I am afraid there will be a dearth of new posts on Elitistreview over the next couple of weeks or so. On Tuesday I was on my way to A La Cruz for lunch and was suddenly consumed with incredible pain. I made it into the nearest hospital and was told I had extremely severe pancreatitis.

This hospital seems less inept than the last one I visited, so when they tell me things like most of my pancreas is consumed by pseudo-cysts and there is a reasonable chance my kidneys might suffer major damage I do worry a tad. All I know is that I’ll be in their intensive care ward for weeks and as a consequence boozy tales are on hold for the time being. I’ll leave future news in comments on this post. Back soon…

Related posts:

• Bin time?
• I’m off to Burgundy, Alsace and Champagne
• Incommunicado with no wine, the horror!

This was published on Elitistreview

The new design for Elitistreview has been live for a few weeks; I hope my regular readers have got over the shock of change and are finding it an improvement. Whether you do or not, I’d like to ask anyone who has a view to let me know what it is. The voting box below is ready and waiting for you to click an option.

If you have more to say than just casting your vote then please feel free to leave a comment; I will address any issues that are within my technical competence.

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• Welcome to the new-look Elitistreview
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This was published on Elitistreview

Elitistreview is five years old today, hooray! Five years of opinion, rants and general lunacy. There have been some difficult times, very difficult times, but one hell of a lot of hilarious larks and screamingly laugh-tastic benders. I hope those who have followed me on this roller-coaster ride of wildly fluctuating sanity and general informed alcoholism, with my various trips to restaurants, loony bins and winemakers, have found something to entertain themselves with reasonable regularly. I think entertainment is terribly important, don’t you?

Elitistreview has improved greatly since I started five years ago: I cover more topics, post far more pictures and, with the recent re-vivification, the design is so much better. Oh good, this means I can add another year to my ‘Historical larks’ sidebar widget.

Today I celebrate as I began with a bottle of fine Burgundy:

Volnay Premier Cru Champans 2006, Domaine Marquis d’Angerville

2006s Burgundies are supposedly tight and closed at the moment but this has an open and giving nose of highly agreeable fruit. The fruit is very ripe, but I love its silky refinement which works in harmony with its polished earthiness to result in a complex nose that oozes with manifest class. I’m a tad surprised by how overtly enjoyable this smells at the moment, 2006s are just not supposed to be this much fun. The palate is also quite a lot of fun. I’m finding its fruit delicious and ripe but it does have an impeccable delicacy which charms me no end. Its tannic structure is terribly silky and svelte with acid levels that are immaculately well balanced. The minerality is tantalizingly engaging and the finish titilatingly long with gratifying complexity. I’m finding the overall impression that this wine delivers is one of clear intellectual interest but with enough in the way of hedonistic delight to satisfy the lover of visceral pleasures. Drinking unexpectedly well today but I think it will continue to improve for many years to come. Top bunny!

May there be many similarly jolly wine experiences over the next five years.

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• Happy birthday Dan
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This was published on Elitistreview

As you can see, Elitistreview has had an over-haul. The aim has been to help you, my dear readers, navigate the site and find posts of interest more easily whilst minimising the vast swathes of stark text my old sites suffered from.

Many people have asked for my three blogs to be accessible in one location and that is now how the site is organised. When you visit the front page you’ll see an excerpt and picture from the latest post at the top of the screen, with one each of the most recent posts from the ‘Wine’, ‘Food’ and ‘Other’ categories underneath. Further recent posts follow below.

You can navigate the categories to view using the drop-downmenus under the site logo, just select a menu option to display posts of that subject. You can achieve the same effect by clicking on the categories which are associated with each post.

The blog also displays posts from the Elitistreview archives (“Historical larks”) and the last posts from my Twitter feed. If you have more time for social networking sites than I do then you can post links to specific articles by using the control present at the bottom of each individual article page.

I am afraid followers of my RSS feeds will have to re-subscribe using their new addresses (in the footer of each page), but this is the only real change I ask of you. Wehay! I’ve worked out how to get the old Feedburner RSS links to work. Readers of my RSS feeds will require no change unless you’d rather subscribe to the feed that contains all posts (see the footer of any page for a link).

If you have any problems with the new site please send us a comment.

The Elitistreview team and our skilled web-developer associates all hope you like the new site and will enjoy the additional functionality we will be adding in the future.

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This was published on Elitistreview

I’m sorry the posts have dried up this month; I am trying to shed some lard and necking bottles of wine followed by huge restaurant meals is not the way to achieve this. At least I am losing weight (see the graph of my weight loss below, scale in kilograms).

I will try and rave about some wines as soon as possible.

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• Sorry for the lack of entries recently
• Apologies
• Many apologies for today’s missing food and drink reports

This was published on Elitistreview