The charming Ricard Sariola joined Dani and I to celebrate St George’s day with a wing rib of beef. Roast beef is about as English as things get and so am I! We also tasted Riesling, Burgundy and a selection of heroic Mourvedres. Truly we are serious chaps to undertake such an engagement for Monday lunch!

The food was a simple affair. Sausage and duck gizzard salad to start then roast beef with goose fat roast potatoes and green beans cooked with garlic and anchovies. We then ate a truly staggering about of cheese. After all that food, and an immoderate amount of fine wine, I was impressed by the ease with which Ricard managed to get home.

We began our afternoon with a bottle of Jacquesson Cuvee 735, the latest release in this impressive series of semi-non-vintage Champagnes. This was based on the 2007 vintage and it showed the abundant fruit of the year, but had good elegance and a honeyed complexity from the large proportion of reserve wines in it. These wines are ready to drink on release but when I’ve stuck them in the cellar I’ve found they age with remarkable grace gaining real weight and showing a lot more complexity. They are well worth seeking out.

First course was duck gizzard and Old English sausage salad. The Old English sausages came from Beechcroft Farm and are made with the pork of Oxford Sandy and Black pigs which are exceptionally tasty. Just follow this recipe with chopped up sausages added to the gesiers as you fry them.

We had three 2009 Riesling Kabinetts with this. First was Eitelsbacher Karthauserhofberg which was a brilliantly pure and direct expression of Ruwer Riesling. Painfully acidic and rigorous but an exciting and nervy drink to enjoy. Willi Schaefer’s Graacher Domprobst had a shade more fat and richness, but still great acidity and an edgy minerality to it. This was a step up in terms of complexity from the Karthauserhofberg. Finally a Berncasteler Doctor from Erben-Thanisch utterly blew us away. Certainly lacking nothing in terms of focus it slashed painfully across my stomach, but had an incredibly intricate and sophisticated minerality to it and a massively long finish. This was a truly great Kabinett and I couldn’t have enjoyed my last bottle of it more.

Whilst we were waiting for the beef to rest and for Ricard to create his peerless horseradish sauce we had a quick bottle of Burgundy: Volnay Vendanges Selectionees 2005 from Michel Lafarge. This is pretty much as winsome and pulchritudinous as village Volnay gets. Highly attractive fruit with a silky texture of polished tannins. Great acidity for a 2005 as well. This just seemed charged with life and begged to be drank, but I’d bet it’d improve for ages if that’s the kind of thing you like doing.

Rather idiotically, I forgot to take a picture of the wing rib of Aberdeen Angus beef, also from Beechcroft Farm, but I suppose this lack of photographic evidence might make it easier to believe it tasted far better than it looked, glorious as that was. I’ll move straight onto the reds.

Ricard had decided he wanted to do Mourvedre as the main theme and we had three to try. First was Altos 2005 from Jumilla. It was certainly alcoholic, but this didn’t show too strongly due to the lovely, scented nose of grilled meat, herbs and flowers. Not as tannic as these things can get it was really pleasurable to drink – I thought it slipped down a treat for such a biggie and was showing at a highly attractive stage of development.

Las Gravas 2001 also from Jumilla was simply delicious. It had matured and softened to a perfumed loveliness, whilst still retaining enough vigour and energy to make it a lively drink. Extremely complex and with massive length. I don’t know the wines of Jumilla at all but if they can be this good, and carry their heroism so discreetly, I’ll look out for them.

Finally I had popped a bottle of Chateau Pradeaux Bandol 2001. Hell’s bells it was a beast! I’d wager the alcohol was at least 15% and the tannins were straying to the distinctly severe side of the intensity motorway. Lovely fruit, though, and a lot of it so I think I need to keep my last bottle for a long time to let all its wildness resolve. I imagine, given long enough, it’ll turn into an extravagantly opulent and ravishing scented old lady. I hope so!

