A new fruit

I've just tasted my first Minneola. Nay, my first two. The first seemed so good I needed to double check. Apparantly a cross between a tangerine and a grapefruit, (though some say a cross between a tangerine and a pomelo) this is a tad smaller than an orange with skin that is somewhat detached from the fruit and that therefore peels very easily and a shape that is a little ovoid. And it is very very tasty. Fresh like an orange with a sweet lake of juice and a seam of keen acidity threaded straight through the middle. The fruit is brilliant, bright and the flavours crystalline in clarity. This chap has gone straight to the top five. Think i'll have another couple at lunch....

Well versed

It seems to me that perhaps wine writing needs to take a cue from creative writing in it's more conventional sense. If I can fashion words and phrases that drip flavours from the page directly through to the consciousness of the reader perhaps I might go someway to converting the two dimensional to the multi-sensational.

Saigoba, Cosecha 2007 - Summer Rioja

This is delicious. Cellar temperature, a real crowd pleaser crammed full of summer berries, stawberry and a touch of sandlewood. The extraction is so fine that at 2 years old this is drinking beautifully. Light and sprightly. It would be a splendid partner to an afternoon in the Sun chewing grilled lamb cutlets from your fingers, or even dusty evenings paella. Seriously good value.

Leftovers

Easter has arrived bringing the annual legend that is the four day weekend. What a touch! Staying in town has become a habit amongst my set. London is a dream when empty and frankly, overcrowded motorways are for losers. Do what others don't. There's a mantra to believe in. The possible benefits are mindboggling......

I undertook the odious task of cleaning my fridge yesterday and by 10.30pm was sitting contentedly in my kitchen with two friends, staring at the remains of a really delicious impromtu three courses that might otherwise have been thrown away. That morning I'd been down on my hands and knees pulling incongruously wrapped packages from the fridge and finding alternatively, old bits of cheese from as long ago as last new year, greening slabs of ancient Pate (one of the more hideous finds), and in one, a single rasher of streaky bacon - e.t.a. in fridge unknown. Out came old pots of mustard (6 types spanning at least three girlfriends), home made jams and chutneys with faded labels (4 varieties), various miscellaneous condimentii including the utterly necessary old pots of cornichons and capers whittled to within an inch of their comestible usefulness, and finally and most unpleasantly a single rod of decomposing vegetable that I will kindly call, Jellied Rhubarb.

From this mess came a supper of Purple Sprouting and Bleu d'Ecosses Soup with cream and pepper that seemed full of flavour even before I added the crumble of new years cheese. Following this was buttery mash with some five spice oxtail that had been clogging up the freezer for a couple of months, with steamed and buttered Pak Choi from the back of the lowest shelf. And to finish.... St Johns Lancashire cheese from last weekend with my own homemade sweet chilli jam and toast. We drank a 2007 Rosso di Montalcino from San Filippo that was juicy and accessible though far from compelling. It had some nice Sangiovese fruit with the duality of flavours that Sangiovese seems to typify leathery red berries and sweet roasted coffee notes, highs and lows in one, fine balance and just about enough staying power to combat the five spice.

The only niggle of the evening was a kind of phone argument with the grey area over another set of plans that she's forgotten. I'd probably had too much to drink, but still......agree to a plan and stick to it.

Rosso di Montalcino, Pertimali 2003

Italian wines offer wonderful value. Not necessarily the most commonly held view, yet one I hold true. Take last nights wine at a dinner party hosted by my cousins. I'd sold them this wine and was thus a little on-the-line as to whether it was going to hold up to a very slow roasted shoulder of pork. It was magnificent. It tips the scales at £15 and for that you get a wine that drew oohs and aahs when each person took the time to have a good long moment with it. There is nothing flashy about Pertimalis Rosso. Grown in the cooler northern part of Brunello it is wine as wine should be. A partner. A cradle. Complex, a conversation piece, full of character. Not in your face, "oh what a card" stuff. Subtle, refined, intrigueing. The sort of person you'd choose to sit on a train for 10 hours with. Evelyn Waugh not Alex Garland.

I suggested David decant it some three or four hours in advance. I'd done a little experiment at work. When we came to sit down there it was, open, but still not fully. Perfect. Gas in the tank. There was something curiously Bordeaux-esq about the nose. Old Bordeaux though, something like 1978 or a 1975. Definitely Medoc. Then the warm tanned leather works its way in followed closely by bramble and hawthorne and you're no longer in France. You are somewhere innately more concerned with texture and earth elements. Finally, at a further swirl, a sense of mocha and dark chocolate fills the glass. See what I mean? This is character. If the nose carries on it's shoulders a vague sense of austerity and the world worn traveller the palate is broad, generous and ripe. There are ample tannins, mouth coating layers of berry fruit and amazingly for such a warm vintage, a freshness of acidity. We are talking man-on-wire balance here. Matched with the salty pucker of slow cooked pork in all it's sweetly saline juices it was tremendous.

