London International Wine Fair – round up

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I visited the London International Wine Fair at Excel last Monday. It’s a massive trade event with a huge number of growers, bottlers, negociants and big booze businesses all showcasing their wines.

Here are some of my stand-outs:

Chasselas and Swiss wines in general

There were some real surprises, including the excellent Wines of Switzerland stand where I tried a really fantastic Chasselas from Maison Blanche in the Mont-Sur-Rolle appellation. (Don’t judge it by the old-skool website!)

The full line up of Swiss wines from Mont Sur Rolle.

The full line up of Swiss wines from Mont Sur Rolle.

I met the wine maker, Yves de Mestral, who was a lovely and very modest chap.

It’s a sensational white with low acidity and a fruity, floral and dry style.

Yves de Mestral pouring his Chasselas for me.

Yves de Mestral pouring his Chasselas for me.

We did some other tasting on the stand and I predict that Swiss wines are going to be ones to watch (if the pound ever gets stronger – the exchange rate is killer!) in future as they are high quality and easy drinking, but under-appreciated in the UK. Could be the new Gruener Veltliner.


The under-representation of English wines

The lack of a strong English wine presence, particularly at such an internationally well attended event on “home turf” felt like a real missed opportunity to me. We were met at the tube station by imitation Frenchies handing out free croissants, India had a huge pitch for its “wines with mango” (pass, thanks), and even the cafes in Excel were stocked with crappy, bottled Echo Falls.

Awkward at a wine fair in London - stocking Echo Falls in the restaurant.

Awkward at a wine fair in London – stocking Echo Falls in the restaurant.

Given how awesome English wine is, this is just bonkers – we should have been all over this event!

How dominiated the wine trade still is by red-trousered Henrys

I would really like to see some more non-white, non-male faces at these things. And not ones dressed up in promo tshirts handing out samples.

Chaps in red trousers - it's a wine thing.

Chaps in red trousers – it’s a wine thing.

Alsace Pinot Gris is delicious

I stopped by the stand of winemaker Hugel et Fils who make a series of great Alsatian wines. My favourite was the Pinot Gris, which pretty much smacks all the insipid Pinot Grigios in the face with a demonstation of what it could achieve if only it would pull its lazy Italian socks up.

Etienne Hugel looking chuffed to be surrounded by his wines!

Etienne Hugel looking chuffed to be surrounded by his wines!

Well worth giving this a go – you can find it for sale in the UK at the Wine Society for £12.50.

All in all, it was a fab day – it’s going to be held at Olympia next year which is much less convenient for a wobbly post-event visit to Westfield Stratford, but that’s probably for the best!

Thanks for reading -

LWG

English sparkling wine and irritatingly delicious Japanese food at Sake No Hana

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I wanted to hate Sake No Hana. On paper, it has all the hallmarks of unbearable pretentiousness. It’s in St James, stomping ground of hedge fund tossers; they have a second branch in Dubai; it’s from the team behind uber-expensive Hakkasan: basically, it seems like the kind of place where Tamara Beckwith hangs out.

sake no hana

camel valley 2011

sushi at sake no hana

Annoyingly, they have a really good wine and sake list, including the really fantastic 2011 Camel Valley Pinot Noir Brut, a rose sparkling wine from the Camel Valley Vineyard in Cornwall. It’s a lovely fresh, fruity and dry fizz that went perfectly with what I can only describe (through gritted teeth) as the amazing food served at Sake No Hana.

Japanese food can be hard to match with wines, and I’d generally suggest sake as a more logical pairing, but this stood up really well to the oily fish, spicy wasabi, and everything tempura because of how light and dry it is.

The only thing I could find to hate about Sake No Hana was the bill – but even then, given how good the food was, I couldn’t object. I arrived loving English wine – and left also loving Sake No Hana.

