Dugois Arbois Savagnin '05 & Chateau Batailley '94

Over the last couple of months I have been wallowing with the eagles at night a fair amount more than is probably good for me. So the rare occurance of making it to bed before 7am on Saturday meant that I was up in time to accompany Sister, through the blazing October sunshine to Borough market in search of pork.

'Nduja is one of the many ingredients available in London at the moment that are as trendy and delicious as they are unpronouncable. It is a raw pork sausage from Cantabria made mostly with head and neck cuts and then laced with shed-loads of hot peperoncino chilli. The porcine equivalent of speedballing.

Some people like to cook with it; frying it up or adding to sauces for pasta or fish. And whilst I'm sure this is great, it's also a bit of a cop-out. It's really just a pimped up Sobressade and hence better eaten on it's own, spread thickly on crusty bread.

It's also fantastically difficult to pair. The rich porkiness that you get from cheap cuts and raw fat shot through with untamed chilli seems specifically designed to obliterate almost any wine you care to mention.

We tried a couple of leftfield juices with supper: Dugois Arbois Savagnin '05 and Chateau Batailley '94.

The Batailley was the better wine: all sour blackberry and sweet raspberry, cracking woodiness, length and balance. No angles, and right in its prime.

The Savagnin is definitely an oxidative style, with a distinct, nutty vin jaune-y nose. But the palate's dancin', with a keen acidity and buckets of apples, cut by a lemon-pith finish. This was the wine for 'Nduja- the apple played nicely with the pork, and the citrus cut through the fattiness. There's not really an answer for that amount of chilli, but it was close enough.

Soaring with the pigs in the morning.

Miquel Gelabert Torrent Negre 20 Aniversari 2005

Sa Bodeguita d'es Pi, €15 (€30)

Anyone following the annual Bordeaux en primeur pig-circus will have noticed something peculiar these last few weeks. The Bordelais no longer have good, bad and average vintages, they have different ones.

As if in some collaborative effort to prove the passing of time, growers, merchants and critics have universally hailed 2010 as neither better nor worse than 2009, merely "different".

A long overdue and begrudging acceptance of the wonderful plurality and variation available to the wine consumer? Whaddayathink?

It all sits rather uneasily in a system based around scores, Vintages of the Century, and the idea that there's some kind of objective and quantifiable definition of what is 'good' Bordeaux. Quite frankly I'm surprised the entire system hasn't imploded under the weight of its own contradictions.

Which is a pity, becuase although I quite like the stuff, it makes me disinclined to drink it. And with celebrations due I wanted some Cabernet-Merlot seriousness.

There was only one thing for it: a bottle Torrent Negre 20th Aniversari 2005 I had purchased in a restaurant the previous week. The owner had not only let me buy a bottle 'off', she had also rung the producer Miquel Gelabert on her mobile to find out what grapes were in it, and then (I discovered later) charged me precisely half what it was worth.

40% Merlot, 30% Cabernet Sauvignon, 30% Syrah, a curious triptych, but the Mallorquins are a funny lot so we shan't hold it against them.

The nose opens with a little brett sweatiness, though this is gone after ten minutes in the glass, leaving ripe raisins, stewed plums and a hint of savouriness.

The palate continues this, it's massive in every way, porty with big thick syrupy red and dark fruit, but little herbaceous touch on the finish. A healthy tannic structure, a seemingly well-integrated blend and no heat from the 14.5% alcohol.

Big, brash, heavy, expansive stuff, and remarkably, not the same as (for example) something else.

Cousino-Macul 1987

c. £10 for recent vintages

If genetics are to be believed I am indubitably fated to become a hoarder of cheap wine.

Brief inspections of my grandmother's wine rack reveals it to be full old and dusty bottles of non-vintage champagne allegedly from the 1960s and '80s Pinot Gris. My father does a good line in oxidised-looking white Burgundy from average early '90s vintages, and Bordeaux from never-before-heard-of Chateaux.

A recent raid on his cellar turned up a bottle of 1987 Chilean red, laid down no doubt when I was still a mewler and a puker, and obstinately silent on the grapes that may have made it.

On the basis that we had nothing to celebrate Friday seemed as good a day as any to crack it open...

Cork was in good condition, and once double decanted it poured a deep garnet, not too brickish, and rather appealing. No taint whatsoever.

