Felton Road Block 1 Riesling '03

It was becoming evident that I had a Reverse Hangover. One of those horrid ones where you wake up all perky thinking 'I might go for a run today, or alphebetise my bookcase, or write a novel.' But then by lunchtime the space behind your eyeballs hurts, and you want to plunge your head into fire, water or gas. All the while slightly worried because the Reverse Hangover's good-to-bad transition is the same order of events as normal-way-round dying.

My blood sugar and alcohol levels were clearly in freefall and some emergency medication was to be sought. Port would do it but I feared that some of my '85 Fonseca at 11am on a Sunday would overload my loucheness gland. And possibly give me gout.

Riesling then. Felton Road Block One 2003. 9% ABV, 'though described as a 'sweet style'.

The nose is nice, and it's all there; petrol, rubber, lemons. Not getting any botrytis 'tho. The palate is full, but not overly so, with quince-y fruit as well as tropical notes backed by that familiar wave of citrus. Relatively simple. The acid's holding up nicely, and gives a pretty perfect balance, and cleanliness. 'Though I hope that the good folks at Felton Road have learnt the difference between 'sweet' and 'off-dry' in the last 9 years.

A fine tonic.

Marie & Denis Chevassu Cotes du Jura Chardonnay '08

c. £14

As legacy-killers go dying in public in an improbable but slightly
amusing accident on Friday 13th is right up there with writing an
autobiograpgy of your time as a DEFRA minister, or a paedophilia charge.

No matter how many starving African children you've rescued from
burning buildings in the last six months, you're always going to be
the person who fell down the stairs of the number 88 'cos you were
googling the clap on your phone or was poisoned by a rogue platypus as you
took lunch at the zoo cafe.

With this in mind I cleverly decided to stay at home all day and drink
Chardonnay.

Chardonnay is a barometer grape. A taste for it neatly divides the
world into those you may want to drink with and others who should be
drowned in a butt of Sauvignon.

The Jura is a barometer region. 'Though it divides the world into
insufferable wine geeks, and normal people who haven't heard of it.

A tricky one this then, and consequently best drunk in bed at 3pm when
there's unlikely to be anyone else there.

There's not much info out there regarding Denis and Marie Chevassu's
operation but they appear to make varietal wines from all five grapes
permitted by the area's AOC*. And at
least one merchant claims the elevage of this Chardonnay is sous voile,
'though I'd probably call that particular claim.

On the nose there's big concentration of honeysuckle and cream and a
richer toffee pudding note. The palate cuts through with a pretty
searing acid streak, lemons, melons.

At the price this is an outstanding bargain. There's proper
delineation and varietal typicity here.

But the anchovies and raw onion I ate for lunch were about the last
food left in the house. Which now means I am a little drunk and
probably needing to go to the shops to buy food.

See you in the obituary pages.


* Chardonnay, Savagnin, Pinot Noir, Trousseau, Ploussard. Open goal.

Granada: Day 2

After quite some debate Sister and I managed to figure out most of the places that we had visited the previous evening. And, as a result of us being Golden, track down her hat, the loss of which had threatened to spoil the whole of her year.

Headwear restored we were off to the Alhambra. If only we'd had some opium this'd be proper Kubla Khan stuff, as it was it was merely mesmerising and sublime.

The closest bar to the Alhambra furnished with a fine breakfast at about 2pm (closest excluding the ones inside where I had enjoyed a couple of pre-breakfast stiffeners). Potato fried with egg, vegetables and Jamon, was as hearty and unpretentious as it sounds. Bang on.

Back into town and a little beer at Damas Queros allows to properly investigate the various sizes of beer recepticles on offer. In Granada a 'Cana' seemed to weigh in below half a pint, which can mean it's gone before any tapas arrives. Here we discover the more manly 'Tubo'- perfect at around 300ml. We also have mushrooms al alijo with bread. A small portion must have made a sizeable dent in an entire clove, but Sister and I are never knowingly out-garlicked and hence loved this one.

From there to one of the most ultra-trad bars in town: 'Los Diamantes.' Tiny, with almost no seating space and three-deep at the bar at any given time. Seemed to specialize in deep-fried stuff, both dishes we had could have done with some sauce.

