Melanie asks :  Do you have any good organic wine recommendations? 

 From Eddie:

There are increasingly more and more organic growers. I’ll do some research and come back later. In the mean time….

The one that stands out is Chateauneuf-du-Pepe (Chateau Beaucastel). They have been doing it for years (both white and red). They also practice biorhythm re their various activities. The red is excellent with duck or game. Expect to pay around £30 per bottle for a decent vintage.

Further comment from Eddie:

Apparently, organic viticulture has been in practice in France (agriculture biologique) for some time. In 1991, the EU introduced regulations which cover a range of crops etc including wine production. California took to it much later and believe it or not, the Australians took to it even later.

The intresting thing about organic wine is that the regulation isn’t confined to soil management, it also applies to the use of sulphates (antioxidation and sterilization) as well as fining agents as well as the use of wild yeast.

The best producers of this type of wine in France are: Ch de Beaucastel of Chateauneuf-du-Pape , mas de Daumas Gassac of the Languedoc and Domaine de Trevallon of Provence. In the US, the pioneers are Fetzer, Gallo, Wente Brothers, Bunea Vista and Mondavi. In Australia, the early pioneers are  Gil Wahlquist and Penfold. There are an increasing number of smaller growers (worldm wide) that practice this approach.

I have only tried Penfold, Beaucastel and Buena Vista.

Eddie

Updated on 16 November 2009:

Just discovered that the following “Great Vineyards” also practice Biodynamic Viticulture:

Domaine Leflaive in Puligny-Montrachet, Domaine Leroy in Vosne-Romanee, Chapoutier in Hermitage and Huet in Vouvray.

Now that Xmas is approaching – well the hotels and restaurants have started taking bookings for Xmas parties – its time to have a few words about bubblies.

Similar to white wines, champagne have a whole range of tastes. However, the non vintage wines are consistent – as they are blended – unlike most white wine which would vary from vintage to vintage.

So what are we looking for? That will depend on your taste and pocket.
The taste ranges from bland to fresh and biscuity to intense.

I tend to avoid the blanc de blanc – pure chardonnay – or the blanc de noir – pure pinot noir. But, that’s simply my personal taste. Go for a mix.
At the bottom end, I have drank Mercier for years. Bit more money and I’ll go for Louis Roederer rather than Moet & Chandon. I found the basic Moet too light. However, the Grand Vintage and Dom Perignon are great champagnes. For a decent light champagne try Tattinger (the champagne of James Bond)

Louis Roderer is a fruity champagne but it lacks that biscuity taste. By the way, I would not buy Crystal – its only a little bit better but at 5x the price. Pol Roger and Mumm  are a little more “fresh” than Louis Roderer but not as fruity.

To me the best value champagne is probably Bollinger Grand Anee at just under £40 a pop. There are also a lot of minor champagne houses  around Epernay that does not sell into the UK but have retail outlets in the Chateau. They are will worth sorting out – my favourite is Dumont.
With regards to Krug, that’s a different animal. Its an acquired taste with a much more lingering and intense floral taste. If you like the basic Moet, you are unlikely to like Krug.

On the Rose side, the one that I really like is the Laurent-Perrier. I found the Ruinart too dry. Another worth a go is Billecart-Salmon.
I can’t comment on some of the other Brands as I have not tasted them.

Eddie@Bottlesandcooks.com

12 October 2009

Name of restaurant or pub: Le Fregate

Location: Les Cotis, St Peter Port, Guernsey, GU1 1UT

Web site: http://www.lafregatehotel.com/Restaurant/

Telephone number: 01481 724624

Date of visit: 12 October 2009

Approx. cost per head: £15.00

Comments on wine list/beer: drank water

Review:

Ate at Le Fregate during the pan- Channel Islands “Tennerfest”.  Excellent lunch, with an unbelievably clear and spectacular view from the restaurant across the rooftops of St Peter Port,  the harbour across to Herm and Sark set clear in a sparkling deep turquoise sea.

The room is all cool cream with black trim, simple but well furnished, leaving the wonderful view to make the statement.  Tennerfest lunch was great – main course of wild mushroom risotto with a simple poached egg and chervil garnish stood out as the texture and flavours were well judged.  First course of seafood fritters nearly hit the mark but the flavours were a little too backward.  Would definately eat there again, and imagine the night  time view would be spectacular too.

aliciaandrews@gmail.com

Name of market or shop: Seewoo

Location: 15 Craddock Rd, Reading RG2 OJT

Public transport/parking: Car park in front or long walk from Basingstoke Rd

Web site:

Telephone number: 01189313188

Date of visit: 10 October  2009

Review:

Seewoo is part of a chain of Chinese supermarkets.