The nose gives this one away in a flash. All blackcurrant, nothing else, a lone Ribena-y dimension. Subsequent research confirmed this- 100% Cabernet Sauvignon.

Fruit is definitely still there on the palate, with a touch of woodiness, some cherry and blackberry flavours, but it's probably on its way out. Tannins are exceptionally light, and after half an hour have gone completely. The structure now is all bright acidity, which makes it remarkably fresh.

This is wine on the borderland of good and very good, and for me puts paid to those suggestions that Chilean wine is in its infancy. If they were making reasonably priced varietals with the legs for 23 years of bottle age back in the late '80s I suspect they're doing some properly clever stuff now.

Perhaps I shouldn't rail against the science. Perhaps the old people are wise. Perhaps the only way forward is buying up as much Concha y Toro as I can find before embracing the fuzzy slide toward mere oblivion. Perhaps...

Le Pont de la Tour

36D Shad Thames London, £230 for 3

Now that the dust has settled and we have time to compose our thoughts and reactions, things have got a lot more confusing. So I’ll go for objectivity, present the facts straight, and leave long and difficult conclusions to someone else.

TOD arrived by taxi at my house at ten in the morning. He had some pink champagne for my family, a waistcoat which he struggled to put on for some time before discarding along with his hat, and was wearing pyjamas. These last were specifically ‘to give the impression that I’ve been to bed.’ A valiant attempt at subterfuge but more composure, less erratic behaviour and fewer stories about the visions he had of himself cooking bacon, would have completed the illusion better.

We were due at Le Pont de la Tour at Midday, though by 11 this was beginning to look unlikely, especially as past heroics mean TOD is blacklisted at Addison Lee. But arrive we did, at some point, via a pub, a cab, a members-only gym and a walk through the rain along the South Bank of the Thames.

Le Pont de la Tour’s opening salvo was by some distance the finest I have encountered in this country. They gave us frutos secos with the Martinis. Proper ones too: mixed, and with both sizes of corn.

The food is of the type that comes littered with technicolour smears, jus and garnish. Sister’s aubergine tower starter she said tasted like pizza. Which is probably a compliment of sorts. My own ‘Foie Gras Parfait’ (a special concoction dreamed up originally to make anyone who orders it sound like a prat), tasted like liver pate, the toast like toast, the garnish wasn’t bringing much to the party, and I left the smear of orange.

For mains TOD and Sister had a piece of accessorised Salmon. The chef's deconstruction of the other ingredients means I can’t tell you much more, but the fish was cooked to perfection.

I decided on 'Daube de Boeuf' because I didn’t know what it was, and was delighted to discover it means a large slow-cooked shanky bit of cow. Another diner may not have been so happy with the situation, as the internet has since informed that, of course, that’s not what it means at all.

I had noticed early on that this is one of those places that, rather pretentiously, does not give you salt or pepper. I’m not too keen on this practice at the best of times, but here it really serves to highlight the complete lack of flavour of everything that we ate. The ability to braise a bit of beef to melting perfection, but make both it, and the accompanying jus, taste of paper and water respectively is a peculiar skill to cultivate.

There are various reasons that my memory of the events is a little hazy, but I’m pretty sure that being unable to tell what most ingredients were using the traditional means of seeing and tasting it is quite high on the list.

Still, the obsolescence of sensory perception probably wasn’t making much of a difference to TOD who I established at one point was neither thinking about nor hearing what he himself was saying:

TOD – “Is everything OK man? There seem to be a lot of lulls in the conversation”
CV – “What? No there aren’t.”
TOD – “Well then I must have been asleep. Did I fall asleep?”
CV – “What? No. And when were these lulls?”
TOD – “They’re happening all the time. You know… when you and your sister aren’t talking.”
CV – “You mean when you’re talking?”
TOD – “Yeah.”

Our unblemished palates may not have required a trio of superb sorbets (rasberry, apple and a third which Sister correctly identified as Ribena), but these silences clearly needed filling. Initially I was a little concerned as they looked exactly like most of the other stuff we had just been served, but accompanied by homemade Lengua de Gato biscuits (not as good as out of a packet), they were brilliant.