Also on c. Navas we found Puerta del Carmen bar and two Equipo Navazos sherries by the glass; La Bota de Fino #18 and La Bota de Palo Cortado #21. They were like good sherry on steroids: with greater intensity, complexity, precision and delineation of flavours. Jamon carved at the bar was all that was needed with them.

On to c. Elvira, universally recommended as the place to go for El Tapeo. Unfortunately in the time between this advice being formed and our arrival most seemed to have become hairdressers.

Weird, but no matter because at the end we managed to find Al Sur de Granada a deli, shop and wine bar that I had been recommended and had every intention of going to right up to the point on the flight over when I forgot its name and address.

It must have 30 or so natural wines by the glass, including the entire Barranco Oscuro range. Highlights were Tres Uves, and a Chardonnay called 'Cardonnohay'. We returned to Al Sur a number of times throughout the three days to work through their list and soon came to realise that the wine really was the star attraction: each tapa was vertically identical and amounted to no more than a small bruschetta with cheese, blood sausage and some veg.

Maybe a good thing 'though- otherwise I may never have left.

Tapa of the Day: Champinones al Alijo

Granada: Day 1

My little Sister (motto: 'Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Shiny Things.') recently decided to emigrate to a made up country*. Which, needless to say, has caused considerable anxiety amongst her friends and family.

Said country also happens to be Arabic, which, needless to say, has caused her considerable anxiety, especially in regards to her normal wine and pork based diet. Which meant the destination for the obligatory going-away-blowout holiday needed to be thought out carefully.

For about 20 seconds.

Granada. A city famous for its tradition of a free tapa with every drink and in a region that worships pigs like deities and rates them like S&P. We decided not to pay for food the entire trip to allow us to fully master the art of El Tapeo...

Day one was a Sunday, a day of rest and stodgy Paella. But later on we managed to find the superlative El Deseo, which furnished us with Barranco Oscuro wines by the glass, and something Godly (I know not what) which involved tomatoes, aubergine, olive oil and goat's cheese alchemically combined to make a tapa of monumental excellence.

They also had a good chicken, chickpea and veg salad, and some cracking aged manchego, hollowed from its wheel at the bar, sprinkled with sticky-sweet Jerez vinegar. Served with a mad, bad and spiky glass of Blancas Nobles it was nutty, salty, sweet, sour, simple and delicious.

From there we moved to the Granadian equivalent of a rough pub to watch Granada triumph away to Athletic Bilbao. Here we endured a dubious sandwich, spread thinly with tuna and tomato paste, as well as some potatoes covered in a shiny red sauce; shinier and saucier than ketchup, but not fooling anyone with its presumed aspirations to Brava.

A day marked by extremes of quality but ultimately marred by the fact that Sister later insisted on drinking half her own bodyweight in Mojitos and losing her hat.

Tapa of the Day: Aubergine and Tomato mush.

* Fujairah

Noella Morantin Mon Cher Gamay '10

"Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." Someone once said. Tennyson, if the old memoria serves correctly.

I came close to the latter with Noella Morantin's 'Mon Cher' Gamay. On opening this was a particularly ungenerous expression of the grape, with green and bitter tannins, lean fruit, earth and some black pepper. I almost consigned it to the sink.

But no. Noella has a reputation that must be founded on something apart from her excellent bandana. She's got history, having been in the winemaking game since 2004, and rents vinyards from the well established Clos Roche Blanche.

And most of all- she loves Gamay. My kind of lass.

Day 2 and faith is rewarded- much more expressive; liqorice laces and sweet fruit. The tannin has worked its way into the wine, leaving the structure more acid based. Vibrant, sappy, finishing with a surprising and pleasing caramel note to back the fruit. Red in tooth and claw, but still a touch of dark.

And now the bottle's empty.

Best of all, I think, to have loved without loss, but that apparently isn't an option in life or wine.

The Abbeville Kitchen

47 Abbeville Road, SW5 9QN. £15 pp.


The quality restaurants are closing in. Each new opening seems closer to me, and all I can do is hope the money runs out before heart disease kicks in.

Most recently: The Abbeville Kitchen, the latest project from those behind the Anchor and Hope and The Canton Arms, has placed itslef so close to where I live that walking there doesn't burn off the calories consumed by merely looking at the menu.

