cluelessaboutwine - wine blog

Squidgy on the Inside

2009-07-02T09:36:00.007+01:00

Some major wine producers are starting to use plastic bottles.

There really is nothing new in wine plastic containers, as we have all on occasion transferred wine from a box bladder to our own. I am not the world's biggest fan of box wine or 'casks'. They do not pour in a gentle flow, the wine jets out with a vulgar gush with more enthusiasm than an emergency comfort stop at a motorway service station, creating an almost foamy head in the glass, and often the floor. Wine brutalised by the bladder.

While we think we appreciate the sizable positive environmental impact of lightweight easy to produce recyclable plastic wine containers, there are other factors to consider before we all turn into Von Hagens plastinated people simply because it is more convenient.

Plastic wine containers are permeable and let in oxygen over time, which makes them vastly inferior to glass (oxidization is mostly bad news for the delicate structures of wine). Tests show that seeping oxygen can adversely change the character of unopened boxed and 'PET' plastic bottled wine from roughly eight months onwards. This means limiting the naturally recommended window to drink wine even more. The wine has barely taken its first steps before it has to be released into the wild. Admittedly most wine in these sorts of containers is designed to be drunk straight away, but the forcibly shortened drinking window bothers me.

Nobody blinked when milk went plastic, but milk has a very short shelf life and is a very different beast. If you are an obsessive milk sniffer, then this is maybe a great transferable skill for plastic bottled wine, which will probably also have a sell by date stamped on it like the box wine.

These new layered plastic containers can have oxygen 'scavengers' in them. Unfortunately they only work for 12 months or so. As I am no scientist my mind thinks of 'PET plastic scavengers' and has a picture of some tiny bloated spikey creature with a pot belly, languishing in the dregs high on wine and O2.

Boxed wine is not hermetically sealed, contrary to popular belief, but once opened, if you are lucky most of the wine will expel without letting any oxygen into the bag. The last glass or so can be problematic, and often this is when you let the air in with a unpleasant ripple of belching (or maybe that is the replete oxygen scavenger being flatulent). The short term advantage of boxed wine is that once opened it can last for a long time (four weeks plus), whereas PET plastic bottles not only have a short shelf life, but also are as susceptible to air as their glass counterparts once opened.

Where does all this new packaging technology leave us?... In an world of ugly inconvenient convenience in my opinion.

With the slow removal of the permanence, authority and glamour of glass, wines may take on the appeal of a sort of boozy grape smoothie, chosen indifferently by hurried shoppers over a mango, kumquat and coconut juice.

The good news for glass lovers is that current plastic technology is not up to the job of keeping your treasure chest of Bordeaux safe for several years, so glass will be around for a long time to come.

Now back to the environmental impact. Yes plastic is lighter and therefore greener to transport, but that is not the whole story. Apparently unlike glass, plastic cannot be recycled over and over again because it degrades significantly in the recycling process. Therefore the ideal image you have in your head of your plastic bottle being turned into another one is just fantasy for now. More likely a bin bag. Producing and recycling plastic bottles also releases lots more toxic nasties than glass bottles.

Suddenly this new form of bottle seems even less appealing.

Perhaps plastic bottles are only good for the producers who can save on shipping and manufacturing costs.

I suppose to be thorough you need to work out the carbon (and other) emissions in manufacture, transport and recycling of glass bottles vs plastic taking into account the degradation of recycled plastic. Sounds too complex a job for me and my maths. Anyone?

Pounds, Shilling and Wine

2009-06-30T11:01:00.009+01:00

I recently had to find cheap wine in bulk for an event.

Where on earth do you start?

If you are just a normal casual wine drinker like me then your experience of different grape varieties, regions, vintages and producers will be a tiny thimble full in the bewildering, aggressively brand led choices out there.

You walk into the supermarket wine aisle and the walls become the Dan Brown cryptex, the wrong choice and you and your guests will end up wallowing in vinegar. Lots of eye catching labels draw your eye, known brands mesmerise you with familiarity and confidence. The Old World French wines sit there elegantly, tempting you with their labels that look more like a wedding invitation from the producer. The possibility of impressing your guests with a relatively unknown Burgundy excites you, until you see the price. Over to New World and you spot Oyster Bay and think it looks like a bargain, until you remember that you have confused it with Cloudy Bay, the brand that demands the big bucks. By this time your head is spinning. Not a wine expert in sight, just a lady who happily tells you that there is a two for one offer on loo rolls.

Exit.

Back home and onto the Internet. You first search for discounted wine in supermarkets, and have some success. Your search is 100% price driven and you have no idea what has forced this price down say from £7.99 to £4.99. Could it be the fact the wine is actually rubbish, or it is just past its best? Is it a blend of average wine tarted up with additives to create a dull predictable homogeneous year on year big brand taste?

You cave in out of frustration and order one bottle to try with friends. Half of them say it is ok, some screw up their faces in disgust, and others just want to drink any free solution containing some alcohol. You then discover that the supermarket can only provide half of the required amount of the stuff.

Back online.

Relying on Internet reviews of bottles of wine is a bit of a lottery. The rise of 'shilling' is partly to blame. Don't panic, the 'economic downturn' (we are apparently past the crunchy bit now) is not resurrecting old money, despite the fact we cannot even make our new money properly (the current faulty 20p coins with no dates). To shill is to pretend to be a genuine customer, but really be in the back pocket of the seller. It is hard to trust wine reviews, unless you can be sure of the authenticity due to a little research around the reviewer. There is no eBay style review of reviewers. No centralised aggregate trustworthiness system. Obviously there are lots of great shill free sites (try saying that after a few glasses..) and the rich tapestry of some of the established wine blogs are a very good bet (although I am bound to say that). Maybe someone should invent a shill free certified stamp or something, as much good as that will do.

So where to next....I suppose it is time to bother some of your friends again and ask for their ideas, assuming that they are not covertly working for some shady wine pyramid selling scheme.

You get some good recommendations like 'we had this wine at our wedding and it was perfect'. The problem is that they may well have been married a couple of years ago, and that wine is long gone, well certainly the vintage, maybe not the brand. They may well have driven to an obscure vineyard in the depths of France and spent £3.00 per bottle, ending up with a superb wine, a one off. You also want to be original, an Indiana Jones in the world of wine, flexing your deep Sunday supplement wine knowledge with your guests, feeling innovative and cavalier.

Off to a wine shop.

Immediately you are seduced by the smell of the wooden wine racks and the intimate feel of the place. All the prices are hand written and there is a little bio on each bottle, a touching and helpful life story. The shop keeper has a great knowledge of wine and guides you to a batch of he has been trying to shift for a long time...stop...now I am now being way too cynical. The wine shop is a great bet. You can develop a trusting relationship with the owner/manager and hopefully find a good bottle. You then go online and try to find it cheaper, which of course you do.

Poor independent wine shop.

Unfortunately you find a double bluff type shill review saying the wine is terrible. More confusion sets in.