A jolly post-prandial game involving throwing sugar cubes at each other was frowned upon by service which occupied a hinterland between frosty and hostile. Apart from the sommelier, who was quite good, but this was just as well because it was she who was tasked with the job of explaining the most staggering fuck-up of the day…

The week before we dined, D&D restaurant chain (of which Le Pont de la Tour is part) had spent a fair amount of time merrily issuing press releases claiming that they were slashing the prices of 100 of their top wines by up to half.

Needless to say that upon entering the restaurant I had commandeered the list from TOD, to prevent any daft choices, and set about it excitedly. Repeated assurances that it did contain up-to-date prices may well have been true, what it did not contain were any of the quite large selection of wines in their Top 100 which I was thinking about ordering.

Eventually we settled on a bottle of IGT Toscana (I do not use the ‘S-term' because I'm not keen on coming across as a tosser, and this one was pretty ordinary anyway) which was subject to their usual 400% mark-up. Not cool.

The very beginning and very end of our meal were pretty excellent, but the best that could be said of the middle was that it was extremely inoffensive. Mediocrity is a terrible criticism, but here I feel they've got away pretty lightly as the another way of describing it would be bland, souless, cynical, cold, outdated, imprecise, stuck-up and absurd.

12v 2009

£20.10, The Sampler


I am an ill man, both generally and in the immediate present.

That February is a good 10% shorter than many months is entirely necessary. Leaving it much longer would pose serious health risks to the population- plague, pestilence and bouts of suicide would sweep the land. Leap years are difficult.

My current malady meant that 4 Kilos 12v's promise that it was a wine that "connects to the central nervous system and recharges the batteries" seemed appealing.

In 2006 Francesc Grimalt, then of Bodegas Anima Negra, uprooted and set off on his own viticultural adventure. And along with a musician by the name of Sergio Caballero, lumped 4 million pesetas (hence "4 Kilos") on a winery of their own.

I have an inkling that on the previous occasion I had this I thought the 2008 markedly less interesting than Anima Negra's equivalent offering, AN/2. But then again, I don't remember if I remember that situation particularly accurately.

The website lists a composition of 40% Callet and Fogoneu, 30% Syrah, 20% Cabernet Sauvignon and 10% Merlot. Throwing a few 'noble' grapes into the mix strikes me as shorting varietal character as a hedge against obscurity. But vamos a ver...

When treated well Callet can produce good, deep, pure wines with the structure for ageing. Vineyards are small and scattered and vines reporduce sexually rather than clonally. Which leads to a helluva lot of variation and seeming confusion about which are Callet and which Fogoneu.

The colour is a pure dark purple, with perhaps a slightly lighter rim. Cabernet is apparnt on the nose, with lots of cassis, some mint, and maybe a nostalgic whiff of VA, harking back to their garage-bodega days.

Drying tannins, good acid and some pepper make this a fairly savoury, almost austere, wine and I think a little more Callet or Merlot might have done favours. It's clearly young, but I'm not sure it has the intensity of fruit to stand up to much time in bottle.

Clearly a quality product, and far more interesting than many Mallorquin reds, but not quite what I was after. Any potential nerve-calming effect was comprehensively decimated by the "Michelin-Man-on-acid" label, and it may be March 'til I recover.

Brasserie Toulouse Lautrec

140 Newington Butts, London. £35 pp including wine.

It seems the game wasn't rigged, or at least, not rigged very well.

This unfortunate fact resulted in the Russian losing the best part of £1000. Which in turn led to a decision that the best medicine would be a day-long bender involving a little sherry, a lot of ale, a trip to a casino to lose some more money playing games that definitely are rigged, several abortive efforts to find dinner, and finally a superb meal in Kennington piano-bar-cum-restaurant Brasserie Toulouse Lautrec.

The place is a recently opened sister restaurant to an old favourite The Lobster Pot, which it is next door to and run by the two sons of extravagantly moustachioed Frenchman Herve Regent, the owner and chef there.

The restaurant was amazingly busy for a Sunday night, though son #1 made an heroic effort as front of house, and, seemingly, the only waiter.

After settling down we set about examining the nicely priced, £20 for two courses, set menu. I was enthused to see a glut of French brasserie classics give little more than a passing nod to vegetarianism, though I did have to spend quite a while trying to explain to the Russian what an endive is. I appear not to have excelled in this matter as he promptly decided on the 'Endive Gratin' to start. Being a salad vegetable the endive obviously doesn't take well to gratin-type situations. This particular example was a predictably sloppy affair, and barely enlivened by the addition of some ham/bacon.

