In Vino Veritas
POSTED ON 18/09/2010Is Byron’s claret light and Madeira strong ‘bottled poetry’ as Robert Louis Stevenson described wine? Not perhaps if you scan the deathless prose of your average wine tasting note (my own among them). Auberon Waugh was idiosyncratic, once describing a Languedoc red as ‘hairy and longbottomed’, Kingsley Amis curmudgeonly: ‘when I hear someone talking about an austere unforgiving wine, I turn a bit austere and unforgiving myself’.
Sherry: The Appetite Whetter
POSTED ON 11/09/2010On a biting cold night when a thick blanket of snow lay on the ground, I went on a tapas-bar crawl as a guest of the Tortilla Club, a group of Spanish food and wine aficionados. Starting off at Fino, my first surprise was at how many tapas bars there are in London’s Charlotte Street area. My next surprise was just how much I found myself enjoying sherry with just about everything consumed that night. I enjoy fino and manzanilla as refreshing summery aperitifs, but their warm full-body and appetizingly tangy flavours made them good winter drinks too.
Entente Cordiale
POSTED ON 04/09/2010As scenic as the emerald green ocean of vines is in the wild terrain of the Languedoc hinterland, it can all too easily become a wine grower’s graveyard. At a time when southern France's growers are up against the economies of scale that make New World wines so competitive, owning a vineyard is by no means a guarantee of a living. Take the area around Fitou; when the southern French co-operatives of Paziols, Villeneuve and Durban lost their competitive edge, they were absorbed into the more go-ahead Mont Tauch Co-op.