In reality, after reading guides online to choosing cheap wine, the information seems to instantly evaporate on application. You need to put a considerable amount of work in if you are to go it alone.

Some pointers like these work for some and not others -

Try to buy wine produced from a more defined area and maybe not so popular general region (research required)

Check how old the wine is (lots of cheaper wine is designed to be drunk young)

Look for unusual grape varietals and blends (for example some of the Italian varietals are excellent and good value)

Try to spot the quality cheaper New World bargains (some say it is better wine for your money than Old World wine in the budget bracket)

Make sure the bottle and label are impressive, attractive and/or intelligently understated , as visual perceptions can dramatically influence taste.

Ask for a bulk discount and see where you end up (no-brainer)

Try the wine over a couple of evenings, with and without food (preferably similar food to the event).

Do a blind tasting of several possibilities with friends

and so on.....

What did I end up doing? I went for an unusual New World blend of grapes on the advice of a wine merchant I trusted that brought the price down, along with a bulk discount. I did a blind tasting with friends and it came out on top.

note - If you are worried about Champagne then read this post I wrote recently. In a nutshell cheap can be excellent. Even try Prosecco (an Italian dry sparkling wine) as an alternative.

Rudolf's Bio

2009-06-23T21:02:00.013+01:00

I am still, like many, struggling with the word 'organic'. Branded to mainstream attention by major food retailers as a healthy, ethical, bourgeois choice, it seems to mean a spectacular confusion of manured tomatoes, happy chickens and celebrity chefs.

If you are finding that concept difficult to get your head around try 'biodynamics', invented by Rudolf Steiner, the phrase coined by his humble followers. It predates most of the organic movement and is wacky stuff.

What came first the organic chicken or the biodynamic egg?

So how is a bottle of wine going to educate me about this particular type of parentage? In short it is probably not. Studying an inanimate bottle is a hybrid game of charades and hide and seek. Lets see..organic is three syllables, biodynamic is five, already it is going to be a struggle. The English language is melting into 'text speak', so the long words and ever shorter attention spans are a really bad combination when it comes to getting a message across.

Where was I...oh yes what is this biothingamajig?

There was a news story very recently about how the moon cycles affect the taste of wine, and that pretty much sums up biodynamics. But do not laugh too much because major brands like Tesco and Marks and Spencer are said to be taking this biodynamic loony (sorry lunar) calendar seriously and only let their wine critics taste on the 'good' days. The calendar was produced by a German great grandmother called Maria Thun (or was it Thumb, related to Tom..you couldn't make this stuff up, could you?)

In all seriousness biodynamics has major benefits to the local environment as everything is pesticide free. Wines may well have interesting characteristics due to the rather eccentric 'organic' (here we go again, the 'o' word has slipped in when I do not really understand it) soil preparations like..

preparation 505 - 'Oak bark fermented in the skull of a domestic animal'

or

preparation 506 - 'Dandelion flowers fermented in cow mesentery'.

I suppose, through the eyes of a biodynamic wine producer, the vines seem like acupuncture needles in the back of a rather large elephant which has been regularly massaged with essential oils. Sceptics may say this creates either a placebo effect or genuinely better wine simply due to the extra care taken, rather than the hocus pocus.

Tenders of these challenging viticulutural eco-pockets are truly passionate about the land so I really do not care how weird and wonderful this all is, anything that environmentally friendly is good in my spell book.

Low On Juice

2009-06-18T14:36:00.005+01:00

My phone is on it last legs. It only vibrates now, too lethargic and cynical to ring. It has seen the rise of the iPhone and has just given up I think, slowly developing an inferiority complex.

This means I am going to have to probably bite a chunk out of the Apple, and spend all my hard earned cash on an iPhone contract. Then I can be on the Internet wherever I am, sending tweets with one of the iPhone's rich application set.....that is until the battery gives out. I am told the Swiss Army Knife of phones is demanding on juice....

Like running a tank in the desert on tracks made of ice.

My current phone will be smugly awaiting for me to discover this, and knows I will probably be back. In truth, I just like the look and feel of the iPhone. The rest is irrelevant (sort of).

There are some wine apps for the iPhone which interest me. These are designed to help you source and choose wines.....sounds good doesn't it? I will let you know when I finally take the plunge.

Snooth have just released on of these apps which I aim to road test.

There are mixed reviews of some wine apps out there, and ultimately I get the impression that one app will not really be a good replacement for asking a member of staff in a good wine shop, but a complementary tool all the same.

Do not vacuum out your brains just yet and plug the iPhone into the void.

The choice of wine is ever more bewildering, probably not enough time on the iPhone's fragile life cycle to cope with the possibilities. I am sure that by the time I had typed in 'Gewurztraminer' to the slightly awkward touch screen keyboard (clearly engineered for The Borrowers' tiny hands) it would be too late and way too frustrating. Combine that with the inevitable half full mobile broadband Britain and you have a nightmare.

My method is more to avoid wines I have bought, drunk and hated. The 'horse has already bolted' approach. You can only really know what you like by trying the stuff. After all....

'One man's meat is another man's poison'

Boiled Aphids

2009-06-09T15:34:00.006+01:00

I have a small herb garden. I am not very green fingered, but am very proud of the modest crop. My mint is particularly vivacious right now, and I thought I would put it to good use by making my own mint tea, and try to impress some visitors.

All you need to do is to pick a few fresh leaves, rinse them, bruise them a bit and put them into a pot with some boiling water. After drinking the tea I noticed some brown bits in the bottom of my cup. If it was packet tea I could put it down to tea 'dust', but this was obviously not the case. Looking more carefully I soon realised that they were lots of poor minute aphids that had been boiled alive.

'At least it was quick', was my first reaction.

I kept quiet about this infestation and hoped it went unnoticed. So plentiful were they, that I am sure if I had turned my cup upside down a passing clairvoyant could have performed an aphid reading.

On further inspection my mint plant was indeed hiding an expanding colony of aphids, cosily tucked under the leaves and very difficult to wash off. You would need a scanning electron microscope to spot them, and a vicious dentists tool to dislodge them.

I have not made mint tea since.

Have you ever thought about all the bugs in the wine making process that escape prevention and cleaning methods, and end up being crushed with the grapes? Grape vines attract aphids, which in turn attract beautiful ladybirds who delight in feasting on them. This normally would be a good thing, but when you have a bumper aphid year, the quantity ladybirds becomes a real problem.

Ladybirds, despite their rather elegant appearance harbour a very nasty chemical, that in tiny quantities can completely change the character of a wine. This is normally used as their defense mechanism, and when there are too many crushed ladybirds in wine it can cause a condition known as 'ladybird taint'. I am told it is sort of green vegetable aroma. I unsurprisingly have not actually eaten a ladybird, or crept up behind one to scare it enough for it to produce this chemical, so if you are an open mouthed cyclist and have had the inevitable misfortune of gathering one, please let me know what they taste like.