My own starter of half a dozen snails was noticeably superior. I side-stepped the £4.50 supplement for the full dozen, though I'm fairly certain they brought me more than six anyway. They were authentically chewy and tasteless affairs floating in some excellent garlic butter, and went well with the (entire loaf of) cracking bread we had been brought.

The Russian stepped up manfully to the £8 supplement for the Cote de Bouef main, which was good, but served with a side of those increasingly common hunks of fried potato that masquerade as a sort of posh 'chip.'

I am unable to ignore the presence of braised lamb shank on a menu, so went for that. It was a lovely, big, soft piece of meat, served simply with some crunchy, run-of-the-mill veg (broccoli, carrot &c.). This was so precisely what I wanted that even the menu's absurd lie that my meat had been cooked for 24 hours failed to bother me.

I navigated a peculiarly assembled wine list to emerge with a good Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, which worked well with the two mains, though with the suspicion that the £26.60 price tag may be dipping its toe a little over the 300% mark-up threshold.

I'll go out on a limb and say that the food here is possibly even better than The Lobster Pot, though it's a close run thing, and it's certainly better value.

We retired to a largely empty upstairs for a small digestif; a Leffe for me and a carafe of Malbec for the Russian. I have faint recollection of a funny-looking man singing, who I assume was meant to be there, but it's testament to the knowing eccentricity of the place that this beardy prescence seemed to cap a charming evening rather well.

Gaucho Tower Bridge

2 More London Riverside, London. £50 pp inc wine.

We had reserved a table at the London Bridge branch of Gaucho Grill. A restaurant that unashamedly promises bloodied steak, blood-y wine and blokiness.

On arrival the most noticeable aspect of this particular establishment was the decor, which consisted entirely of bits of cow draped around a dining room. The effect, need I say, was largely unpleasant.

We were dining off the back of a three-hour wine tasting session run by Laithwaites at Vinopolis. TOD had spent much of this time talking bollix at two young ladies who seemed content to feed him cheese and claret whilst pretending to listen. I opted for the more ethereally sexy charms of Pinot Noir, served (winningly) by a woman who had a bag of Liquorice Allsorts under her desk. Afterwards TOD preposterously claimed not to like Liquorice Allsorts, but I think this was jealousy and beneath it he recognized who made the better call.

All this gluttony meant that we decided to skip starters and head straight for the restaurant's raison d'etre- steak.

I cast aside a perplexing folded menu, that probably would have required some advanced knowledge of origami to untangle, and let TOD do the necessary talking.

Before the main show we enjoyed an amuse-bouche of bread with posh herby oil. The dish had been a little over-hyped by my companion, who had insisted the waiter bring extra as it was so delicious. I put this down to a rather 1990s-surburban-houswife enthusiasm for flavoured olive oil, because, though was nice enough, it certainly wasn't a revolutionary take on the tried and tested "bread with posh herby oil" formula.

Afterwards what arrived at our table was; two rare rump steaks, two sauces, a bowl of chips, a second of leeks and a third containing something orange.

All that needs to be said of the steaks is that they were excellent: good quality, cooked accurately and satisfyingly meaty. The chips too were reassuringly chippy.

Accompanying sauces (creamy-with-mushrooms and creamy-with-peppercorns) could well be described as 'semantically challenged'. Their runny consistency seemed to place them firmly in the 'sauce' camp, but the portion size, and the manner of presentation in small pots in the middle of the table, was that of a dip. This duality of purpose amused me for some time and certainly didn't rankle, as they went excellently with the chips.

TOD finished the bowl of orange before I could get to it, but he tells me it was something involving sweet potatoes. This would strike as a slightly peculiar lie to invent, so I have no reason to doubt him.

And anyway I didn't care because I had something far more exciting on my side of the table... leeks.

I know what you're thinking: "Leeks!? But they're the poor man's scallion surely? And preposterously over-rated by Welsh people and sociopaths." And to be fair, I would tend to agree; the leek is an 'umble vegetable, never the star of the show, certainly not Prince Hamlet, somewhat (whisper it) downstairs.

In this instance the addition of blue cheese was transformative and revelatory. The salty zing cut through the char-grilled sweetness of the leeks perfectly. And with the pristine steak it was mesmerising.