They sell a variety of goods ranging from frozen, fresh, dried food to bottled sauces.

In terms of frozen food, the frozen dumplings (prawn, spring rolls etc) are dead easy to cook in your kitchen – they will turn out just like the dim sum lunches you get in a restaurant. The range available is colossal. They then have freezers full of frozen meat and fish. This is where you can buy a kilo of huge tiger prawns for under £20 instead of £50 at your fish mongers.

In terms of bottled sauces, you will find soy, oyster, hoisin and a variety (hundreds) of stir fry sauces.

The dry goods department is full of sacks of rice (25 or 50 kilos), noodles  (normal size packets) and dried herbs, spices, fungus and sea produces.

They do have a fresh food area and this is where you can get the exotic and unusual vegetables and fruits e.g. rambuten, snake beans, daikon etc. They also do wind-dried meats and sausages, fresh bean curd etc. You will also be able to get roast duck (cantonese style) and char sui (roast loin of pork) most days but they tend to come in on a Thursday or Friday.

They also do woks, pots, plates and bowls. However they tend to be the down market variety. The only exceptions are the Japaneses claypots that you can cook overr a naked flame.

The booze side is nothing special, all the asian beers are there : singha, tiger, chingdau.. but they are not cheap. They also stock a range of chinese wines – beware, they taste more like sherry than the vino we are used to.

By the way, debit cards only. Membership is required but nobody checks and you can join on the door – no annual fees.
They are open from 10.00-18.00, 7 days a week.

Eddie@bottlesandcooks.com

Name of market or shop: Costco

Location: 100 South Oak Way,Reading, RG2 6UE

Public transport/parking: Green Park bus, ample parking

Web site: http://www.costco.co.uk/Locations_home/locations/Reading/reading_x.html

Telephone number: 1189207105

Date of visit: 11 October 2009

Review:
Costco? Isn’t it just a cash and carry for members and businesses. Yip, is the answer.

They are a nationwide chain. You will need to be a business or someone who works for medical, local goverment etc to qualify. Check their web site for membership qualifications and locations.

Costco is very cheap – if you buy in bulk.They are especially good on beer and wines. For example, you can buy Krug champagne (you get change from £100 for a bottle)……and Asahi beer…. etc. I rate their booze division as one of the best around. Supermarkets are going down market all the time in order to keep prices low re wine – some of the Oz wines on sale are so immature and acid that they are great at curing athlete foot – wash your feet in it.

The food side majors at the convience end (£5 for a tray of pazza, enough to feed 10) but you can alsoget a kilo of organic carrots for £2 and 6 figs for £3.50. The meat counter is priced very cheaply – a whole fillet (steak) for £70 (weight dependent). They also have lots of deli meats and cheese but its bulk rather than taste.

The frozen food cabinets are full of convience food of the more interesting type – mainly deep and oven fried. For example, they do crab cakes and shoft shell crabs.

Nuts, crisps and chocolates all come by the kilo (or thereabout).

Besides all this, you can get domestic appliances, tyres, DVDs, clothes etc. There is even an optician!

Is it a good shopping expierence? No, it’s big, confusing with trollies left all over the place because it attracts that sort of customers but at the price they charge, its a small price to pay.

Note: they take only debit cards and you need to be a member – you can join and start shopping on the same day.

Eddie – eddie@bottlesandcooks.com

Name of restaurant or pub: The Wharf,

Location: 22 Manor Rd, Teddington, TW11 8BG

Web site: www.thewharfteddington.com

Telephone number: 020 8977 6333

Date of visit: 9 October 2009

Approx. cost per head: £25 plus

Comments on wine list/beer: A very basic wine list at normal|London markup

Review:
We went for lunch – 2 courses for £14 and 3 for £16. The cuisine could be described as modern european.

The dining room is a giant glass structure perxched on the riverside. Very trendy looking bar. we had squid to start with followed by Moroccan lamb with couscous and grilled mackeral – fresh!. All the dishes were very well executed. According to the manager, they only sell fresh fish in season – the other fish on the menu was sea beam. The deserts on the next table looked very good.

Whilst we ate, the actor who starred in the recent BT adverts turned up with his agents(?). He drank orange juice with his meal.

As the structure was mainly glass, it let in a lot of light which I liked very much. I can remembered eating at Roy Yamaguchi’s in Philli where I was presented with a torch to accompany my menu.

I like tho place and food very much – especially at the prices charged. However, the wine list was very basic and I would recommend that they jazz it up with a few “older” vintages.