If this idea of jus de ladybird in some wines bothers you, then there is a choice. Scientists have worked out that wine cartons sealed with an aluminium layer actively reduce the taint, a major trade off being that wine keeps less well in cartons (it is more susceptible to oxidization, which I wrote about here).

For me, I would rather put one thousand ladybirds in my Magimix and mix the resulting juice with my wine than drink from a vulgar wine carton. Naturally I would give them the option to 'fly away home' before attempting this heinous act of mass extermination.

Anyone for Home Secretary?

2009-06-05T16:32:00.003+01:00

Extraordinary times. It feels like we have no government, a childish game of musical chairs is taking place, with the press as the games master and everyone else sitting in the amphitheatre with thumbs mostly down.

I can barely reach for my glass to discover another politician has been fed to the lions.

The Freedom of Information Act to MPs expenses was a bit like opening that witch's bottle recently discovered on a building site in Greenwich. It was mostly full of brimstone, urine and nails, need I say more.

Witch bottles have a strong connection with wine as they are Bellarmines, which were originally stoneware wine flagons from the Rhineland. Apparently these days witch bottles are a little bit more sophisticated containing rosemary, pins and needles and red wine. Reminds me of a big red I drank the other day....great material for my tasting chart.

Prehistoric Vienetta

2009-06-01T11:08:00.019+01:00

It has been incredibly hot the last few days which has meant lots of barbeques. Friends are more likely to bring white wine or rose which often needs to be chilled quickly, or else you will find ice cubes floating in your wine, a terrible state of affairs.

Like most of my friends, for a super fast chill I have been putting wine bottles into the frozen wastelands of my freezer amongst the prehistoric Vienetta, frozen peas, vodka and not forgetting the bolognese mix that I thought I would use a week or so later, about 10 years ago. I normally have to find an ice axe and crampons before attempting this.

As you can see my freezer has a serious short term memory problem and the wine usually ends up as a real alcopop, discovered at the next party when more friends arrive with more bottles to chill. If you are interested in how temperature affects alcohol read my old post here .

The freezer is wholly inadequate and does not seem to do the job quickly enough. I have recently discovered that the best way to cool wine in just 20 minutes or so is to submerge the bottle in a bucket of water with ice, and add a couple of spoons of rock salt. Hey presto perfectly chilled wine. Those beautiful reassuring drops of condensation form on the side of your glass, like the wine is doing all the sweating for you under the heat of the sun, and every sip imparts flavour while cooling you from within.

At this point you may well wonder why there was a need to add salt to the bucket of ice and water. Doesn't it just lower the freezing temperature of water (as in road treatment in the winter) and not actually decrease the temperature of the solution? Well the salt does actually have the effect of reducing the temperature. It lowers the water's freezing point and the ice starts to melt. The energy to melt the ice has to come from somewhere, and it is supplied by the heat in the surrounding water solution, hence a temperature reduction. Old fashioned ice cream makers used to work in this way, and you can in theory achieve temperatures down to -21 degrees C.

So my Vienetta, while old, is not so useless after all and has locked within a deep understanding of this process in every ice crystal of its being.

Remember that most white wines should be served between 7 and 10 degrees C, so do not get carried away, or you may as well be drinking very cold water, the subtle aromas of the wine lost in the chill.

Frozen Dog Turd

2009-05-29T14:26:00.005+01:00

I am enjoying a glass of red wine with some pate on toast. Sounds a simple snack, but recent news studies tell me there are hidden depths to all of this.

The way I hold my glass has now been attributed to a personality type. A Dr Glenn Wilson studied at 500 drinkers and decided that you should fit into one of eight glass grasping personality profiles.

There does not seem to be a 'blogger' personality type. That would be me, 'attempting to drink and type at the same time, spilling most of my wine into the keyboard'. If my prose gets fruity I normally blame it on the raised alcohol level of my keyboard.

Moving onto the pate, a report has appeared that claims us humans cannot distinguish pate from dog food. In the blind taste tests, although the participants disliked the dog food more than the other offerings, they could not pick it out as dog food. The fact that dog food came out worst in taste is enough for me to say it was identified.

The ground up sinews and bones of some poor chicken say, is vastly different to the chicken livers delicately mixed with herbs, onions and butter that I am eating.

I will probably venture into the freezer and have some chocolate ice cream later, or could it be frozen dog turd? Yet another pointless scientific experiment in the 'offaling'.

A Lung Full of Air

2009-05-28T13:19:00.011+01:00

I run into this really annoying problem with the elaborate recycling regime in Cambridgeshire.

I normally collect all of my wine bottles and pop them into a green plastic box ready for collection. Unfortunately this box is extremely hazardous.

The dregs from the bottles ultimately run and gather into putrid oxidized pools at the bottom of the box. A sort of dark rose that could happily burn a hole through several floors if spilt, much like the blood from the film Alien. This is a perfect, if not slightly extreme example of the poor fate of an open bottle of wine if left too long before consuming.

Moving this box ready for collection is a nightmare. The evil liquid invariably finds its way out of engineered holes and all over my trousers (I am sure the box designers are still chuckling about this 'feature'). I arrive back in the house looking and smelling like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The fantastic speed of the action of oxygen on wine is both excellent and really frustrating. Initially it shakes hands with the wine, and is perfectly charming, even improving the taste of some wines for a short while. Then, just when you least expect it, nasty things start happening and you eventually end up with vin aigre which is old French for 'sour wine' and hence the word vinegar.

This presents more issues for me as I rarely get more that three quarters of my way through a bottle in the working week, when it becomes unpalatable (after maybe two to three days depending on the wine). This happens due to multiple bottles being opened to complement my evening meal.

This is where I wished half bottles were a solution. But they are really not. They age in their cute 375ml bottles at breakneck speed due to the ratio of oxygen to wine, so when opened a half bottle will often taste different to its larger counterpart containing exactly the same wine. In a nutshell they carry unpredictably volatile contents, exacerbated greatly when opened. They are also very hard to get hold of, difficult to store and quite frankly give the impression of a distinct lack of a full commitment to wine, a slightly dull, cautious approach.

They look like they belong in a large dolls house, not on the dining room table.

The normal 750ml bottle has so much allure and romance. For example it is said that until the 1600s all bottles were hand blown, and the standard size we have today was dictated by the glass blowers breath, a lung full of air. Who am I to argue with that.

On the other hand I often buy sweet wine in half bottles which will seemingly keep until the sun turns into a red giant (no, nothing whatsoever to do with GM sweetcorn) in about 5 billion years, and boils off the bottle, and indeed us too.

So are there good solutions for keeping bottles drinkable after opening? I spoke briefly about one contraption back in 2006 here . But there are other ways, like squirting inert gas into the bottle and replacing the cork (sounds a real palaver).

Maybe I could just talk to my bottles, and then the hot air (CO2) will gradually replace the oxygen inside.....but I am sure tedium of my monologue may well turn the wine sour anyway.

The Big Bitter

2009-05-26T14:41:00.013+01:00

My somewhat fickle palate seems to be temporarily drifting away from New World wines. I have been on a mission in the last few months to specifically hunt out bargain Burgundies.