I had been charged with selecting the wine, but with the clear implication that nothing but Malbec would do. TOD, always confident in his own infallibility, decided somtime ago that appreciation of red wine has reached its zenith in getting smacked around the chops by the grape's slick jamminess. Our waiter offered us a couple to taste, which was a nice touch, but we went for something more expensive. I'm pretty sure I ordered a Malbec, but our man distinguished himself by bringing a varietal Cabernet Sauvignon. I took this as a divine justification... que sera sera. TOD sulked a little.

Without a chaperone I might have fallen at the first, flummoxed by the weird interior design and foldy menu. But my companion steered us through these early setbacks admirably and we emerged fed, watered, and happy.

Laithwaites Grand Tasting

The message simply read 'Help'

When I found him sometime later, dribbling to himself in a back corridor at Vinopolis it transpired that he had gone rogue and ended up cornered by a German lady who was alledgedly making him smell mushrooms before offering any of her Pinot Noir. The Shock and Awe approach to the Laithwaites tasting had been decided upon some time before, but it was clear now that TOD would need some guidance and a little more nerve if he was going to make it through.

Some other spirit knew this too, because, excellently, on our way back from the corridor we got lost and ended up in a pub. We did this I'm pretty sure without leaving the building. Sensing the hand of God at play I bought a couple of ales and we sat down to assess the situation.

Some time ago we had procured tickets to Laithwaites first 'Grand Tasting' session in the cavernous Vinopolis at London Bridge. The show promised 200 wines from across the globe served by their enthusiastic producers, lectures and tutored tastings from industry experts, friendly and knowledgeable staff on hand to offer advice and 10% off any wine bought on the day. We were clearly going to be hopelessly out of our depth...

On re-entering the arena TOD immediately latched on to two young ladies in Laithwaites shirts who were serving Le Chai au Quai with a big plate of cheese. They didn't seem to know much about Bordeaux, but were contented to listen whilst he told them all about how much he loved cheese. The wines were fairly nondescript apart from the top-of-the-line Pauillac, which had a nice attack.

I left him to go remonstrate with the German lady from earlier. She was still trying to get people to smell mushrooms and Liquorice Allsorts, but having been briefed on this I flatly refused. Instead I ate some of the Liquorice Allsorts and had a glass of Chilean Pinot Noir, which was, interestingly, mushroomy. We then made our way back to the main hall via a man who who had some Whisky to get us in the fighting spirit.

Downstairs we set about some more serious drinking.

The producers stalls were mostly set out by country, to aide the nationalist set. An Aussie gave me some fizzy Shiraz which the winemaker had, rather unimaginatively I thought, made taste exactly as you would expect, i.e. of Vimto.

Onwards to a pleasant Spier Pinotage 2008, nice but lacking a little varietal distinction. I chose not to believe the man’s optimistic declaration that ‘This is probably the finest red you will taste today’ but it seems others were more easily gulled as this was voted the crowd’s favourite wine of the day.

A brace of modern, zippy Rieslings from Von Buhl were good enough, but didn't really excite, so I moved to the next stall with the intention of practising my inimitable Spanish on a woman from Carinena. 'Though this was scuppered when she inexplicably took against me when I asked if her wine contained any.

Meeting up with TOD again we spotted an opening at the sole Argentinian stand, and an opportunity for one of his famously prolix Proustian eulogies on the joy of Malbec.

Unfortunately before he could really hit his stride the producer happened to mention Chilean wine... "Bastards the lot of them!" exclaimed TOD loudly as the atmosphere around the table darkened. The man serving the wine looked frightened, but another, standing beside us made the mistake of pressing TOD further on the finer points of his assertion. He muttered something about the Chilean being an unpredictable sort before declaring them "Untrustworthy in matters of business and affairs of the heart." This did the job and, as people started to edge away, I kept a close eye on the Chileans at the stall next door in case the scene turned ugly.

Up until this point the highlights had been some cracking NZ Pinot Noirs, especially the Forrest Wines Stonewall 2008 which matched a cracking savoury nose, to a smooth deep and long fruit palate. But the best was saved 'til the very end.

The final NZ stall we visited was that of Seifried Estate, whose ice wine Riesling was a revelation. Full and honeyed in the mouth, with bags of clean lime acidity on the finish.

We left with the firm intention of taking advantage of the 10% off deal at the shop, but queues were prohibitive. Instead we stole a couple of tasting glasses and made our merry way.