I’ve said it loads of times: Chablis is the bleeding edge of interesting Chardonnay. This Grand Cru from Fevre is in an intermediate stage of development, but it thrills and excites me with its winning personality, incredible interest, and baroque brilliance. It’s lovely, but slightly bonkers. I’ve heard complaints about premature oxidation in Fevre Chablis [...]
I promised myself a bottle of Champagne to celebrate surviving going under the knife. As I know my GP reads this site I should add I did not open this bottle until over 48 hours after my operation. I definitely did not have any alcohol in that 48 hours, oh no… No Pimms, no G&Ts, [...]
I wish to discuss the truly important character of food and drink: pleasure. I will illustrate this with a meal at a branch of JD Wetherspoon. This article is probably going to vex many readers, but it is probably the most important thing I’ve written on Elitistreview. A lot of people assign moral, political and [...]
Going into most wine shops is to be assaulted with a torrent of the well-made but utterly dreary and unmemorable dross that floods the wine world at the moment. I don’t give a tinkers cuss about all those weird appellations from Southern France, Chile or the Cook Islands – they are all the same and [...]
You don’t have to live in France to be proud of your local cheese; with Lyburn Farmhouse Cheesemakers down the road we Hampshire Hogs can love our local curd too. It’s all made from the milk of their own cows that they treat with care and they are not Cheddar. Unsurprisingly, we found Lyburn at [...]
Alain Burguet was one of the very first Burgundy producers I visited as an undergraduate. I’m pleased I was educated enough to like his wines; they are still good. His sons may have largely taken over, allowing him to dedicate his life to hunting, but the impressive, manly house style remains. This old vines cuvee [...]
The cookbook Hawksmoor at Home is probably the only collection of cooking instructions you need. It provided this recipe for a toasted cheese sandwich. It was a spiffing sandwich. I admit it is not so much ‘toasted’ as ‘fried and baked’ but who cares when it is so good. Don’t hold back on the amount [...]
Winchester’s best restaurant, The Bangkok Brasserie, may not cure you of all ills, but when I went I’d been feeling rotten for days and afterwards my disposition was just magic. I also slept like the dead and felt ace the next morning. It is a brilliant place. I won’t cover every aspect of the meal [...]
Real ale festivals, there’s only really two ways to approach them. Firstly, you can get roaringly paralytic having imbibed and vomited your body weight in pongy, soupy beer and pongy, acrid cider. Secondly, you can be so overwhelmed by the quantity on offer, with no way of distinguishing between any of it, that you instantly [...]
Fine New Zealand Pinot Noir is often more boozy than Burgundy but with a similar tannin and acidity profile. Escarpment 2009, made by the brilliant Larry McKenna, provides a really fun and highly enjoyable example of the style. I must admit to leaning a bit in favour of Larry’s wines. He came to Oxford when [...]
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