I needed some financial advice of a Friday, and seeing that Emily1 has eschewed the traditional job market in favour of getting 'sponsored' by a middle-aged gentleman she seemed the ideal candidate to get along for lunch.

We kick off with with the charcuterie platter. Quite splendid Iberico ham and not too cold, some other italian ham which was less remarkable and lastly that sublime salami studded with fennel seeds and sliced super-thin, which is currently neck-and-neck with sausage rolls as the best way to consume pork yet invented.

After that we head for pidgeon breast, chicory and pickled walnut salad. A seemingly nonchalant throwing together of strong flavours that all pull in the same direction. Really quite good.

Now for the bad. They have only one (ONE!) type of beer- an overpriced Belgian lager, and a friendly but uninspring wine list which is pretty much a carbon copy of the Canton Arms'. On a Friday lunch the restaurant was full, but every single other table was taken by a pair of 30 something year old women sitting opposite each other, which made Emily1 and I, both wearing sunglasses and so hungover we could barely speak, stand out like Buddha in a brothel.

I'm pleased it is where it is, but it's not The Canton. It's not trying to be. It's a pity.

Yvon Metras Moulin-a-Vent '10

c. £23

There's something special about windmills. Their ease and grace, their silence. In parts of Spain they spatter the countryside like shot. Yet they are vital; pumping water and grinding grain, giving life out of nothing, the unmoved mover. The absurdity of Quixote is not that he saw the windmills as giants, it is that he was attacking windmills.

But here in the city we are far away from this calm and serenity, and sometimes other pleasures must be found. Sometimes the only thing for it is to get smashed on expensive wine and go out partying till sunrise with models. So I packed a bottle of Yvon Metras' Moulin-a-Vent and went off to see the Russian's American Sister in Shoreditch.

This is classy juice. It pours a light maroon and hits with a focused and concentrated mushroomy sous bois on the nose. The palate is alive, fine acidity and red fruit, precise slate-y minerality, some structure, unreal length. Reminds overwhelmingly of Grand Cru Burgundy. Seriously sexy stuff.

Gotta love windmills.

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.

Nando's

11-12 Friary Street, GU1 4EN. £7

Popular amongst the youth of today is eating chickens. And the best place to eat them alonside other like-minded gang members is, apparently, Nando's.

We untangle a folded menu to reveal a choice of food that must run to at least 10,000 options. There are wings and breasts, sauces and salads, wraps and corn and a mind-boggling array of potato based sides.

Equally confusing is the pointless hybridisation of fast-food and table service, whereby you order at a counter before your food is brought to you at an indiscriminate point in the future.

To stop my head exploding and make life a little easier I decided to focus on only a small part of the menu: the bit nearest me in the bottom left hand corner. This section was titled "Nandino's" and came with an age limit: "For under 10's".

Balls to that, I ordered the Nandino chicken breast stips, corn-on-the-cob, frozen banana yougurt and a beer (Sagres).

I've not come across adjectives suitably damning for what turned up. The chicken was a triumph of aesthetics over edibility. It did at least look a bit like chicken. The corn ran with this theme.

Sagres is Sagres: a relatively inoffesive way to consume a mild anaesthetic, and, as such, a perfect pairing for the food.

Dessert too finds new ways to undermine the traditional dining experience. Firstly it is self service, secondly the recepticle and hence portion size is entirely of your own choosing and lastly it seems to operate on a 1930s style honesty-box system, whereby if you tell them you've paid for dessert they'll let you have it.

We grabbed a couple of plastic coke cups, filled them with 'Frozen Banana Youghurt' and exited the premises. Utterly wonderful stuff. Packed full of that delicious, artificial pick'n'mix-banana-sweet flavour, and with consistency less fatty, coating and cloying than traditional ice cream. Strongly recommended when mixed half and half with rum.

This kind of gutter/stars food dichotomy is difficult to evaluate so all I shall say is that it remains the only restaurant I have visited to which I will only return to steal their ice cream.

