Category Archives: Uncategorized

I have recently discovered the forums at wine-pages.com. A microcosm of the wine-lovers’ universe, perhaps, it’s simultaneously beguiling and deeply offputting. It’s a real, genuine community, full of lively and extremely friendly debate and discussion. And more: rhttps://cellarfella.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=176&message=1egular posters seem to meet up frequently to actually drink wine, and forge friendships. But I just feel that many of them don’t live in my world.

After taking delivery of a case from the Wine Society yesterday, I probably have about 50 bottles of wine at home, a many as I can reasonably store, which cost, on average, a little over £7 a bottle. I know this, because every time I go wine shopping I aim to spend, on average, a little over £7 a bottle. There are perhaps half a dozen star wines in there waiting for a special occasion, and these are worth perhaps £18 or so. There is a bottle of Viu Manent 1 2006, which will cost you about £40 where you are lucky enough to find it, but which cost less than half that in the Caves de Pyrene sale. I have another few cases in storage elsewhere, all Rhones. The most expensive is a case of Coudoulet de Beaucastel 2007, which I bought from the Sunday Times Wine Club with the aid of a big voucher and some cashback from Quidco at considerably less than its £120 a case asking price. In other words, I exist at a level just higher than the average punter. I spend just enough to drink varied, interesting wine. But how many bottles of red Burgundy have I bought, ever? None. Not one (OK, this is a bit of an oversight. They’re not all unaffordable). How many famous Bordeaux chateaux are represented in my basement? Not one.

These guys, though, are different. They have friends who give them 1989 Petrus. They have 15 vintages of Musar in their basement. They say things like

“Of the last two 1990s I’ve drunk at this level the Lynch Bages was better (IMO) than Léoville Barton”. They meet every month at the Ledbury, a Michelin-starred restaurant (though at £60 for three courses and half that at lunchtime, it’s not so expensive).

Who am I, to them? What is my knowledge of wine, compared to theirs? What will it ever be? For at the highest level, knowledge of wine is the preserve of a self-selecting few. There is a lot there for me, a lot of pleasure to be had, but also a frustration: that a wealth of knowledge is available only to the wealthy. Or those with big basements.

But for all that, I think could learn a lot from these people, whoever they are. And hopefully, I will.

Yum.

So this cost £6.99 from Majestic. Its gimmick is that it blends Malbec from a relatively low altitude (which, say Majestic, gives ripe plum and prune characteristics), and Malbec from just up the hill, which is more intensely coloured and flavoured. It’s pretty hard to tell the truth of it all, without bottles of just-low-level and just-high-level wine to ponder individually, but the bare fact is that this is a supremely drinkable wine with genuine character – a real wine – for are bargainly penny under seven quid. It could just be my favourite low-end malbec. A definite buy-again. And the nice people at the IWC agreed with me, giving it a big, brass, shiny medal.

Holidays with the in-laws, such as the one I’m currently enjoying, aren’t entirely gastronomic wastelands. My mother-in-law’s cooking is OK, though I’m a bit uncomfortable ceding kitchen control to anybody if truth be told, and when my father-in-law accompanies her to the shops he does his best to find wines that I will like, by only selecting those that have stickers on them saying they have won trophies, or awards, or been named by Oz Clarke as one of the 100 best somethings.

Meals on these little trips are normally fine, occasionally even good, but rarely very exciting. But, apart from being good people and producing an excellent daughter and really quite a lot of other positive stuff, they did get something right: they sorted themselves out with a holiday home about 10 miles away from one of the best restaurants in the country, a sentence that several people who know its rivals better than myself suggest could equally apply without either of the words “one” or “of”.

L’Enclume may or may not be better than Gordon Ramsay or The Fat Duck, but it certainly improves on them in one way: it’s hundreds of miles from London, and really inconveniently located for anyone in any of the country’s major cities, with the possible exception of Manchester, which is nevertheless ruddy miles away. Thus I could phone them on Tuesday and get a table on Wednesday, or indeed Thursday, or any other day of the week. This is a bit sad for them, because they should be booked up weeks in advance and would make more money if they were, but good for people like me, who can decide to go, and then go. Like that. No frantic redialling six months before you’re hungry. Just go.

Our menus cost £75 each, without drinks or service. There was a £55 menu, but then there was also a £95 menu. It seemed wise to take one in the middle. Clearly, this is expensive. But the following day we had lunch at Make, the restaurant at the South Lakes Wild Animal Park, and spent £12.50 on a child’s meal of disgusting meatballs with frozen peas and instant mash, and a not-even-hot baked potato with tuna, plus a mini Babybel, one Diet Coke and a carton of apple juice. That meal cost just over a seventeenth as much as our 12-course meal for two the previous night, once service and drinks are taken into account. It was at very best a thousandth of the quality. It was prepared in five minutes by a 16-year-old, who was probably picking his nose at the time. L’Enclume is expensive, but very good value.

