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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

Thinking pink – rosé wine reviews for an English summer

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It looks like summer has finally arrived in London, just in time for us to spend three weeks indoors glued to the Olympics. For me, it’s not summer without massive quantities of rosé, served icy cold either with summer salads and barbeques, or necked while lying in the park or garden.

Rosé is made in the same way as red wine, except that the grape skins are scooped out after only a couple of days so that it doesn’t get as dark as a red. How they get it to be so moreish remains a mystery, though.

I’ve long been a fan of Chapel Down’s English Rose, which is grown in Kent and is totally fruity and delicious without being too cloyingly sweet. If you’re feeling patriotic, this is the pink wine for you, and although it’s a bit pricey at £10, it is bloody tasty.

The rather tasty Chapel Down English Rose 2010

The wine: Chapel Down English Rose
Where’s it from? Kent, UK
Where to buy it: Waitrose
What it will set you back: £10.44
How boozy is it? 11%

I also recently tried Reserve De La Saurine, a light, crisp and dry rosé from M&S that would go really well with picnics and light summer meals, and is a total bargain at £6.49 or £38 for six (let’s face it, one bottle is not enough.) Careful though, it packs a punch at 13.5% – make sure you eat!

A hard night’s work comparing rosés!

The wine: Reserve De La Saurine Rosé
Where’s it from? Languedoc, France
Where to buy it: Marks & Spencer
What it will set you back: £6.49
How boozy is it? 13.5%

It’s unusual for me to really dislike a wine, but I couldn’t get on with my third rosé, Yali, despite it being made from the light and fruity Merlot grape which is normally one of my faves. I found it tasted a bit plasticky and artificial, and for the price there is much nicer stuff around. It’s also as orangey as a fake-tanned WAG, which was a bit off-putting. One to avoid – I ended up adding it to a bolognaise sauce, which surprisingly worked ok. It seems to have gone down well with the commenters on the Majestic site, which just goes to show how variable opinons about wine can be!

The wine: Yali Winemaker’s Selection Merlot Rosé
Where’s it from? Chile
Where to buy it: Majestic – but I don’t recommend it
What it will set you back: £5.99 for two
How boozy is it? 11.5%

Bottles cunningly photographed before being mysteriously emptied…

Luckily, my fourth rosé was more successful – another reliable, tasty Kiwi from Majestic, Fairleigh Estate Pinot Noir Rosé. Tastes almost like juice – really fruity, light and totally drinkable. Also, at £5.99 for two, really good value!

The wine: Fairleigh Estate Pinot Noir Rosé, 2011
Where’s it from? Marlborough, New Zealand
Where to buy it: Majestic
What it will set you back: £5.99 for two
How boozy is it? 12.5%

So that’s my summer wine shopping list sorted – enjoy life through rosé-tinted spectacles, and thanks for reading -

LWG

Believing everything you read – impartiality in wine writing

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The wine market is huge and full of choice for wine consumers. It’s hard for smaller wineries to achieve cut-through and perversely, sometimes it’s hard for consumers to know what they are getting, because of the role played by marketing, labelling and… wine reviewers. Some of you may know that I am on Twitter and among some really great wine conversations, I also get quite a lot of approaches from wineries and wine PRs trying to get “airtime” for their particular wines or causes.

For me, this is one of the major problems with wine reviewing and writing – that because wine is a product, as well as a passion for me and thousands of other wine geeks, there is a lot of vested and commercial interest in recommendations.

Not to diss the people who make their living from wine writing, because many of them are awesome and have your best interests as a customer at heart too, but one of the reasons I started the blog is that I don’t want to be one of them, and love the pure “people power” of reaching people through blogging. So, let’s be really clear – I don’t sell ad space on the blog, and I don’t accept freebies, or free trips, or dinners or bottles on the house. If any of this changes, I’ll make sure I tell you!

My day job isn’t in the wine trade, although LondonWineHusband does work in a wine shop, and I am jealous of his employee discount. If I review something, it’s because I’ve bought it as a consumer or visited a place as an enthusiastic eater/drinker, and I genuinely think (or don’t think) it’s good value for money and worth drinking. LWG is a labour of boozy love. So if you hate something I recommended, at least you know that you should blame me, not the winery’s PR people!

Thanks for reading –

LWG

Pardon my French – the trouble with French wines

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I’m spending a fantastic week in Western France in a villa with some friends at the moment. This is the kind of holiday that is a sneaky reminder that you are a bit grown-up – when did we stop planning holidays based on the availability of hideous bars where cocktails come in fishbowls and you can drink Sangria from a bucket? Reassuringly, though, there has been loads of drinking – the recycling bin bottle count on day 5 is 38 on wine alone. (Remember, LWG encourages responsible consumption and is not a good role model…)

We’ve had a great time, thanks in part to discovering the joys of the French supermarket wine aisle which has some truly great, easy drinking French bargains to offer – cheaper as there’s less ridiculous tax and duty than in the UK and as the vast majority of the wines on offer are homegrown.

I’ve not always been such a fan of French wine, thanks largely to my one-woman crusade against all that is fusty and pretentious in the world of wine. And let’s face it, the French are really good at pretentiousness. French wine is generally labelled by region not grape type, and hard to understand, relying on you as a consumer to know that Sancerre = Sauvignon Blanc or Chablis = Chardonnay. French wine is generally made in a more complex style that goes with food, rather than something you can sit and drink at the pub or while watching TV. French wine is also a lot less consistent – whereas you might know where you are and what to expect from a Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc, you are more likely to get something you don’t like if you take a punt on something French and unknown.

Having said that, this trip has been a real eye-opener. We’ve done a couple of winery visits, one to a sparkling wine producer and one to a smallish Muscadet producer, and both have been passionate and interested in getting their wine across to a larger audience and in challenging preconceptions. French growers are waking up to a new kind of wine consumer, that doesn’t expect bargain basement bilge but also wants to know what they can expect from the wine they’re buying without a six-week introductory French wine class. And those supermarket 5 Euro bottles have all been either good or great – not a vinegarry vin de table in sight. So while I won’t be abandoning my approachable, reliable new world faves from Oz, New Zealand, South Africa or the US just yet, or ditching my big Italian reds, I will be filling the boot up with some Frenchies for the drive back to Dover. I’ll let you know how I get on!

Santé, and thanks for reading -

LWG