Occhipinti SP68 Rosso '09 & Il Frappatto '08

Les Caves de Pyrene, c. £14 & £18

At 3am on Sunday morning I was standing (I think) on a friend of mine's balcony drinking the last the last dregs of Occhipinti SP68 Rosso 2009 straight from the bottle. There were only plastic cups available and if you're going to look tackily drunk it's best to push it all the way.

Style is temporary, class is permanent.

Arianna Occhipinti has both in spades, but alas, I can only master one at a time. And seeing as I had evidently nailed the former pretty convincingly, the next night I moved on to the latter: Occhipinti Il Frappatto 2008 and Riedel.

SP68 is a blend of Cerasuolo di Vittoria grapes: Frappato and Nero 'Avola. 'Though fashionably it's just an IGT Sicilia. The '09's perfect for drinking now; what might have been spiky acid in youth has integrated into the wine. Cherry and blackberry are there, now joined by riper red fruit and seamless tannins. Uncomplicated and fruit-forward.

Il Frappato is a more serious beast, with vinification that confronts the grape's thin skins head-on. 70% of the wine sees a maceration sees a two month maceration, the other 30% stays on for 8.

The nose shows raisins, leather and rich red fruit, huge concentration. Good acid depth on the palate with again, a graceful, integrated structure, and a long, long finish on the fruit.

All bases are covered. Wines to introduce to your parents.

Puzelat Touraine Pinot Noir '10

£13.68, Les Caves de Pyrene

Many friends old and new, animate and inanimate featured in a recent holiday to Mallorca. With varying levels of success.

Amongst the most prominent disappointments were a host of Mallorcan wines that previously I had loved, but now seemed clumsily oaked and over-extracted. Bottles from Anima Negra, and Miquels Gelabert and Oliver were all found wanting, and refuge was found only in Estrella Damm, Herbes and Jaegermeister.

On return to blighty then some tonic was needed. Like a good friend a good wine should have levels; I want to be able to talk Hegel to it for hours and analyse bouquet, or go on a bender and drink it with a straw. Step forward Thierry Puzelat and some Pinot Loire...

Apples and red fruit on the nose. Stoniness too. The palate just so bright and alive. Cherries, sour rasberries and a long minerality. Sexy and silken. The deftly light tannins make me think a little carbonic maceration was involved somewhere down the line, but I don't know. Fucking great: a right gude-willy waught.

I'm not writing off auld acquaintance just yet. But I might just be taking a cup or two more Puzelat in the near future.

Spanish Airport Cheese and Serrano Sandwich

€5, Palma Airport

And so once again we found ourselves in just saddest position in space-time mankind has yet experienced: Palma Airport, on the way to Stansted.

And even yet this despair proves time and again powerless to destroy the ineffable wonder of the Spanish Airport Cheese Sandwich.

But I was drunk and in the mood for experimentation, and the conflagration of these factors led me to a twist on the theme: the Spanish Airport Cheese & Serrano Ham Sandwich. It's a Ronseal number containing nothing but cheese, ham and bread and none the worse for it. Don't fuck with the classics, nobody wants a Bowdlerised sandwich.

That slightly stale ciabatta-style bread is my madeline; Valencia Airport all those years ago, with the vagrants and their dogs and their ugly Catalan. The mastication required stretches this sandwich to full twenty minutes. €5 isn't cheap for a sandwich, but Sister's hotdog was over in five, so that's value right there.

The cheese is obviously what this sandwich is all about. Two thin slices of a tasty, salty, cheddar-type affair. We'll stop there- I'm not about to unweave this rainbow.

If only they'd left it. The ham is low-quality; stringy, hard and requiring the trimming of fat that makes the whole affair rather more of a trial than necessary. It also pushes us a little far over the salt-line which meant sister and I had to drink the best part of two litres of San Miguel with our meal. Though we did get free hats to congratulate us on this. Swings and roundabouts.

My quarrel with this sandwich is fairly petty. It's still very highy recommended: 18 points at least. Just a pity it always comes when it does.

Cherished, strengthened and fed, without the aid of joy.

Panevino Is de fundu 'e muru '09

c. €25

As a foodstuff bread is fairly consistently overrated.