As we gorged ourselves on quality cheese we had a bottle of 2009 Riesling Auslese #45 from Eitelsbacher Karthauserhofberg. The fruit/sugar/acid balance was electric fun and thrills, and the minerality was great too, but I suspect this wine either needed popping a year ago or in five years’ time. Riesling may be the stuff, but sometimes it doesn’t always show itself at its most luridly attractive.

Our final taste of Burgundy bleached from my mind the requirement for Ricard to try some of our 100 year old Marc de Bourgogne, which he should feel disappointed about, but as we escorted him to the station in the pouring rain he looked remarkably chipper. I think we can do that ‘entertaining’ lark and do it well – I certainly enjoyed myself!

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Some may recall, on my post about natural wine, a brief discussion with Fabio of Vinos Ambiz in which he agreed to send me a bottle of his wine as long as I was brutally honest about it. This post is the culmination of that bargain. I agreed to be honest, Fabio, and I most certainly will be, which is a bit of a shame as I had hoped for either a lot more or a lot less… When sampling Fabio’s wine we tried some variations on Scotch eggs, namely Heston Bulmenthal’s suggestions for their preparation.

Those of a warped bent will be pleased to know I have set this article to be published right when I’ll be going under the knife on Thursday morning. If the anaesthetic gets me or the surgeon cuts the wrong bit out you’ll know the last bottle I popped just as I’m popping my clogs. I would have hoped for something significantly more terrific for my terminal tipple, truthfully.

Garnacha 2010, Vinos Ambiz

This has a very ripe, alcoholic and fruity nose. And that’s it. It’s not dirty, faulty, complex or interesting; it’s just a rather ripe, rather young Grenache of supreme simplicity. I’m a bit let down by that, I was expecting either fantastic fireworks or florid flaws. It’s just a well-made, ordinary wine and I think such things are really boring. The palate has a surprising level of acidity for it’s ripeness level and varietal, but that’s all that is surprising about it. It is quite fruity, quite tannic and quite alcoholic. If you want me to tell you the things it has to excess those would be simplicity and lack of dimension. There is nothing at all bad about it, indeed it is a well-made wine of this style. It’s just not a style I give two hoots about. So thank you, Fabio, for showing me that natural wines can be clean, lack faults and well-made, but next time we get into an argument send something that has more complexity that I can get worked up about, eh? I’d prefer a lot more interest-value of even the ‘flawed to buggery’-type rather than simply ‘dull’.

Just to note, this is bottle number 213 of 300 made, so I have poured away most of 0.3% of the entire production. Hmmm… 213 bottles, that is about how many I made in total from fruit when a teenager. I sold most to fellow pupils at school – that seemed just fine to me. I did it just to cover costs and for educational reasons, you understand. I wanted them to tell me how I should improve future batches I made. I never got any coherent responses to that question and I was far too naive to know why…

We drank the small tastes we had with some Scotch eggs; indubitably orbs of the moment. These used Greenfield Pork Products sausage meat. It was perfectly adequate, but not as good as the best we’ve used.

The major changes were those suggested by Heston in The Sun On Sunday last weekend. Not that I read a dreadful English rag of a newspaper you understand. Well, apart from The Economist. He suggests that the best way of boiling eggs is to put them in a pan of cold water, bring to the boil, then take off the heat and leave for 6 minutes before cooling the eggs. As you can see from the picture, this resulted in eggs too well-cooked to have runny yolks.

His second suggestion was to only deep fry the orbs for 2 minutes then finish them off in an oven at 190 Celsius for 100 minutes. This is supposed to make them more golden, which I am not convinced it did. All-in-all, nil points for Heston and his egg bonkersness, it seems.

Fabio, I’m sorry I didn’t either love or hate your wine any more than I did. It was good-ish, but in a manner that holds no interest at all for me. Many thanks for sending me the bottle, though, and I hope you enjoy the bacon that finally made it to you.