So where is Burgundy?

If you are looking at a map of France, find Paris and drop a little bit south and east. This is Auxerre where the region starts. It stretches south in a narrow strip made up of several areas. North to south they are Chablis, Cote de Nuits, Cotes de Beaune, Cotes de Chalonnaise, Maconnaise and Beujolais. Cote just means slope or hill. Once you have reached Lyon in the south the region has ended. The grape varieties are mainly Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, then Gamay, Aligote and Pinot Blanc.

I am predominantly a red wine drinker. I love the more quaffable complex Pinot Noir and easy drinking Gamay found in Burgundy. The bottles are always difficult to decipher at first. Unlike New World wines, you normally just get the region on the label not a whisper of the grape variety.

Terroir is everything in France, in other words the French 'sense of place' and geographical region is all important.

Far south in Burgundy you end up in Beaujolais (although there is debate as to whether this is part of Bourgogne) which is mainly the Gamay grape. Georges Duboeuf is a well known large Beaujolais producer I seem to drink lots of.

So with this flurry into the Old World I had my cousin over to dinner the other night and purchased a bottle of Fleurie (a Beaujolias, so the Gamay grape). He in turn produced an Amarone, a wine I have not had in a long while.

Amarone looks innocuous enough from the label. It plainly declares that it is a Valpolochella (from the Veneto region in North east Italy), and I always associate that with light fruity wine made from a blend mostly of the Corvina grape. This could not be further from the truth.

My Fleurie had just stepped into the ring with Mike Tyson.

Amarone is made from dried grapes. They are allowed to basically turn into raisins on straw mats or drying chambers before being made into wine . This accounts for the power of the wine. At 15% plus, it is a big hitter.

We polished off the Fleurie before the meal and then drank the Amarone with the food. It was delicious - deep, dark and dangerous. Amarone literally means the 'big bitter'. It was rumoured to have come about by chance when a producer was trying to produce sweet Recioto wine and ended up fermenting the dried grapes too long, turning all the sugar into alcohol.

Interestingly, Hannibal Lecter actually drank Amarone with his fava beans in the book, not Chianti as depicted in the film.

In truth my real 'big bitter' last week was the CAMRA Cambridge Beer festival with over 200+ real ales to sample. There was some wine on offer from a local producer at Chilford Vineyards which was deep and heavy, but would still have been knocked for six by the Amarone.

Meatball Marinara

2009-04-24T11:03:00.008+01:00

It is quite frankly amazing that I am still here. The media is pummeling us with so many health caveats at the moment that I am unsure what to believe.

Apparently the Subway's six-inch Meatball Marinara contains roughly the same amount of salt as 'nine small packets of Walkers Ready Salted crisps'. Well, with a name like six-inch Meatball Marinara, forgive me if that does not seem surprising (on a side note, I did not think that small packets of crisps existed any more. When I walk into a pub, all I am presented with these days is a garish selection of dustbin bags full of mostly air and the occasional large genetically modified slice of potato generously dusted with salt).

So is my glass of wine now hiding an evil payload of toxic substances (apart from the obvious)?

One glass of wine has approximately the same calorie content as a slice of cake (120). The average wine drinker consumes 2000 calories each month which is like eating an extra 38 roast beef dinners every year. Wait a minute, that is only four glasses a week.

That means I am eating an awful lot of beef.....

So how about salt in wine? If your liver could take it then you would have to drink 100 bottles to exceed your maximum daily intake of salt. So no problem there.

It is all so confusing, especially after the u-turn on attitudes to eating eggs for example, which are now deemed fine after all, unless you put salt on them of course.

I was in a pub the other day and ordered a pickled egg. They always look so unappealing, sulking in a swamp of vinegar, deliberately not revealing how many decades they have been waiting to be picked. I ate my healthy egg in a very unhealthy traditional way.

I added it to a very generous bag of crisps all washed down with a glass of Merlot. Delicious.

Back to the 1980s

2009-04-11T14:21:00.019+01:00

I have just returned from visiting friends near Lisbon. I had been to Portugal before, but sadly not ventured out of the Algarve, drawn by grilled sardines and the warm waters of the Mediterranean.

I spent some time in Lisbon first and stayed at the York House hotel in the Lapa district, which was charming, once a 17th century Carmelite convent. Effortless shabby chic would be the best way to describe my room (at about 120 euros a night). Everything seems so expensive at the moment with the euro pound parity. Apparently the best value plan for longer stays is to rent a small apartment in the centre.

Lisbon is built on several steep hills and this was certainly a shock after being used to flat Cambridgeshire. Thankfully there are plenty of trams to pull you up the inclines, and lots of cafes to dawdle in.

The basic table wine in Portugal is meant to be excellent. It is often worth just sticking to that rather than ordering a more expensive bottle. With this in mind I wandered up to the Bairro Alto district to have lunch. This is one of the oldest districts in Lisbon, with Rua Garrett and the famous Cafe a Brasileira. I found a small restaurant in a side street, and as it was hot ordered a 'house' half bottle of rose.

Stupidly I had forgotten about Mateus Rose, the mass market sparkling medium rose that accounted for 40% of wine exports from Portugal in the 1980's. Hey presto, the waiter kindly deposited a half bottle of that very stuff on my table. All I needed was a Miami Vice white shoulder padded suit and the illusion would have been complete. Looking around, all the other tables have delicious looking bottles of white and red. A great start to my Portuguese wine experience.

Moving swiftly on I found a superb restaurant that evening called A Travessa, an anonymous doorway in a side street leading to a gastronomic marathon. The cover charge seemed to provide endless interesting nibbles, followed by a stream of amuse-bouche finishing in the most amazing oysters I have slurped in a long while. This is where I at last sampled some great local Portuguese wine. The wine was from the Douro region in the north where port is also made. There were a few port undertones in the wine, and it had a heavy, full feel about it. Delicious.

Portuguese time is very relaxing. Nothing seems rushed and that suits a short break down to the ground. Portugal only has around 10 million inhabitants and is about three-quarters the size of England with its population of 50+ million. Portugal does however grow dramatically in size with tourism, as about 12 million tourists visit each year, but still nothing on my own seemingly hectic overcrowded country.

I spent the next part of the trip in Sintra, a stunning town in the hills 16 miles north west of Lisbon where I salivated over a port shop selling vintage port from about 300 euros a bottle. I then moved to the coast and Cascais where I drank plenty of Portuguese white wine with fish that were practically jumping out of the sea onto your plate.

Bad memories of Mateus Rose were long gone.

The Case of the Mystery Bottle

2009-03-24T15:17:00.013Z

There is something rather Sherlock Holmes about this post.

I have had two rather odd eating out wine experiences recently.

The first was at a friend's birthday, held in a local gastropub (a good old British pub turned into a flash restaurant leaving no trace of a bar to sit at and sup beer, but retaining the pub feel in a sort of half-hearted way). We ordered a bottle of Champagne, and were promptly fetched several full glasses of fizz. The bottle nowhere to be seen.