Barolo Riserva Voghera Brea, Azelia 2000

This little wine has just shot straight into my top ten bottles of all time. Not least because of who I drank it with. We went to Enoteca Turi in Putney. Smoke became fire. She's quite amazing. Let's hope it lasts and I don't do something stupid.

The Barolo fitted perfectly. Soaringly aromatic from the glass, menthol, sweet cherry, sun warmed strawberries, the rich tang of fresh pipe tobacco and sweet roasted asian spices. The palate was strung with ripe powerful minerally tannins, huge fruit concentration of roasted strawberry, violet, black cherry, with base notes of tobacco pouch and crushed coal dust. It was so profound I could smell it from the glass on the table over my Rabbit.

Morey-St-Denis, En La Rue de Vergy, Bruno Clair 1998

My neighbour took in a case of this wine yesterday, delivered from my reserves. Her fee; a bottle of Scavinos very drinkable Rosso di Tavola 2005 that combines bright black cherry with Piedmontese tannins to create an excellent long saturday shoulder of lamb lunch acompaniment. Ripe and structured and with bundles more fruit than your everyday Rosso di Tavola. Very accomplished.

The burgundy I couldn't resist, cracking a bottle as soon as I got home. Good pinot, with a little age needs little excuse save for a hungry palate and a willing audience. I had one, and soon I had the other as a knock at the door signalled a friend over to collect some frozen mice from my freezer - a remnant of my days snake-sitting.

Morey St Denis always conjures sweet fruit for me. It has the prettiness of chambolle with the depth of a gevrey. And this didn't disappoint. High-toned strawberries, minerals and a whiff of autumn pipe smoke on the nose, and some clearly stated concentration on the palate. Classic Clair this, not an ounce of tomfoolery here just pure pinot Morey fruit. The merest hint of aged pinot creeps in but purely to complement the absolute grace in which this mans burgundy ages. Thoroughly enjoyable, I couldn't help but repeat my mantra that a good bottle should leave two of you wanting just a little more. It should, as it did, put a slight spring in your step and give you the urge to talk and laugh and love. This is not the most profound bottle you'll find. But it does give you all the pleasure that a mid-range burgundy should - it makes you want to have fun and I had to be held back from drinking another bottle. Which my date tomorrow should thank me for.

Sesti, Rosso di Montalcino, Castello di Argiano 2005

Beautifully juicy, plump and sweet fruit on the nose, suggestions of wild strawberries, menthol, and curiously, leather bottles. The palate is rich and extremely succulent, generous yet spiced, playful and somehow grown up. Good complexity here, finish of fresh roasted coffee beans, the inside suede of a well worn tobacco pouch, clove, sweet raspberry, redcurrant, black plum, sweet earth and ground mocha. Displaying an almost pauillac like sandlewood aroma on the nose, pure italian charm on the palate, and a finish that is complex, elegant, and harmonious and surprisingly long.......excellent and worth looking this one up.

Lynch Bages, 5eme Cru Classe, Pauillac 1990

We had a bottle of this at Chrismas from one of the finest and most elegant decanters I've ever seen. It was a waterford commission by Chateau Latour. Who else?

Lynch 1990 is a stunner. It quite reawakened my flagging interest in the wonder of Bordeaux. It was entirely reserved at first, but with some coaxing began to divulge it's velvet suited, dapper-as-you-like, I'm so fucking smart you can only begin to imagine sense of exalted distinguished, catch-me-if-you-can sexiness. By the end of the bottle my two co-drinkers and I were quite beside ourselves. Truly a great wine, like a shy savant, it took it's own time to shed it's clothes and reveal the naked beauty beneath. But when it did you'd have had to have been medusa proof to not become entangled in it's spell.

Wines like this do more to your mind than a year doing yoga surely ever could. Buy it. Drink it. See the light.

A couple of Isralis and a stinky gigondas (A simple twist of fate)

I tasted three things today. Two appeared on my desk, rather opportunely while I was selling some Lynch Bages 1990 and Ducru 2000 to a couple of gregarious, and rather large Israelis. Both bottles were from the Judean Valley in Israel and therefor a far cry from my usual staples of Burgundy, Piedmont, the Rhone and Bordeaux.

Or were they?

Both were noted and remarked upon quite effaciously by my two errant guests who spied the labels as they were disappearing upstairs and couldn't help themselves from commenting on what they told me where two of Israels finest offerings. They should know; one of them was the chef and owner of the Tel Aviv version of our own Waterside Inn. Quite a claim.