They have a car park outside the front of the restaurant.

Hi.

Thought being somewhat new to the whole wine drinking game I thought I would take it up for a bit of fun and share with you my experience for your amusement.

The sense of excitement about buying a bottle of 2001 Pereus D’Aligino Merlot was tangible. It is not so often that I spend so much on a single bottle of wine, indeed, many a time I have bought a whole box for the amount I was to have spent on this particular wine. But I felt I should buy a decent bottle of wine if I am to contribute a review to this wonderful site.

So, armed with my handy copy of ‘Old McGraw’s guide to our wine’, which has the curious subtitle of ‘we gave them government, infrastructure and the game of cricket and how do they repay us… cheap plonk!’, I set about my task.

The list of wines available to the complete novice was awe inspiring so it was just as well I had my Old McGraw with me. Old McGraw himself must be quite some character given his descriptions of the various wines from around the world, albeit all ex-colonies in one shape or another. I noted with interest that although Old does state they are all ex-colonies he appears to have included France. I would have thought this an oversight of history on Old’s part but he is quite insistent if not impassioned that we ‘beat their arses’ on several occasions and therefore this is good enough reason to include them.

I strolled, in a literary sense, through the tranquil wine growing regions of Napa Valley, Coonawarra, Marlborough and of course Little Karoo where apparently ‘you can still detect the blood of the fifty five gallant infantry men who died protecting this god forsaken land from the cunning and cowardly enemies of the British Empire.’

Although a friend of mine did point out that the ‘massacre’ as described in the book was somewhat inaccurate as apparently, according to military records, there was no sign of an actual enemy being involved. Indeed one of the locals was said to have been a witness to a drunken brawl involving this particular unit as they sat around a camp fire smoking a variety of local dried plants leaves.

The witness had noted, he was not aware any of the leaves actually being smoked… could be smoked, but what did he know he was just some dumbass local who knew nothing. Still, the British authorities took great pity on this gentleman and by way of thanks for his evidence of this event he was placed in a special camp to aid his education. One can only hope he went on to great things this young chap.

It was here, in this section of the book I found the wine I was looking for. The much heralded Pereus D’Aligino Merlot. The description of the wine sounded exquisite, ‘like drinking from the fountain of youth the sensations of overripe pomegarnite crushed by the delicate feet of a hermaphrodite from Corfu’ sent a tingle down my spine albeit I didn’t actually fully understand, but the sense that the wine had actually been made by real human feet crushing grapes was exhilarating. Yes, this was the wine for me!

Apparently 2001 was not this wines best year, but it was marked as within my price range so that settled it.

The Old McGraw rating system stated ‘many wines connisewers (sic), or pretentious snobs as I like to call them, mark wine with a dry-sweet or Light-Full Body rating, whereas I urge my audience to stick to the much more important hic rating system. Ranging from 1-5, where one hic is something you would wash socks in unless you were then going to recant the wine and take it to a party of somebody you don’t really like and five hics is so good sometimes when you wake up you are actually blind for several hours.’

Ah, good Old McGraw, now that’s a rating system I could get to grips with. There was also his ‘vomit scale’ but I found this a little more difficult to understand as it related to actual distance and colouration which McGraw himself stated was somewhat difficult for the average wino to get to grips with.

So, armed with my handy guide and the certain knowledge of what I wanted to buy, off I set to my local Tesco’s. This was not quite what I had expected but there were clear instructions in the guide telling me that Tesco had managed to secure the full 2001 harvest from the Pereus family at very favourable rates. Once again McGraw goes into the kind of detail you would not expect of other guides. He explains how, having mislaid one wine buyer in the region Tesco sent a second buyer with his own security detail to secure the best possible deal from the poor migrant farmers. All this for the hard working British housewives who ‘only wanted to quaff a few glasses of wine after a hard day at the local dole office and then having had to fill out fifteen different claims for benefits under a variety of names.’ Ah, indeed, that could be very taxing indeed!

On first glance I was unable to find this delicate little ‘five hiccer’ in amongst the neatly stacked wine boxes and had to ask one of the knowledgeable ‘Tesco Sommelier’ for some assistance. Jon, was certainly more knowledgeable than his youthful pimple infested face let on. With hands in pockets and a terrible cold he looked somewhat wretched as he indicated to a section of wines in bottles in the adjoining aisle. Aha… at last… real wine. This was what I had been looking for, I could almost sense the taste the pomegranates, mind you, if truth be told, I am not entirely sure what a pomegranate is, let alone what it tastes like. But it sounds delicious.

