This note celebrates two events. Firstly, today it’s the 13th anniversary of the first time I tried to kill myself, shortly after paranoid schizophrenia consumed my mind, by slashing my wrists and then getting sectioned in the loony bin a few hours later. Tonight those events seem a terribly long time ago; I suppose they [...]
I have recently been musing on the importance of being happy, both in relation to wine and also more generally. Indeed, it was this very subject that Editor Daniel and I were discussing as I popped this Riesling. It was therefore serendipitous that it proved to be quite deliciously drinkable allowing us to continue our [...]
Once again it was our pleasure to host Peter Sidebotham (of Hand-Picked Burgundy) and Peter Palmer (the Black Sea wanderer) at Elitistreview Towers. We drank quite mind-bogglingly well, but I was a tad dejected that three weeks off the sauce whilst in hospital has done my historically epic tolerance no favours at all. I was [...]
Long time readers may recall – I think the stuff is a wonderful aid to fine wine-making. Jay Jay, the premier producer of Wehlener Sonnenuhr does not hold back his hand when sulphuring his wines and this results in them being incredibly cellar worthy. Sure, when you pop a bottle at the age of the [...]
Yesterday I got out of hospital where I had been spending the past week. I suppose this blog is a bit of a home for florid expressions of excess, so let me just say that pancreatitis is without a doubt the most painful thing I have experienced in my life. Moreover, such was the woeful [...]
It is a Saturday, there is cricket on, Riesling is called for! Last time they were rather good, this time… deary me… Zind-Humbrecht wines, particularly the flasher Grand Crus, do strike me as being rather unstable beasts and so it is somewhat of a lottery ageing the blighters. These two bottles had been kept in [...]
I have been having computer issues over the last week so I am getting a tad behind transcribing my notes, I hope the next few days will see them published. Yesterday’s tasting of 2010 German Rieslings organised by the great wine merchant Howard Ripley was such a remarkable, marvellous and flabbergasting experience that it has [...]
Last weekend we had the good fortune to visit the Tully family in Jersey. Whilst Edward Tully and I ran the Oxford University blind tasting team we tasted quite a lot of wine together; indeed, in one academic year over three thousand different ones. Student life was not always a trial. Our last trip to [...]
Given my title for this post I want to make it abundantly clear that my violent illness had nothing to do with lovely Richard and his brilliant cooking. Sometimes my insanity expresses itself in physical terms and I was inordinately unhappy that the trek across London messed with my mind so much that more spew [...]
Extravagant Mosel Riesling, fervid Chablis with some red Burgundy to follow up sounds like an experience every lover of good times would revel in. However, as I rarely travel on the London Underground at rush hour and that the resultant proximity to more and smellier people than even Berlusconi invites to his bunga bunga sex [...]
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