The other day I had one of the greatest meals of my life. A dinner marked by profundity of flavour in food and wine. If I may, I will enlighten you about the three core ingredients that made it such a downright enjoyable experience. Of their type, there’s little better easily available. I start with [...]
Continuing my report on when Mr Greg came for lunch I’ll tell you about a couple of stunners. Our main course was a leg of Oxford Sandy and Black pork from Beechcroft Direct whose pigs have provided many of my most profound pork pleasures. Perhaps, my faithful readers, you will be unsurprised to learn I [...]
On Friday we were happy to host at Elitistreview Towers a friend, Mr Greg the plastic surgeon, I’ve know for 26 years – we were at Oundle School together. Apart from my brother, he’s the only chap I was at that school with that I’m still in contact with. His sadly deceased father left Greg a [...]
Hermitage is traditionally the manliest wine in France and, as The Editor and I are at least nominally men (superannuated toddlers, more like!) we thought it would make appropriate drinking for lunch. No food, you see? This is extreme dieting. One sniff of this shows it to be deeply pulsingly manly, so much so I [...]
In a recent tasting note I said I bloody hate Grenache-based wines – they are normally too heavy, boozy and hard work. Given this, my excellent chum Lance Foyster, a wine merchant I’ve known for 20 years, decided to send me this bottle of 14.5% Grenache. I can only imagine he did this to continue [...]
The last bottle of Rhone wine I had was totally repulsive. Since this bottle was handily lying next to the bed I thought I would take advantage of the convenience factor and see if that also was a portent of good fortune. It was! This wine is far better than the crap Courbis Cornas and, [...]
I really don’t have much time for Grenache-based wines. They are usually soupily boozed-up, with little real refinement or complexity. They are just so often fruit and alcohol bombs and that sort of thing bores the poo out of me. I bloody hate them. So if you are obliged, by previous generations’ planting habits, to make [...]
Today I did something that meant quite a lot to me and I’m very proud to have managed: I went out to the postal delivery office by myself and collected a parcel waiting for me. Now, this may not sound like very much at all to you peculiar normal people, but I have been too [...]
I’ve never really got on with wines from Domaine Courbis, so when I suddenly found myself standing in front of the wine fridge, out of the blue, holding this bottle I not only pondered how I got there, but I was veritably vexed how it had infiltrated my sancto sanctorum. It cannot have been left [...]
People lucky enough not to follow me on Twitter will be unaware that I’ve been avoiding booze for the past period of time as I’ve been on painkillers of heroism. Despite regular exercise and desperately trying to be less tall I knackered my back again. I’ve managed without any of the really mind-buggering pills today so [...]
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