The moment of destiny arrived. Here it was, the 2001 Pereus D’Aligino Merlot and luck was certainly on my side. The wine had been reduced making it even more of a bargain. I raced through the checkout and thence to home, placing the wine carefully on the kitchen worktop. I read with interest the amazing detail on the back of the bottle including how the wine is actually ‘reduced’ in the native country and then carefully transported via special wine lorries to a England where, once again, the concentrate is pumped full of natural English water and rehydrated to its natural state. Amazing, I never realised the wine industry was so complex, no wonder these bottles cost so much having to use this new fangled technology.

It was not until later that evening, having followed Old McGraw’s guide to decanting that I sat down with my evening meal with this ‘cheeky little Merlot’. The decanting process was very good fun and apparently necessary to bring the best from the wine. I did not have the requisite ‘pint glass’ as described by the guide so used my plastic measuring jug instead. With great care and with the sense of anticipation palpable, I poured the first glass from the measuring jug into my mug, clearly a mug was not ideal, but until reading the guide had not realised glass was the preferred vessel for drinking wine.

The wine was exquisite. The pomegranates certainly bit into the tongue and left a fascinating after taste that I had not really experienced since school when I accidentally swallowed some methylated spirits, but this I was sure was ‘the experience’. The sensation of heat was readily discernible as the bright red liquid cascaded down my throat and the distinct smell of burning hair as described in the guide was readily discernible, so much so I had to pay my own head just to make sure I was not on fire. In fact, I had not even had to think about this as beating ones head appeared to be a natural reaction to the delicate wine.

Yes, I would definitely recommend this wine to anybody. It is a shame the fish’n’chip supper must have been a little off though as the nausea I felt for the next three days somewhat dampened the whole experience. But you must hurry, I believe the 2001 vintage is somewhat limited now following the Tesco special offer. And don’t forget to pick up your own copy of Old McGraw too, it is an invaluable guide to the niceties of wine drinking for the average ‘wino’.

Hoping you have a sense of humour as always (albeit humour is subjective) Yours… Mr Creosote (nephalion@yahoo.com)

* Please see Eddie’s comments on this article.

Name of restaurant or pub: Zilli Fish

Location: 36-40 Brewer St, London, W1F 9TA

Web site: http://www.zillialdo.com/

Telephone number: 020 7734 8649

Date of visit: 8 October 2009

Approx. cost per head: £19.90

Comments on wine list/beer: Run of the mill London list and prices

Review:
I was looking forward to this as I have seen Aldo a lot on TV.

However, I was disappointed. The food was par for a Soho restaurant before the 8pm performance (theatre).

We had the set meal, mussels and sardines to start with. The sardines were in my humble view previously frozen. The mussels had a chilli kick which was unusual but pleasant. Main courses were sea beam on a bed of ratatouille and a sea food tagliatelle in a lobster bisque. The ratatouille turned out to be the highlight of the evening – perfectly cooked and not mushy. I wasn’t mad about the seafood ratatouille as it only had bits of tuna in it and no other fish.

We also had a bottle of house champagne (ok) and the poached pear for desert. The pear was poached in mulled wine – very acceptable.

The service was excellent but overall, the food didn’t give me a I want to come back feeling.

Eddie – eddie@bottlesandcooks.com

Name of restaurant or pub: The Black Rat

Location: 88 Chesil St, Winchester, SO23 0HX

Web site: http://theblackrat.co.uk/

Telephone number: 01962 844465

Date of visit: 6 October 2009

Approx. cost per head: £25 plus

Comments on wine list/beer: Interesting list with a few gems. Mark up slightly below average

Review:

On a dark and windy wednesday night in Winchester when other restaurants and pubs are nearly empty, this place is half full.

The restaurant is owned by the same people as the Black Boy and it used to be a gay pub – so I was told.

The Black Rat is mainly open for dinner and weekend lunches. The cooking is “continental” english i.e. its multiple ingredients with a slight twist.

We had the Pollock Croquttes which were moist and plum and an interesting dish of pork with rillettes and pate en croute or a sausage roll filled with pate (thats what I think it should be called) which I liked very much.

Main courses was duck, onglet steak (I always thought that this is a skirt steak but Tony of Vicars in Reading told me that this is the muscle wrapped around  the bladder –  to squeeze the bladder) and Tuscan vegetarian platter. The steak and duck were cooked pink with ample side vegetables. The Tuscan platter was disappointing – it tasted of the ingredients (bread, mushroom, red cabbage and cheese) with no “special come together effect”.

The deserts were very visual and according to my friends excellent.

Eddie – eddie@bottlesandcooks.com

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