And our meal? Here, for the record, is a list of all the things we ate, according to the menu (which was wrong, but we’ll come on to that):

Creamed foie, radish and smoked eel (my least favourite dish of the night, and I love foie)

Grown-up yolk from the golden egg

Humhrey’s Pool (a vegetable broth filled with sea moluscs of every shape and size)

Lamb sweetbreads, onions and ash

Salad of Artichokes and fresh goats cheese

Manx Queenies and wild sorrel, parsley and horseradish

Chick ‘O’ Hake

Hot Pot

Valley venison with salsify, hedge garlic and parsley root

Expearamenthol frappe

Stiffy tacky pudding

Fig in vanilla, sweet cicely and wild juniper

For me, it was almost all excellent, with a couple of less good things – the foie and the stiffy tacky pudding, gelified bubbles of the five constituent flavours of a sticky toffee pudding, Cartmel’s most famous progeny, and thus exactly the same concept as the Hot Pot that preceded it, only not as good. Pleasant, all the same. The Chick ‘O’ Hake, a hake fillet pan seared inside chicken skin, served with a wonderful lemon thyme infused jus and a puree of brussels sprouts (much nicer than it may sound), was brilliant. But top of the tree were, at No2, the grown-up yolk from the golden egg – golden rice crispies, something that looked like an egg yolk but was in fact a multi-layered chickeny mousse, covered with a delicious spoonful of mustardy excellence – brilliant to look at, wonderful to eat. And at No1, my favourite plate of the night, the artichoke, which was a combination of globe, Jerusalem and Chinese artichokes, with a mousse that tasted a great deal more of artichoke than of goats cheese, though that could be down to what it came with, covered with malt soil, and bits of the other artichokes poking out of it. You basically needed to like artichokes. But the combination of textures and (largely artichoky) flavours was impeccable. I would drive from London to eat it again.

It was a meal I could write 1,000 words about in half an hour. It was theatre and artifice, delight and disappointment. It was excellent. I’ll be back. Not, however, until I’ve paid off my credit card bill.

It’s been a difficult few weeks. My house, populated as it is these days by a pair of under-threes, has become a haven for bugs and viruses. If there’s a sniffle anywhere in London it’ll somehow work its way to my front door. The nadir came about a week ago when I took my bog-standard cold to work one day and ended my shift by vomiting into a recycling bin. The upshot of this all is that I haven’t been able to taste and smell simultaneously for weeks. Until, that is, about two days ago. I did drink a couple of wines in the mean time, and they were wasted on me, more than decent wines are usually. I even made my debut visit to The Sampler, the shop in Islington which is not so much a wine merchant as a temple to expensive wine, the first establishment I’ve ever visited where more wines cost three figures than one. Or two, probably. I tasted a few wines all the same. I couldn’t tell you much about them. I decided not to spend £80 on a tiny dribble of Petrus 82.

So, I’m back.

This is the last 78 minutes of another Waitrose 25% off everything offer. I love Waitrose. They have a great website. They have great customer service. They deliver fast, and free. They have 25% off everything offers. They sell Greek white wines that are totally delicious. Rachel and I never, ever, spend our evening drinking an entire bottle of wine. I am happy, in many different ways.

That is all, for now.

I love Les Caves de Pyrene. Love them. I’ve only ever been once, but none of the wine I bought then was bad and a lot of it – I can still taste that Fumin from the Valle d’Aosta was superb. So here’s another cracker. A very humble label tells you nothing at all about it – it’s a humble Vin de Pays from the Loire. And that’s about it. So it’s 70% cot (malbec) and 30% gamay, a rich, deep, heavy satin but with only 12.5% alcohol, it’s got a silky touch. Chocolate, allspice, tobacco and cinnamon-infused poached plums. That’s what I’m saying, and I’m sticking to it.

The thing is, they’re miles away and they don’t really deal in bargain wines – except in their annual summer bin end sale, which is where I got this (normally a shade under £12, can’t remember what I paid). So it might be June before I go back, but you just try to stop me.

As we speak I am sitting at the bar in Bocca di Lupo, drinking a fine Barbera d’Asti and perusing a desert menu I’m way too full to seriously consider. So, Sanguinaccio, then. “Sweet pate of pigs’ blood and chocolate”. I mean, wtf?

That is all.

An absurdly long break in posts. Blogs are like new friends – so long as you see each other all the time it’s very comfortable and you get along fine, but if the phone goes cold even for a short while it just feels a bit awkward to pick it up again. Next thing you know, you haven’t spoken in six months and you’re little more than strangers.

Anyway, I digress. I’m in the office. It’s a slow day. The bit of newspaper I’m responsible for filling has been filled instead by adverts, leaving me free to look at Twitter (another friendship gone cold) and make an awkward rapprochement with the Cellar Fella.

So what was so important that it forced me to ignore this slight social chill and reignite our little relationship? The discovery, no less, of a new thing. OK, it’s not the most revelatory discovery, but it’s new to me. Chenin blanc has been one of those subjects that are just a bit too big. Like rosé, which I almost never drink and absolutely never buy because I just don’t know how, it’s been a bizarre, big gap in my vinous knowledge.

But then I went to a wine-tasting dinner (I’d call it a wine-drinking dinner, to be more precise. There weren’t that many wines tasted and they were served in such generous quantities, things swiftly got out of hand) at High Timber on Monday, a charity thing in aid of Cosmic. They didn’t really tell us what we were drinking most of the time, but it was all South African and a lot of it was excellent – a zappy sauvignon blanc, a delicious noble-rot boosted sweet. The restaurant is co-owned by Gary and Kathy Jordan of South African winery Jordan wines, who hosted the evening, so they presumably had a hand in the selections. But I really loved the chenin – The FMC, by Ken Forrester – which was as mouthwatering a white as I’ve had for a long while. Then again, it was by all accounts pretty much the best the country can muster. At about £17 a bottle it should be good, but damn, it was. More investigation required.

And it’s good to be back. More soon. And apologies for shamelessly stealing the photo from Jamie Goode’s blog.