The whole point of ordering Champagne is admiring the elegant bottle, cooled in a silver ice bucket and anticipating the extravagant pop on opening. This was all rudely robbed from the moment. May as well have been served up some cheap sparking wine...or maybe it was?

Champagne has proven difficult to pick out in blind tastes. Fairly ordinary sparkling wines can do better. This article from the Independent makes an interesting read and proves the point -

"According to the panel of tasters, the £24 Moët & Chandon Brut Imperial was inferior to a £3.99 cava from the Co-op"

I love the idea of sabrage, opening a Champagne bottle with a sword. This harks back to Napoleon's cavalry, the Hussars, and flamboyant displays with the saber. I will have a word with the management of the gastropub next time in advance.

The second strange occurrence happened very recently in an Italian restaurant. I looked at the wine list, and next to a cheap Montepulciano there was an intriguing Barbera D'Alba from Piedmont, North Italy. It is the third most planted red grape in Italy and has high acids levels, low tannins. It is also a high yield grape and can become lower in quality and more acid as a result of less than meticulous pruning. But it interested me, a 2006, aged in Oak and sounded rather nice.

The wine bottle arrived at the table already opened , a major sin. The wine also had the cork half in the bottle.... I poured it out for my brother and I to taste.

My brother first mentioned that the wine seemed odd. I agreed. Something did not seem right, and I am not talking about corked wine. This wine tasted more like the familiar house carafe wine, light, acid and no depth or oak whatsoever. Even a rich pasta dish could not cut through the astringent edge. I may be clueless about wine , but this bottle did seem like a cheap impostor.

Looking more closely the cork was not of that bottle, some might say guilty as charged. It is tricky being in this situation, especially as it was a special occasion and you do not want to cause a fuss. We left it and next time will insist on the bottle being opened at the table.

I suppose you always doubt your judgement, so I cannot truly point the finger at the restaurant. I will buy the same bottle and try it at home to make a proper comparison, which will naturally include gorging on homemade pasta and tiramisu.

Bubblegum

2009-03-13T17:45:00.014Z

If you pick up a large glass of rose and look through it, the failing dull winter light turns into a spectacular pink tinted sunset, remnants of holidays past. This is the place rose seems to be drunk most, abroad in much warmer climbs.

The French are extremely keen on the stuff, and about 1 in 5 bottles of wine sold in France is rose. Until relatively recently, if someone offered you a glass of rose in the UK, it was treated with as much disdain as some fizzy water that recently contained a piece of discarded bubblegum.

The French went out of their way to produce excellent rose, involving red wine grapes like Grenache, Syrah, Cabernet and Carignan. The skins are removed early on in the process, leaving the pink liquid to ferment. This quality fizzy juice was infectious and more and more people here are now quaffing the stuff on a hot summers day over a barbecue.

There is a threat on the pink tinted horizon. The process of blending to make rose, previously not permitted, may well soon be allowed by the European Commission to supply the ever growing global demand in places like China.

This puts the traditional production methods in France under threat, and could result in a totally different drink. Blending is simply mixing red and white wine until it looks and tastes like rose. A drink that unlike lovingly produced complex red wine grape rose, will contain lots of white wine, probably Sauvingon and Chardonnay.

You can imagine a wine producer looking into a barrel of white, grabbing a bottle of red plonk and pouring it in. Hey presto rose. Sounds a bit of a con, I want blood sweat and tears in my rose.

Blended rose has a feeling of a soda stream equivalent of a bottle of coke. I can see visions of rose being blended to order at a bar with one of those horrendous push button dispensers.

Quality seems to being compromised for market pressures. Back to bubblegum in a glass. The manufacturing process should be made clear on the label so we have an informed choice.

Quantitative Beesing

2009-03-02T18:44:00.017Z

It was one of those days today when nothing goes quite to plan.

I went out to get my brother's birthday present, and first port of call was the cash point. There were people using both available holes so I took a punt at the one on the right. It soon became apparent that the person in front of me was making a meal of of it and seemed to be all fingers and thumbs. He then kept producing more cards to try, like Jerry Sadowich with a bad magic trick.

As I was already breaching the the subtle rules of cash point etiquette in 'shoulder surfing' this person, I considered pushing into the other growing queue. No matter how hard you may try in this country, queue jumping is impossible. There is more chance of getting a table at The Fat Duck at Bray (even now while it is closed due to a food poisoning scare). Queues turn the most mild mannered people (like myself) into monsters, and I would be unceremoniously thrown out, and have to wander to the back, tail between legs. So no, I was not going there.

Humph.

Eventually the way was clear to extract the spoils of the governments quantitative easing policy (if there is no more cash in the system, just print your own). I feel like we are getting to a point where the money from my ancient Monopoly game is worth more (and the plastic houses more than bricks and mortar).

Suitably flush I went to a card shop. I suppose I am a fairly discerning card buyer, and I found myself staring at a dwindling selection of rubbish designs that have all done the rounds in Cambridge. DIY Potato shapes would be an improvement but do lack a certain maturity I suppose, and online cards just make be feel sick. Yes, why not just farm out all of your family birthdays to a dot com, let them source and send out presents and cards for you. Not a stretch for them to work out your families profiles and intimate likes and dislikes thanks to Facebook et al. and the public proliferation of personal information. Yes indeed, why not take away all of the thought and mechanize your life. Errm...no thanks.

I do however find choosing cards in public a deeply personal experience. Irrationally, the idea of someone else scrutinizing my choices bothers me, I am always in a fluster to get the card and get out as quickly as possible.

I am ranting a bit today, sorry about that, most unlike me. Remainders of a red wine head.

On a positive note the weather now has a spring feel, getting ready for the burst of colour. Sadly this reminded me of an article I recently read on the dwindling bee population.

Einstein famously did not say "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live".

The statement is intensely worrying all the same and holds some truth. Just when I had started dealing with global warming and the credit crunch combined, off buzz the bees. Mobile phones, Colony Collapse Disorder, pesticides and our general interference are all blamed. Thankfully grape vines are wind pollinated, so in a post-bee apocalyptic world, after a hard days pollination with paint brushes, you could still drown your sorrows with a fine Bordeaux from an overflowing European wine lake. The cider drinkers out there really should panic.

The article actually made me buy a share in a bee colony somewhere in Shropshire to help the cause, as I selfishly do not want to lose my apple a day.

I wish quantitative beesing was also possible.

Hula Heat

2009-02-16T12:39:00.025Z

It's cold out there this evening and it is now past midnight. Due to my current penny pinching nature the heating switched itself off much earlier, so my hands are almost rigid with cold while typing this.

I am a bit of a night owl, and find bed is the last resort. I would much rather sip wine, eat Hula Hoops, and write down my random thoughts into the 'cloud' that is the internet. Speaking of which I have just joined Twitter. I am unsure why as I cannot reconcile doing and reporting on doing at the same time.

It looks like a full time job tattling on Twitter.

