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.