after work one evening (£19 for two courses, £24 for three). Walking through the front entrance one immediately finds oneself in the bar, which is spectacular. NB this is the bar for the Gilbert Scott, not the Booking Office Bar for the hotel which is also on my hit list.

I'd certainly like to come here for cocktails some time, but on this occasion we were booked in for dinner so we were taken into the main restaurant.

This photo doesn't quite do justice to the room. The ceiling is very high indeed and when sitting down, one could barely see out of the windows which open onto the front sweep of the hotel drive.

It was only about 6.00 so the dining room was fairly empty and there were lots of smartly-dressed waiting staff hovering about. We were given big paper menus which had an awful lot of dishes on them, and then in the bottom-left hand corner we spotted our early supper deal. The wine list was also quite confusing and it took me a while to notice that within the various categories, they did not proceed in an orderly fashion from cheap and cheerful to super-expensive, but were all jumbled up from a price point of view. Not helpful.

We chose a bottle of Argentinian Torrontes which at £30 was one of the cheapest bottles on the list and asked for a jug of water. Perhaps it was just me but I thought the waitress's lips curled slightly at that point. After the wine had been poured, the bottle was whisked away and I don't know where it went - it certainly wasn't nearby. Note this point because it becomes significant later...

For starters, C had the pork pie and I had Southwold sprats with ketchup. Both servings were enormous - the pork pie was more like a large slab of terrine with some pastry round the edge, and my bowl of sprats appeared to be bottomless. In fact I would go so far to say that the portion sizes were rather too big, given the lack of accompanying side-dishes or garnishes to liven things up.

For our main course we both had the Cumberland sausage and mash, which came in cute individual little pans. It did exactly what it said on the tin, and the mash was very delicious and clearly had about a pound of butter in it, but again one felt the need of a vegetable or side dish just for variety.

For pudding, C had the turkish delight cheesecake (I think she'd been thinking about it all day) while I went for the Sussex pond pudding sundae. This time, the portions were miniscule! One had to do a double-take to spot anything on one's plate. C's first impression of the cheesecake was that it was very disappointing and not what she'd expected, but then it grew on her. I got to try a bit and we agreed that it was more like a mousse than a cheesecake. My pudding was nice but nothing spectacular and I ate it in about 2 mouthfuls.

Throughout the meal our wine glasses had been assiduously topped up, but each time the bottle had been whisked away to its mystery location. I found this very irritating and over-controlling. I've had enough bad experiences with wine waiters to prefer to be left to refill my own glass. It also made it hard to judge how much we'd had - were we 2/3 through the bottle or had we finished it?

I reckoned we'd finished it, so I was quite surprised when a waiter came back and gave us a very hearty refill. On tasting, this wine was very bland, some sort of pinot grigio if I had to guess, and certainly not our zingy Torrontes! This presented us with a dilemma. We'd clearly been given two glasses of someone else's wine. What should we do? In the end we kept quiet about it (I didn't want to cause a fuss, and nor did I want to risk having to pay for someone else's stuff) and left it. They must have got us confused with another table - a pretty shocking thing to happen in a place like this. Mistakes do happen, but if they didn't have such a silly system with the wine, this particular mistake wouldn't have been possible.

We had a coffee, and then got the bill. C noticed that a £2 cover charge had been slapped on for each of us. I knew this was likely to happen, as I'd read Nicholas Lander's review of the restaurant in the FT. C asked the waitress what the cover charge was for, and we listened to 2 minutes of drivel about how the price of vegetables varied with the seasons and the cover charge was to avoid the need to change the prices of the dishes each day. I've never heard such a load of claptrap in my life and sat there trying to keep a straight face. Really, when is the last time one heard of paying a cover charge in this day and age? It just seems greedy.

Including food, wine, coffee, cover charge and service, our bill was £100 for two - yet again - but we left with a sour taste in our mouths feeling that we'd been screwed over. Before we went, I'd been wondering about taking my family here for lunch to celebrate my birthday which is coming up soon, but by the time we had finished I'd decided there was no way I'd be coming back to the restaurant in the near future. I might visit the bar though!

Summer party masterclass at Claridges, 21st May

To celebrate my mother's birthday, I took her to a summer party masterclass at Claridges. We arrived at 11.30 and were shown into the Fumoir Bar, which I didn't know existed! It's a very small bar in the middle of the building, with black and white pictures of glamorous women smoking while wearing big hats. Here we had coffee and pastries and met the other people on the class. There were only six of us, all women. I can't say I was surprised by that, as the masterclass was billed as answering questions along the lines of "What are THE season's canapes of choice?"

After some chitchat, Michael the extremely smooth food and beverage manager took us down to the kitchens in the basement and into a room which apparently is normally where they keep/carve the meat! A table had been laid out with six director-style stools round it. Here we were introduced to Martyn Nail, the executive chef.

I'd been under the impression that Gordon Ramsay ran the restaurant at Claridges so wasn't quite clear where Martyn fit into the system but it turned out that Ramsay's restaurant is completely separate from the hotel kitchen. For the hotel, they have 55 people working in the kitchen, but not all at once. They were mainly hidden from view in different rooms, but the atmosphere seemed very calm and there wasn't any shouting, although there was the occasional bang or crash!

Martyn showed us how to make a range of canapes:

• peppered goats cheese with raspberry and pine nut
• blinis with smoked salmon and chives
• asparagus with blue cheese on a walnut biscuit
• cherry tomatoes with crab, on a little swirly pastry disc
• tuna sashimi with ginger and coriander
• scallops wrapped in pancetta with tomato compote
• lamb kebab with pea puree

He was very down-to-earth and and the atmosphere was informal so we felt we could ask him anything. There was a lot of discussion about where we could get some of the ingredients, where he got his ideas from (Waitrose!), and what it was like working in the hotel where they put on many events including film premieres. They had three weddings in the hotel that afternoon and apparently the brides were all arriving at the same time! I was impressed by the logistics and it was a fascinating behind-the-scenes insight.

There was real attention to detail in the canapes, e.g. with pea shoots being used as a garnish, because they are very pretty, and raspberries being cut into quarters. I don't think I've ever halved a raspberry let alone quartered one! We watched in awe, and also with a twinge of jealousy as all his ingredients had been prepared and put in little plastic tubs beforehand by more junior chefs.

The cooking demo went on for about an hour and a half and then we were taken back upstairs to the Fumoir Bar where two charming and lively young men - one the head bartender of the main Claridges Bar, and one the head bartender of the Fumoir Bar - did a double act where they made cocktails while we sat around the bar and drank them and ate the canapes which were brought up from the kitchen. The cocktails included:

• a bellini
• a variation on the bellini involving strawberries and creme de cassis
• Pimm's
• Pimm's Royale
• a mojito
• a pear and passionfruit variation on the mojito, which we loved
• a gin fizz
• a ruby fizz, made with sloe gin and grenadine

By this stage we were fairly merry so we didn't actually drink everything that was going. Unbelievable, I know... Eventually at about 4.00 we poured ourselves into a taxi and went to meet my father for a welcome coffee at the Wellcome Collection. We were given goody bags containing an apron and a jar of jam, and earlier on we'd been given a booklet containing all the recipes.

The whole thing was a fantastic and exclusive experience and we felt very pampered and looked after throughout. At £165 a pop it wasn't cheap but it was a wonderful way to spend a day. Most importantly I think Mum enjoyed it! What on earth will I give her next year?