In fact it would probably turn your days into sitting at a 'device', reporting on imaginary exploits and carving a fantasy bite-size life for any bored follower to read. Ah yes, of course, if you thought that was a drain on time, you have to follow as well.

Maybe I am better off hiring a personal assistant to shadow me everywhere and Twitter about my rather uninteresting exploits for me all day.

A sort of 'Ghost Twitterer'.

As long as the companion does not drink any of my precious wine I will be happy (beginning to sound like Gollum, that will be the extreme cold affecting my brain).

I also need lots of words to say anything (as you no doubt have noticed) so Twitter will take a bit of getting used to. It is like unlimited text messaging to random people for free as opposed to my modest text phone package. As you probably are gathering it will take some time to get my frozen head around it.

Thankfully I am drinking a wine with a fairly healthy alcohol content this evening which is sort of warming. Well it actually is not at all warming, in fact my Hula Hoops provide more warmth, I will explain.

The alcohol (get images of St Bernards carrying brandy in the snow out of your head) just brings your warm life blood to the skin surface layers, removing valuable heat from your core, giving the illusion of added heat. At this point a clever looking person in a white coat will point out that this is obvious and start tediously reciting the laws of thermodynamics. Hula Hoops conversely provide the energy for me to rub my hands together, the friction generates heat and helps me type sort of coherently.

My wine is an average tasting Fitou fresh from Sainsbury's at 13.5%. Looking at the glass I can see the tears of wine, or legs appearing above the inky horizon. This is caused by a complex mixture of surface tension and alcohol evaporating faster than water.

If I just sat here, waited for the next ice age (which ironically may well be caused by global warming), and watched the glass of wine, at 0 degrees C water would freeze, turning my wine and me into a slush puppie (don't forget us humans are about 60 % water). At around -10 degrees C you will get a mostly solid lump, but ethanol (the alcohol we drink) freezes at -114 degrees C. So for 'frozen wine for the purist' you will need to apply liberal amounts of liquid nitrogen (that is at about -196 degrees C). The caped Little Chef, Heston Bumenthal would have to make a guest appearance, he is like one of the 'X Men' with his liquid nitrogen ways.

Back to reality and Twitter is calling, it is already becoming addictive.

Pipe and Sippers

2009-01-30T16:54:00.016Z

I am wearing a cardigan.

There we go, it feels better for sharing. In fact I now have two of these peculiar front button garments. Maybe my late thirties is bringing on convenience at the expense of style, but I am informed that they are the height of fashion, which definitely means they are so 'out' already.

Anyway now I have my cardigan out of the closet.. I was sitting by the fire last night in my armchair, puffing on my pipe reading the broadsheets when I noticed a wine story about the lack of consistency of wine tasting judges.

In tests, over 90 percent of judges failed to give similar scores to identical bottles. They were way off at times. Shock horror, as if anyone really believed that the complex human chemosensory system was a consistent reliable tool. I know that my taste perception changes day to day, in fact 'The Journal of Neuroscience' published research from the University of Bristol in 2006 that says taste is directly effected by mood.

Salt and bitterness diminish with increased anxiousness, so imagine a stressed Miles from 'Sideways' tasting a heavily tannic Bordeaux, it would seem like a light fruity Valpolichella, or even Ribena.

Happiness can produce more serotonin in the brain increasing sensitivity to bitter and sweet tastes. Remind me not to try a Tokaji sweet wine whilst in high spirits.

The scientists discovered that taste changes throughout our lives, day to day, even minute to minute.

Award winning wine labels should include the mood of the taster, perhaps their sense of self- worth, even their mental history. There again forget the mental history, the NHS is doing its best to leave all of our records in a very expensive electronic black hole.

Aside from moods I am sure the delicate chemosensory system gets overloaded during wine tastings. The neurones have lots to deal with, all those thousands of nuances in a sip, brutally mangled verbally by the taster as pretentious descriptors ...'Bavarian bark'... 'turgid tarmac'. Not to mention the effect of seeping alcohol on the brain from an accumulation of absorbed alcoholic residue left in the mouth after attempting to make use of a spittoon.

The wine itself is also subtly changing character and evolving every day, and this adds yet more unpredictability to the mix, by the time the bottle graces your table.

So electronic sniffers are the future? There are e-noses and e-tongues out there, what a scary thought. Combine that with manipulation of molecules with computer models in the wine making process, and we end up in a boring colourless sterile world. Wine becomes as predictable and dull as a bottle of Ribena.

I love the inconsistency of wine and the eccentric cardigan clad pontifications of those who taste it. A wholly human experience.

Sugar Rush

2009-01-06T14:04:00.020Z

I spent most of the Christmas break in North Norfolk. I left the main roads and followed the dark icy corridors to the coast. This must have been the coldest Christmas for some time. Thankfully the charming rental cottage in Burnham Market was equipped with an electric Aga.

I became very attached to the Aga and it was a wrench to go home without one. Such a versatile chunk of metal with a very good pedigree. Always on, always available to warm, boil, roast or just lean against. A considerable impression for a glorified storage heater. It flawlessly delivered hot croissants in the morning and temperate red wine in the evening. All the better for not having to worry about the electricity it must be sucking up.

My early evening drink of choice was a Whisky Mac, a combination of Stones Original Green Ginger Wine and Famous Grouse blended whisky. My measures were one glug of whisky to two glugs of ginger wine (the 'glug' is a wildly imprecise measure that is directly related to hand-eye coordination, which in turn is proportional to consumption).

Ginger wine is essentially a fortified wine which is made from fermented raisins and ground ginger. Sounds disgusting, but its rich velvet potency nicely caresses the blended whisky into your belly, providing an inner feeling of winter warmth, much like an Aga has repositioned itself to your core.

To fortify a wine you have to add alcohol during or after the fermentation process. If added during the process then this stops fermentation and therefore leaves 'residual sugar' behind making the wine sweeter and stronger. Port is an example of this. For something like dry sherry the alcohol is added after the fermentation process, minimising the residual sugar.

The term 'residual sugar' is fairly self explanatory, a measurement of a wine's sweetness. Anything over 45 grams of sugar per litre is considered sweet. The residual sugar offset against a balance of acidity, tannin and alcohol levels delivers the actual sweetness. Playing around with acidity can deliver sweet wines with an extremely high residual sugar level, like some of the Hungarian Tokaji at 450 grams per litre. This means, that by my crude maths, there could be the equivalent of about 80 teaspoons of sugar in that 75cl bottle, compare that to Coca-Cola which has about 20 teaspoons of sugar in 75cl. A serious sugar rush.

Long trade voyages in the 16th and 17th centuries were the beginnings of fortifying wine to stabilise it and protect it from the eccentric ship motion and extreme temperature variations. This makes me wonder how my red wine survived intact on the long winding winter drive up to Norfolk.

'loadsamoney'

2008-12-16T17:27:00.026Z

I have just been to the bank for some cash, you remember, that stuff before credit came and went.