I'll admit that there exists a pretty wide choice of breads, and that, of course, not all bread is created equal. You can get posh breads; with bits of stuff in it or on it, bread made using funny flour or yeast, crafted into odd shapes, or cooked in special ovens. And this diversity means that it is one of few foods that can happily play its part in all three of the days meals.

But it's never really the star of the show. Its role is one of deliverance. It is a pusher of peanut butter, an enabler of escargots.

Strange I always think then that there are entire shops dedicated to it, people whose whole profession is 'baker', and that it is frequently mentioned by restaurant reviewers.

Our man at Panevino started out life as a 'baker' before moving on to winemaking, and it's clearly left a bit of a chip on his shoulder. If I was being kind I would describe him as "rude". At the end of a rather Socratic 30-minuite questioning session I finally managed to extract the following information:

Hail hit the crop in 2009 and so, rather than using grapes from different plots to make a number of cuvees in different styles as he normally would, he instead put all the grapes for his red wines together and vinified them in very slightly different ways. Six wines were made, each named afer the place in the cellar where the barrel was. They all mean things like 'the one in the middle' or 'the one at the front'.

Recourse to an online translation service suggests Is de Fundu e Muru was at the base of a wall. The grapes are field blend, mostly Cannonau (aka Grenache), and load of others that he's never bothered zetting.

Thin-skinned grenache gives a light colour, violets and oranges on the nose on a light leather and spice base. In the mouth concentration hits. Sweet berries, more leather, sappy fruit, brighter cherries and very light, fine tannins. There's lots here, and it demands attention.

Better than all bread, and most wine.

Yvon Metras Fleurie "Le Printemps" '10

c. £20

"But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well marked though not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers... Does it not contradict the English indifference to the arts? Not really, because it is found in people who have no aesthetic feelings whatever."

That's how Orwell pinned us down. Miserable git.

Flowers aren't lightweight; they are heavy as stone, and the apogee of art. We take nature's beauty and imbue it with meaning and myth. The semiotics of flowers are centuries old; lillies and death, roses and health, rebirth and regeneration, bouquets, romance, the frail transcience of youth, even art and nature.

I bought this bottle of Fleurie for a couple of reasons markedly less serious than flowers. Firstly I liked the label- quite the prettiest I have ever seen. And secondly I liked the name.

It pours that attractive red-purple of Beaujolais. A succulent, savoury nose; violets, petals.

A simple palate with easy red fruit, but brambly blackberry too, possibly even eucalyptus. Clear and clean minerality, but a touch dilute.

Pretty nice? Yep. Worth the price? Not a chance. Will I buy it again for the name and the label and the frippery? I expect so.

Domaine Lucci Pinot Gris on Skins '10

£14 (ish) for 50cl, Les Caves de Pyrene

I love my little Sister for many reasons; I love her because she is funny and fun, because we share interests, because she is pretty, earnest, silly, passionate, irreverent and intelligent. But most of all I love her because she's fucking peculiar and because she has booked me a holiday to Mallorca.

Something appropiate to celebrate then. My cellar was unfortunately unable to furnish anything Mallorquin, but 'fucking peculiar' is something of a forte... Red Pinot Gris from Australia in just the cutest little wax-sealed bottle you could possibly imagine.

God only knows what mutant clone they've macerated to get this colour, somewhere between a deep dark rose, and a light Pinot Noir, and slightly cloudy.

The nose opens big. Strawberries, cream, toffee, confection: singular, promising and unapologetic.

The palate is completely discordant; crisp and one-dimensional with a lithe citrus flavour, no mid-palate. The tannins lend a bit o' bitterness and the brevity a whack of alcohol. A bad and loveable wine.

You can't have it all and I'll take weird over good any day of the week.

M&S New York Deli Pastrami Sandwich

£3.99, M&S

On sitting down to read possibly the finest piece of writing ever (once again), I was much taken with the desire to eat a sandwich.

I was introduced to this particular sandwich recently by my friend Emily2 on a tediously prolix journey from Oxford to Guildford when we managed to eat three, washed down with what was perhaps, with hindsight, a superfluity of of M&S ready-made Gin and Slim.

The history of the New York Pastrami Sandwich is one that is shrouded in myst'ry, steeped in controversy and shot-through by warring factions; Volk says it's his sandwich / And Katz's say it's their sandwich.