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Sometimes you fancy something different, happens to us all, and so you shop outside your normal parameters. Of course, this is a path fraught with danger and the peril of heinous suffering. We all do it anyway. The Albarino was the only white wine, beyond Sherry, I have found I could reliably manage to tolerate on my jaunts to Spain. As I am sure stomach churning experience has taught you Spanish whites are generally of a quality that makes them unfit even to clean the toilets in particularly unkempt dysentery wards. But I felt reasonably safe with this.

I got a recommendation to try the Seresin from a normally reliable source. Whilst it was far from cheap it seemed a good risk; I am a firm believer that New Zealand can produce properly grown-up Pinot, Larry Mackenna can certainly do it. I hoped this would show some of the allure and lubricity that make Pinot the obvious red wine choice for enlightened lovers of fine things.

Albarino 2010, Pazo Senorans

Bloody hell, does this smell of anything at all?^[1] If I strain my most acutely trained and finely honed of tasting faculties I think I might be able to discern a suggestion of yeastiness and maybe even something, that with the application of my active and slightly unhinged imagination, could have a vague resemblance to fruit. But sweaty tests to that! This nose is bland, torpid and tedious, matched only in anodyne character by the wit and erudition displayed in the lunchtime banter at a Trappist monastery. Arse, it is staggeringly dreary. The palate pushes back the boundaries of insipid, anaemic boredom. So devoid of character is it that I am more able to detect the flavour of my tonsils than the wine. What really worries me is that I have drank at least several bottles of this wine, indeed exchanged actual money I could have used for Burgundy or fizzy cherry sweets to get it, because it was preferable to what else was on offer. The staggeringly noisome qualities of things worse than this lacklustre contrivance so perturb me that the trip to Spain has been burnt from my diary with a laser and I’ll go and visit my chum Jeremy in Burgundy this October with the instruction that any appearance of Spanish whites will result in the agonisingly severe application of my Singapore Judicial. If, most likely given threats of having to drink something as execrable as Cava, I were forced to endure such a soulless entity of woe just to satisfy my white wine requirements the only path open to me would be to repeatedly force cocktail sticks violently into my sinuses just to prevent sensory deprevation. I must make it luridly clear that spending money on this wine will only leave you weeping with bleak depression; mind-bendingly sub-interest. Get some Sherry, it is cheaper and better.

Pinot Noir ‘Rachel’ 2008, Seresin

This has a nice, fruity nose of strawberries and raspberries, but that, I’m afraid, seems pretty much it. They claim some expensive oak influence but I don’t see it. Sure, it’ll please, but it will ask no questions and deliver little stimulation. The palate is much the same. I like the fruit, the acid level is refreshing and there is what approaches a convincing approximation of structure. It is a simple quaffer, and over-priced at that. Only buy if you like your vinous conquests to be of extravagently easy virtue and most definitely hanging around the embarrassing end of the ‘gifted’ pond.

1. ^[1] Guy will remind us of when, moving onto to white wine number two at one of our little gatherings, I annouced it was rather aroma free. Much laughter ensued as he pointed out I was sniffing the swill of water I poured to clean my glass. I did feel a bit of a large, unsightly arse. ↩

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At the very disappointing Restaurant Etxebarri we didn’t drink too well.

Albarino 2005, Pazo de Senorans

Very fruity, light bodied and refreshing. It was a passable drink but no great excitement here.

Rioja Roda I Reserva 2002, Bodegas Roda

Piss boring.

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At Restaurant Alameda we had an Albarino worthy of mention and a bottle of a typically styled, big, modern wine; a ‘dull wine’ as I like to call them.

Albarino Seleccion de Anada 2001, Pazo de Senorans

This has been aged in large inert tanks for several years, which supposedly allows the wine to last longer than most Albarinos (which die after a couple of years). The nose has real density of good, Viognier-like fruit. The palate has real density too, and very good fruit. The finish is very pleasing. A very good wine.

Ribera del Duero 2003, AALTO

Too oaky, over-extracted. Much too butch with no harmony or elegance. No thanks.

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