After the transaction had been approved the bank clerk reluctantly stooped down to his 'time locked' safe. What's wrong with me today, I most certainly do not look like one of Patrick Swayze's Ex-Presidents. Perhaps my dying embers of a cold and slightly off-ill snotty look was threatening to the clerk. The timed safe is was.

The wait reminded me of my washing machine's infuriating lock, the passing of time dwindled (like Hiro Nakamura from 'Heroes' had just blinked) then finally there was a click and the safe door opened. I had better end the comparison there in case I use the word money and laundry in the same sentence, confusing both myself and my readers, and further marring the bank's reputation...if that is possible.

Anyway I walked through Cambridge with the last of the bank's £20 pound notes in a big Enfield 'loadsamoney' roll feeling slightly edgy (not in a Brand/Ross way). How many days until Christmas?..Nine I think. How many presents had I bought? None. Mild panic. What's more the notes bursting out of my pocket were not for presents, just bills.

In every window I passed there was a 50% sale on, by the time I buy anything they may be giving stuff away, you can but hope.

I passed a wine shop with some great looking deals. I may well buy wine for some people, but my wine of choice for a present would be a quirky one. Perhaps the vein stripping, fat busting Cillit Bang of all wines, invented recently by and Australian doctor. He has increased, to epic proportions, the levels of a chemical called resveratrol (which I previously wrote about here back in 2006, the longer you write a blog the more your life can seem like Groundhog Day) . He has crammed in the resveratrol content equivalent of 15 to 20 normal bottles of red wine, or 70 to 100 of white.

Apparently resveratrol is tasteless and drinking this wine 'potion' adds immense health benefits, if you forget that you have a liver.

The new, rather extraordinary Corpus Clock was next to the wine shop, confusing me as ever. It is both beautiful and sinister and does not give up the time easily. After little bit of studying I realised my lunch break was over and headed back to the office, where I am now guarding my wad of cash.

Any quirky wine suggestions welcome.

Green Glowing Goo

2008-12-04T20:45:00.008Z

A year has whizzed by and I have just been to my friends house again for Thanksgiving dinner.

I wrote about it here last year, and always enjoy experiencing pre-Christmas turkey mirroring my American cousins. It must be particularly nice in the USA being able to build up to Thanksgiving in October/November rather than prematurely over-egging Christmas like here in the UK. When the stale chocolate drops out of the first window in the Advent calendar I turn my mind to festivities. Prior to that my subconscious wrestles to ignore the flowing tinsel which fast wraps around every image and town centre, like an untamed rampant glittering weed growing out of season.

The Thanksgiving meal started on rather an unfortunate note as one of the guests did not entirely make it into the cottage on her first attempt. My friends have a huge moat of newly laid cables around their house, yet to be filled in. Combined with the dark evening it ended up swallowing her whole. Thankfully both bottle and guest were in one piece.

The meal was amazing, a real tribute to quirky American cuisine. The candied yams that featured along side the turkey made more of a cameo appearance than last time, but were served with grandeur on a silver salver displaying the mini marshmallows in all of their glory.

I brought two bottles of US wine. A Francis Coppola Diamond Collection Red Label Zinfandel (mainly because the label was quirky, I am a sucker for celebrity endorsements and the hosts love Zinfandel) and also a Cuvaison Winery Pinot Noir which was delicious. The hosts have an amazing wine collection nestling in a very large inglenook fireplace, there is naturally no 1787 Chateau Lafite there (now the worlds most expensive vinegar at about £100,000), but certainly some very fine wines, several of which made an appearance that night.

There are loads of obscure ways that wine producers are trying to combat the wine fraudsters when it comes to the higher end bottles that collectors obsess over. The latest most reliable method is so expensive that it is hardly worth employing. It involves cesium-137, a radioactive isotope (visions of Homer Simpson and green glowing goo) which liberally dusted our dear planet due to mankind's both dark inventiveness and carelessness. This 'fallout' ended up in the wine itself over the latter half of the 20th century and can be detected, and therefore the wine's age can be derived without removing the rotten cork.

I don't think I have ever had the pleasure of trying a wine of over about £50 a bottle, but who says price equates to a delicious wine, complex maybe but the taste is always subjective.

Off With Their Heads

2008-11-27T16:20:00.018Z

It has been a while, but I find myself at the blog face again.

I am fed up with all the recession doom and gloom the media keep projecting our way. Spin, counter spin, and tall stories. I feel the 'news' is like an Open University economics course, except factually dubious, glossy and sensationalist. There is 24 hour news everywhere, you simply cannot avoid it.

Analysis over analysis.

I think I am developing a new mental illness related to too much 'news' exposure. I am finding it strangely addictive and depressing all at once. How many times a day do I hear the same reports by the same journalists, or the same stories with a few extra lines, interspersed with mundane banter. Fickle arguments and counter arguments, only to be cut off before a point is actually made due to erratic scheduling. Please, no more...oh gosh, have I missed any developments while I have been writing this, better check...

On a more uplifting note, while I am digesting the credit crunch lunch from a local cafe, I would like to talk about the wine stain on my new sitting room carpet.

It was at 4am in the aftermath of a 'round the world' fancy dress dinner party when a table of half full red wine glasses, left in the good care of the Australians and Brits, managed to mysteriously topple over. I (Louis XIV of France) ran in on hearing the crash and shouts of despair, brandishing Vanish and my faux sword. The totally impractical brand new John Lewis fitted cream carpet was rudely bruised. Vanish applied I left the foam to dry while practicing my sword play (finding it hard to get out of character). After a bit of floor grooming I was left with a permanent shadow on the carpet. Ironically a sort of map of Australia and Britain combined.

After guillotining the responsible guests I wondered where I had gone wrong. Is there actually a good way to get rid of red wine stains (and now blood)?

Well there is lots of guff out there, measures that people presume to work and pass on to the hallowed Google search engine, but in practice fall down. Ones that do work to some extent are salt, white wine and soda water. My mother-in-law has tried and tested soda water, and it does indeed work. The trick is not to rub the stain in the carpet too much. Try to blot it out and not let it dry out too quickly before all of the red colour has been lifted. These solutions are unfortunately all for while the stain is fresh.

Too late for me.

A professional cleaner wants to charge me 70 pounds for the privilege. What does he know about carpet cleaning above Google and my mother-in-law combined? Is there a magic formula out there for dried red wine stains, or is he just a broke optimist with some household bleach?

The Milk of Human Kindness

2008-07-24T17:33:00.007+01:00

I have friends who have just moved to Guernsey, and I recently paid them a visit.

The ATR 72-200 twin-turboprop plane awaiting me on the tarmac at Stansted looked dwarfed by the menacing airbus edifices strewn around. The Aurigny pilot started the propellers and we were off, flying at a leisurely 18000 ft towards the Channel Islands. If I closed my eyes the sound and smells reminded me of my father's old cylinder lawn mower. I was looking forward to a nice cool glass of the iconic Guernsey cow milk.