Let me know if you try it out (either the pricey Japanese, or the delicious English fizz) – and thanks for reading,

LWG

LWG’s Greek bargain

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The wine: Hatzidakis 2011 Santorini Assyrtiko
Where’s it from? Santorini, Greece
Where to buy it: Waitrose or Ocado
What it will set you back: £8.60
How boozy is it? 13.5%

Greek wine is the butt of many a joke, and many of us have washed down a halloumi salad with some seriously dodgy pine-flavoured Retsina.

So when I was doing the Easter Ocado shop (Four massive dark chocolate Lindt rabbits? An Easter essential.) and the Hatzidakis Santorini Assyrtiko popped up as an “item I might be interested in”, I wasn’t immediately sold on it.

Yes, my rug does need hoovering. But I was busy drinking wine.

Yes, my rug does need hoovering. But I was busy drinking wine.

But I’ve been blogging long enough now to have learnt that you have to try a few mingers to idenitfy a diamond, and it was only £8, so I popped it in the basket.

I have to say, it was a pleasant surprise – light, really, really dry and lemony, and generally a tasty wine that stacked up well to our copious Easter scoffing!

 It’s from the beautiful island of Santorini and is a fantastic sunshiney wine bargain that could change the way you think about Greek booze forever. (Good luck finding a palatable Ouzo though – you’re on your own with that one!)

Thanks for reading -

 

LWG

Pink, fizzy, fruity and thoroughly girly – Innocent Bystander Moscato wine review

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The wine: Innocent Bystander Moscato 2012
Where’s it from? Yarra Valley, Victoria, Australia
Where to buy it: Whole Foods Market, High St Ken
What it will set you back: £6.95
How boozy is it? 5.5%

The totally yummy Innocent Bystander Moscato 2012.

The totally yummy Innocent Bystander Moscato 2012.

Every now and again, I get tired of wine that you have to think about, wine that’s sophisticated, interesting, sharp and not pink. On Friday night, I had one of those moments – and I saw this fizzy pink flowery wine in a beer style bottle calling to me from the fridge in the High St Ken branch of US hippy, foodie grocery store Whole Foods Market.

We popped the beer bottle style top off this one a couple of hours later, unleashing what I can only describe as a total Spice Girl of a cheeky, fruity, juicy wine. It’s an Italian style sweetish fizzy wine made from a blend of Muscat grapes, and at 5.5% is unlikely to give you too drastic a hangover!

In the week of Mother’s Day and International Women’s Day, I’d highly recommend this decidedly girly Aussie import to you. I won’t bother to tell you what food it would go with – you’ll have necked it before the plates hit the table. It’s not complicated, but it’s delicious.

Enjoy, and thanks for reading -

LWG

Ten reasons not to give up wine in January

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1. January is a tough month – for a lot of us, it’s grey, boring and we’re skint. Wine is a little pleasure at a time when others are scarce.

2. Wine bargains abound at this time of year – for example, Bollinger on offer at Majestic

3. You can drink the rest of your Christmas wines: after all, it’s the season of leftovers. Don’t finish the liqueurs though, it will just add to your malaise.

4. It’s freezing outside, and it calls for a big plummy red like this bargain Californian Blackburn & James Shiraz from Waitrose.

5. Celebrate every January sale bargain with something sparkling!

6. It takes longer than a month for your liver to regenerate anyway.

7. Lower calorie and carb wine options for those of you dieting are those wines with lower residual sugars, so basically dry whites like Sauvignon Blanc or Chardonnay. Technically, Pinot Grigio falls into this category too – but if you’re not on the wagon, drink something nicer.

8. It’s summer in the New World – get excited about new 2013 releases coming this spring by sampling a few of your old favourites.

9. You can catch up with the friends that you didn’t manage to see before Christmas over a bottle of wine.

10. Were the previous nine reasons not convincing enough? If you’re still determined, the charity Alcohol Concern, which does great work tackling problem drinking and alcohol dependency, is seeking fundraisers to do a sponsered Dry January – you have my full support (from the sidelines!)