I don't profess to knowing anything at all about Israeli wine. I've tasted a couple - Musar and Messiah from the Bekar valley- each time finding them somewhat brash; not dissimilar to young Mas Daumas Gassac. But preconceptions can be, and often are, wrong. Very wrong, as I found out when I dug a bottle of 1995 Daumas Gassac out of the cellar on Boxing day and showed it blind to my family (who's cellar it is). No one got it. No one really got close. It was an elegant yet somehow brawny wine. Classique, yet with a sense of muscle that put it quite out of reach of Bordeaux proper. It was idiosyncratically superb. I digress somewhat, but the point is that counting, or discounting your chicks, bottles or even books before you've allowed them to mature can be disadvantageous to both your cellar and your pride.

Anyway these two wines fell in a zone I hadn't tasted before. They were, Castel Grand Vin 2005 and Secrez, Shiraz 2004 (not entirely sure of this last name - will check and revert!) Both showed quite pronounced oak on the nose, the Shiraz parading it better with it's warm climate black currant cassis fruit. In fact it was quite attractive in a modern way. Definitely not Rhone, but neither was Australian. Somewhere in between. The palate of the Shiraz, whilst quite refined, left one searching for commitment. Reserved and almost reticent it was curiously bereft of place. And to my dismay held just a hint of saccharine sweetness that I find so distressing and unappetising in so many New World wines. It was as if they had blended two very nice wines, one French and one from the New World, and just by misfortune had chosen the bits that didn't quite go together.

Castel on the other hand I did not go for at all on the nose. Somewhat old and a touch musty it had that curiously dusty type of fruit that lesser old wines achieve when they are basically over the hill. And it was replete with a cloak of oak. The palate however, I liked. It reminded me of a hunk of ancient timber cut from the tree and laid to rest on a forest floor with a skirt of rather sun-warmed forest berries. It was both generous and staid. Neither a bordeaux (whose varietal make up in grapes it apes), nor a big, slathering Napa valley cab. Nor did it have the sweet cassis essence of an Aussie Mclaren vale cabernet. It was somehow old and young at once. Not unlike the Gaza strip, a newcomer in an old guise, struggling to find it's identity.

The closest approximation I can find is to an old style South African wine but with a more modern take on winemaking. Picture spices and souks clad in the fine tayloring of a Bordeaux left bank monsieur.

They were certainly interesting. Each held a flame to one of the great regions. Each offered something different, but neither surpassed their inspirations.

I tasted one final thing with my two neighbours over drinks. Their combined age came to 164. Mine less than a quatre. But we drank a bottle of Crawford River Sauvignon Semillon 2004. It's quite invincible this wine. It flat refuses to age, each bottle throwing out aromatic cut grass flavours, fine definition and Aussie charm. A great apperative.

The gigondas, Domaine du Cayron 2004 was a stinky little shit when I opened the cork. Bretty and awkward on the nose it nonetheless gave lovely grenache sweet sun-soaked fruit on the palate and plenty of acidity to keep it's rev counter up. Three hours later with some lamb and cumin meatballs, river cafe tomato sauce and some spag it had thrown off this stink and become a spicy, sappy, actually quite gorgeous mouthful of southern rhone fruit. Stirrups and orange peel, clove and cracked black pepper, sloes and damsens. Delicious. Had I opened it for friends I might not have served it. As it is, having waited four hours (and bear in mind this is a £9 bottle), it's a real overachiever.

Never count those chicks before you're sure. You never know what a simple twist of fate might throw up (that's Dylan, and I flat out love that tune)

Corton-Charlemagne, Follin Arbelet 2002

On Monday we opened three bottles of Corton-Charlemagne for a lunch that, in the end, were not needed. A producer turned up and changed the dynamics of everything and so in the end the producers drank Alsatian. And we mere mortals on the ground floor got to drink Corton-Charlie. 2002 to boot.

The first bottle, on what was meant to be a non-drinking night, was highly impressive. Almost impenetrable; real marble door stuff - tight fittting, impossible to make out the cracks so that you might peer in - but it sang on the palate, a high-toned pleasure dome of stoney clad porticos and crystaline honey. The second bottle was poor the next day, contrary to what we expected. But the third, tonight, opened again two days after the cork was pulled was pure plastic-man reason. The nose was composed and savoury in that way that Corton-Charlemagne only is, replete with polymer flavours, cold frozen nuts and pure ethereal essence of cold soaked citric fruit.

The palate dripped. Dripped and coated. Honey drops, cold lemon pureee and that marbling of tannin that I simply love. Extract, essence, call it what you will. It drags your palate along with the force of a plastic tongue-palette, smooth yet adhesive, without friction yet with immense texture. I love good C-C. It makes me feel like I'm sucking a sculptured spoon of some impossibly sexy material.