On hour later and stepping out of a rather plush airport, Guernsey seemed extremely cute. This small island of very narrow roads and bungalows gave the impression of Britain left too long on a hot wash. It is a British Crown dependency, which means it is not part of the United Kingdom or the European Union. You get a huge sense of independence and freedom, no more ridiculous health and safety laws to worry about.

When you consider how close the Channel Islands are to Normandy it seems remarkable that we have managed to hold onto them. They have been occupied briefly by other countries several times, including in World War II by the Germans. The glorious intimate bays of golden sand are often flanked by the ominous concrete relics of war.

The tax haven status has bred lots of excellent restaurants and bars, throw in no VAT and you have got a major party on your hands. My experience of booze on the island was unfortunate as the bottle of French Pinot Noir I purchased was awash with a detritus and undrinkable. This was rather embarrassing as it was a gift for my friends. We in the UK are normally thoroughly backed up by the Sales Of Good Act 'fit for their purpose' clause when it comes to returning corked wine. Probably no such assurances in a Crown Dependency like this, although I was sure I could trust the good nature of the seller.

I returned home both contented and confused, harbouring a newly found milk identity crisis (reverse colour scheme in Guernsey) and a clutch of pound notes in my back pocket.

Wiimbledon

2008-07-04T11:16:00.005+01:00

You know you have too much time on your hands when you are worried that playing virtual tennis on the Nintendo Wii is adversely affecting your real world forehand.

I was bought a Wii for my recent birthday and due to the innovative motion control sensors I can now play like Roger Federer while drinking a glass of wine. Even wine is not wasted in the gaming world. A new game urinal system developed by two Belgians called 'Place to Pee' makes use of your urine, providing pressure sensitive pads for men to aim at and conquer the universe. If Nintendo decided to produce that game it would certainly add new meaning to Wii.

The sensors on the Wii wireless controllers have quite a range. During a recent singles game, a friend and I took time out to say goodbye to visitors from my hallway, controllers in hand. My wave ended up translating into a serve winning me the set. My friends forehand swipe on hearing the serve almost decapitated me.

I am now a fully trained Wii tennis pro and have even found that I can enter Wiimbledon with my skills, if I could afford rising oil prices to cross the Atlantic to Brooklyn -

http://www.wiimbledon.net/

Maybe if I offered an airline some chip fat for their tanks they would reduce the fuel surcharge.

There is another way to get to the real Wimbledon as I noticed they were advertising for lavatory attendants the other day. I was tempted to take two weeks off work and spend time in a new 'Place to Pee'.

The Wight Cliffs

2008-05-27T16:05:00.005+01:00

I spent last bank holiday weekend visiting friends on the Isle of Wight. TomTom guided me into a multitude of GPS generated traffic jams, everyone blindly following orders from disembodied voices interpreting commands decreed by Big Brother in the sky. I need to dig out my map again and explore my own route creativity.

The ferry was expensive, the same price as a flight to more sunnier climbs. While sloshing around on the Solent , the thin watery barrier to this small ceremonial county, I assessed the distance. I reckon a running jump off deck and the gap could have been cleared. It is renowned to be the one of the most expensive sea crossings in the world. The engines were barely on, I suppose it would be rather an eye opener if the 30 minute snail pace bob was turned into a 3 minute dash at those inflated prices.

In time with the Phoenix Mars Lander I was about to break new ground, except my journey considerably more expensive than NASA's rocket propelled robot, and we already know that there is life on the Isle of Wight...well certainly lots of red squirrels.

On closer inspection from my northern approach, the island looked like an apple crumble, thinly sliced layers of golden sandstone rock topped with loose stony soil. Parts of this magnificent pudding are slowly crumbling into the sea at a rate of 3 metres per annum. Thankfully not all of the island suffers from this problem, and we have a generous 147 square miles of Alan Titchmarch's back garden to explore as he is the current High Sheriff. Now the Chelsea flower show has finished I expect he will be back with Charlie Dimmock to tend the borders.

The island borders are bristling with fortifications due to its strategic placement. Any invaders would find it a perfect staging post for an assault on Britain. Concrete batteries stare out to sea in all directions, now fighting against the eroding coastline and salty winds. 'The Needles' add the signature to the Isle of Wight, three chalk outcrops marking the most westerly point. The name was derived from the now invisible fourth spur in the shape of a needle, battered down by the sea back in 1764. Round the corner to the south are huge chalk cliffs, a lost sailor could easily mistake these for the white cliffs of Dover. This obvious abundance of limestone and warm southerly climate provides good conditions for vineyards. Adgestone vineyard, first established by the Romans, is one of the oldest in Britain.

I stayed in a block of bungalow holiday chalets overlooking Hurst Castle which was clinging to the end of a sandy mainland snake to the North. I noticed the precarious nature of some of the chalets, metres away from life on a beach 100 ft below. There were plenty of large cracks in the ground searching for the next victim.

The island is charming, like a Victorian time capsule, preserved by the extortionate ferry prices, with only the odd souped up Ford Escort cutting through the illusion, treating the coastal road much like a bob sleigh run.

A Noble Hop

2008-05-07T13:36:00.006+01:00

I was at a conference last week in Regensburg, Bavaria. Time for wine to take a back seat and beer to stand up and be counted.

The easyjet plane smelt like a leaky Zippo lighter, which reminded me of recent news stories that claim cabin fumes may well be toxic. I was more worried about the germs emanating from the clearly ill, coughing person next to me. A cat with a fur ball. The cabin was like a combined doctor's waiting room and creche, very unrelaxing.

I know a little German, but he sadly did not travel with me, the luxury of English speakers not so prevalent in Southern Germany. After much flamboyant sign language I left Munich airport by bus and travelled on the autobahn, where it seems all sense of moderation is forgotten. The floor is the natural resting place for accelerators making it feel more like the Hockenheim circuit. Cars in the fast lane were almost travelling in their own dimension, producing a tunnel of air buffeting other lesser vehicles.
Whizzing by were endless fields divided up with matrices of tall posts, looking like a rather large pin cushion. I was puzzled as I had never seen this type of agricultural mechanics. It turn out that this is for hop growing. Bavaria is the biggest producer of hops globally, and we were passing Hallertau, a 'noble hop' region, which is a term with similar meaning to the French 'appellations' for wine, a designation for specific growing areas. The region affects the aroma, bitterness and quality of the hop, much like grapes. Hallertau Mittelfruh is said to be the original German lager hop.

Regensburg was stunning. The medieval town centre is full of large palaces set amoungst cobbled streets. The impressive stone bridge over the Danube was built by Roman workers fueled by Bavarian sausages, purchased 'it is said' from a 900 year old hut by the bridge still serving sausages today . I popped in to be confronted by a fierce looking lady next to a grill covered with countless chipolata type sausages. I was served two in a roll covered in fermented cabbage (sauerkraut) and locally produced Handlmaier's sweet mustard. They were delicious.

My evenings consisted of yet more sausages punctuated by biergartens, the 'Reinheitsgebot' (German beer purity laws) seemed to leave me without a hangover.