Happy 2013 to all of you, and thanks for reading -

LWG

LWG’s wine trip to Piemonte

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Autumn is an exciting time in wine-making. The grapes are picked, sorted, squished, and the process of making them into wine begins. It’s a time for marketing hype about how great the wine year is, and more importantly, it’s when crisp whites give way to bolshy reds at the dinner table.

So I was properly excited to visit Piemonte, a region in Northern Italy famous for Barolo and Barbaresco wines and for producing truffles, last week. It’s a gorgeous area and a top destination for foodies. We visited quite a few wineries, and apart from the big, sharp Barolo wines made to be aged for a few years before drinking, also tried the lesser known Dolcetto and Barbera reds and the rather lovely local white, Gavi di Gavi – (yes, it’s so good they named it twice.)

Visiting vineyards and winemakers is always exciting if like me, you are a Wine Nerd, because you get to understand all the things that winemakers can do that make a difference to how the wine tastes. They all think that their methods of growing, managing their crop and changing the grapes into wine are the best – from using steel tanks to toasted French oak barrels – and their methods are able to produce very different styles of wine from the same grape varieties, sometimes even in the next door vineyard. I would be a hopeless winemaker – I barely got through Chemistry GCSE – but I’m a big fan of wines from little wineries without massive marketing budgets that are good value, well made and tasty.

The stand out from my visits was the Cavallotto winery. Giuseppe, from the winemaking family, gave us a very detailled wine tasting (8 wines before 11am – I am so dedicated!) and their wines include some fantastic Barolos, but a great taster would be the reasonably priced and drinkable Dolcetto red wine, available here for about £12 a bottle.

I’d definitely recommend exploring some wines from this fantastic region. Salute (that’s Italian for cheers!) and thanks for reading -

LWG

London Wine Girl’s visit to Fulham Wine Rooms

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LondonWineHusband and I were at a loose end and hungry in Hammersmith the other night when I remembered a recent drive past the Fulham Wine Rooms. It’s at the nice end of Fulham Road and about ten minutes from the tube.

Fulham Wine Rooms, complete with decorative moose head on the wall.

Even on a Tuesday evening, it was bustling, full of girls dressed, in the Fulham tradition, exactly like K Middy. Although I did hear someone talking loudly about Rye-sling (FFS, people, it’s Reeeezling), the crowd seemed to be enjoying the wines on offer and the atmosphere was cosy.

Easily the coolest thing about the Fulham Wine Rooms are the Enomatic machines, which are basically Oystercard-powered wine dispensers. You top up a card with credit, put it in the machine, pick the wine you want from a selection of 40 or so bottles, and tell the machine whether you want a 75 ml taste, or a smaller or large glass, and it then charges you and fills your glass accordingly. Although initially I wasn’t quick enough off the mark and poured white Burgundy on my shoes (luckily, they were patent leather, so easy wipe-clean), it does otherwise seem pretty foolproof!

The Enomatic machine in action!

It allows the restaurant to have lots of wines available by the glass, as the machine keeps it fresh for a couple of weeks rather than the usual 2 or 3 days shelf life of open wine kept behind the bar. It’s also a great, low risk way of trying out a few different wines – you can try a sample before you commit to a whole glass, and also can have a glass of something that would be out of your price range if you bought a whole bottle.

The range of wines that the Fulham Wine Rooms offers is broad and interesting and our food was really nice, too – I had tempura fish and chips with minted mushy peas, which soaked up the many and varied glasses I drank nicely.

Fulham Wine Rooms make a tasty pile of tempura fish and chips.

I would definitely recommend it – they also have a sister restaurant, Kensington Wine Rooms in Notting Hill Gate which might be worth a go.

Needless to say, I’ve already started thinking about how I can make space in my kitchen for my very own Enomatic wine dispenser – do I really need a washing machine?

Thanks for reading –

LWG