50 Shades of Pink, Nearly
POSTED ON 23/05/2015In time for flaming June, should it ever catch fire, ‘posh pinks’ was the subject of the premium rosé tasting organised this month by Richard Bampfield MW and Château Brown. 36 pink wines were tasted blind and decanted into clear label-less bottles so no-one could tell what was what from the bottle shape. The only visual identifying feature was the colour, and for anyone who thinks that rosé simply means pink, even a Dulux colour chart wouldn’t do justice to the nearly 50 shades of pink on offer.
The Not-So-Arrogant Frog
POSTED ON 16/05/2015Before showing me a selection of Domaines Paul Mas wines in Soho's Vietnamese House of Ho, Jean-Claude Mas hands me a nest of handmade pralines, initialled with CM, and a man-scarf branded with the name of his Languedoc restaurant, Côté Mas. Could it be that the man best known for the tongue-in-cheek Arrogant Frog label doesn't have enough to do?
The Riesling Why
POSTED ON 09/05/2015Whatever a young man’s fancy turns to in Spring, mine turns to riesling, simple as that. Nothing else quite refreshes or lingers so scentedly in the nostrils as riesling and no other grape runs the gamut from mouthwateringly bone dry to lusciously sweet. The German grape is perhaps the only known great non-French white grape, aka rhine or johannisberg riesling, and not to be confused with its bastard central European cousins, olasz, lutomer and welsch.