On to my sandwich... The pastrami's great; tasty, and loads of it, reminds me of corned beef but without the niggling doubts about what it's made of. Gherkins and sauerkraut are good (possibly great) accompaniments, their zingy flavour and crunch playing perfectly with the meat. The light American mustard dressing is icing-on-the-cake rather than gilding-the-lily.

Damn good so far, but then you hit cheese. At least you do texturally, beacuse it tastes very precisely of nothing. No American, Jewish or otherwise, has ever done anything worthwhile with cheese, and this sandwich is no exception: an especially pointless addition.

The bread too leaves a lot to be desired. It's density and uniformity do make for a sandwich with commendable structural integrity, but there's no bite to it, and they defintiely could've done better taste-wise.

In all 'though this is a very good sandwich. On the "Spanish Airport Cheese Sandwich 20-Point Scale"* it's a solid 13. And there's potential for more, without a couple of unforced errors (cheese, bread) this is easily a 16 point sandwich, maybe even 17.


* A fairly self-explanatory rating system, whereby a sandwich is judged against the 20-point Platonically Ideal cheese sandwich- available in all good Spanish airports.

Trimbach Riesling '09 & El Velero Ortiz Anchoas

£9.99, Majestic & £4, Sainsbury's

Most the week had been dominated by a (hitherto unexperienced) yearning to eat very expensive tinned Spanish anchovies.

For a tenacious sort finding them is not difficult, the tapas-inisation of the London food scene has seen to that, the problems arrive in locating companions, both people and wine.

Emily1's virtues are legion; she lives near me, reads the Romantic Poets, enjoys sweet wine, understands the importance of lunch, seems reasonably forgiving, and doesn't eat fish. More horrifically expensive anchovies for me.

Riesling's virtues are also legion. Lunch was a gim'me.

Aforementioned anchovies, quail eggs, sundried tomatoes, cucumber salad, pork pies, sausage rolls, couscous, ripe Camembert, apricot chutney, a baguette, and 2009 Trimbach Riesling.

The anchovies were good, firm and tasty, with a slightly metallic aftertaste. Each was indiviually wrapped around a single caper: a suitably profligate attitude to production costs.

Trimbach's effort was also straight up. A classic Alsatian style, wet rocks and sleek citrus on the nose, a wisp of smoke. Piercingly dry palate, lime and lemon peel, with just a hint of tropicality coming through on the finish.

This was a fine meal even by our own lofty standards, and a clear indication that the long hot streak that my sense of whimsy is currently enjoying shows no signs of letting up.

Borgogno Barolo '04

£32.70, Les Caves de Pyrene

TOD arrived at mine at 9am. Early for lunch, one might think.

He was laden with an inexpliacle alarm clock*, an explicable weariness, and an unjusifiable conviction that he had power of veto over my intention to go to Borough Market that morning.

Things fell apart... We didn't make lunch... I didn't make Borough... We took a cab out West.

Saturdays seem to be becoming increasingly picaresque. We may have drunk at three separate establishments, or possibly twelve. One, a pub, served oysters (in August?!), another hamburgers. Most treated us with with suspicion, some with disdain, and at least one, I believe, with outright terror. Later on TOD lost his Blackberry, keys, mind and a peacock feather that I had rather generously bought him. A la recherche de temps perdu.

All of this I put down to the Barolo: full of a passionate intensity, and just too young.

2004 Borgogno Barolo
The elegant Pinot-ish colour feints rich red fruit and dark cherries on the nose, flowers and leather too. Exceptional concentration. The palate is more austere; juicy and crunchy but firm. Before the tannins hit. Fine grained and supple, then succulent and coating, then puckering and total.

It's a disparate and poorly integrated amalgamation of high-quality components (at the moment), and all out of time.

But then again, these days, what isn't?


*predicatbly non-functioning

Dinavolo '06 and Dinavolino '10

£19.32 & 13.32, Les Caves de Pyrene

Very few of my close friends have any notcieable physical defects. I should point out that this is not out of any kind of bigotry, or eugenic companion selection on my part, it just so happens that amongst them they count not so much as a single cleft palate, club leg, or webbed toe.

I do however have a friend, Rollo, who has ginger hair.

I applaud the fact that in these enlightened times it is no longer acceptable to whisper, point, or throw faeces at those with ginger hair, and that the vast majority of the population do all they can to make these people feel accepted and comfortable amongst the rest of us. Small children may still cry in the street, but that's only natural.

With this in mind I decided to emphasise my own free-thinking liberalism by bringing a(nother) bottle of orange wine to a recent, 'though long-overdue, eating and drinking session with her: 2006 Denavolo "Dinavolo".

Made by Giulio Armani, winemaker at the well-known La Stoppa winery, but this from grapes on his own vinyard. 25% Some kind of Malvasia, 25% Ortrugo, 25% Marsanne, 25% God-knows-what. Straddling the line between 'minimum intervention' and 'just can't be fooked, mate.' The LCdP wine list reckons that '06 Dinavolo spent a year on its skins. Whoever told them this either a liar or certifiable, or most likely, both.

Dinavolo is wine that is savage in the best possible way (as holy as enchanted). Deep, dark orange, and opening with funk and cheese, rich oranges, herbs and spice come through, half sherbert, half dark British marmalade. The palate's huge, with brutal tannins, and fine acid, changing in the bottle by the hour, sometimes sweet, sometimes savoury. This one's pretty lairy even in comparison with other XM whites. Rollo loved it with cheese, and hated it on it's own. Which is a pretty liberal and open-minded approach to something quite so leftfield.

In comparison then: You wouldn't call Dinavolino a 'Baby Cuvee' to its face. It's got cheese and flowers on the nose, and is only a shade lighter than the Dinavolo. All the aggression's here too with a big mouth-puckering structure backing citrus fruit, by turns lush and sour. It's losing a little in terms of coplexity and layering of flavour, but at the price this one's a winner.

Drinking for the rebel and the rake. Outcast winemaking at its best.

Testalonga El Bandito 2009

probably around £20, Green and Blue

A total lack of sleep in the previous 2 1/2 days had lead seamlessly into five or six hours spent with some confused looking doctors at the Royal Surrey Hospital who were experimenting with a myraid of hedonistic delights, taking in everything from pupil-expanding drops, to a mixture of steroids injected straight into my eyeball.

The comedown was killer.

As much fun as being medicated at had been, I was pretty sure that some self medication was probably due... The weird turned pro some time ago, and the going needed to catch up, so I chucked a bottle of extended maceration* white wine in the fridge and settled in for the evening.

Skin maceration is the vinifiication technique used in all red wine in which the pressed juice is left on the skins (and sometimes stalks), in order to extract tannin, colour and flavour from them in the the final wine. A lot of rose wine involves limited maceration to just extract a little colour. White wine alomst never has an intentional maceration, and if it does usually only for a few hours, to extract flavour from some of the more neutral-tasting varieties such as Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Girs and Semillon.

There are though, on the controversial fringes of the wine-making world, a disparate group who'll leave white grapes on their skins for days, extracting colour, wild, heady aromas, and grippy tannic structure, to create the Marmite of the wine world: Orange Wine.

I love it like like I do yeast spread.

I had pretty high hopes for Testalonga's El Bandito; 100% Chenin Blanc, and probably the only X-M white being made in South Africa at the present time. It's also pretty damn rare, not available yet in the UK, and only from Natural Wine specialist Green and Blue in Dulwich when it is.

Colour is not at all orange, but a deep clear gold. The nose is dominated intitially by yeast and lees, giving way to spice and little lemon twist, tannin is light to non-existent on the palate, on recognisable by a faint bitterness at the tail. Mouthfeel is unbelieveably rich, with all the honeyed Chenin texture you could hope for, and a load of exotic spiciness.

It's nothing like the biting, agressive X-M whites coming out of Italy and the flavours seem more driven by the lees than by the skins, which is concurrent with the non X-M version, El Bandito 'Cortez', which I personally also find just a tad more comlex.

It's good, unctuous stuff, and great with food I imagine, but I left it just slightly struggling to see the point.

If you're going to do something weird, best to push it all the way. This one's like ending the party at home with a mug of cocoa in bed, rather than at a hospital with a hypodermic needle in your eye.


*which I have decided to abbreviate to "X-M"