Rutland Bird Fair is another opportunity to meet old friends and make new ones. Steven & Ann Cameron were running the African Bird Club stand. Gehan de Silva who arranged our last birding tour to Sri Lanka was at the JetWing stand promoting ‘Big Five‘ tours to the island. Dimiter who was our guide in…
I have been storing my wine in the cellars under my office at 86 Station parade in Harrogate for a quarter of century. In ten days time, the property will be sold and over the last three months, I have been moving my wine to its new home, a few cases at a time. Today,…
There are many things good about the tasting dinners at Harrogate’s Rudding Park, introduced last August. The idea seemed to be to offer discerning wine lovers an opportunity to drink quality wine with good food at reasonable cost in elegant surroundings. Rudding offered all this and more. One year on, things have changed, and it…
Matilda, our second granddaughter, was born on Sunday 4th July. Five days later, Ramani & I drove to London to see her, tiny, pretty and adorable. We stayed with our daughter in her smart new flat in Islington and saw, held and cuddled little Matilda every day of that warm sunny weekend when Spain beat Holland…
“Another trip to the Sherry Triangle is long over due” they tell me. The last visit was nine years ago, in 2001. We still talk about it – the Fiesta in Jerez, visit to the hunting lodge in Donana, flamenco of Sara Barras and of course, the food and wine of Andalucía. It would be…
I met Etienne Hugel in Harrogate on Wednesday. We drank coffee and mineral water and talked about wine and food and mistresses. Etienne said he would return to Harrogate in May to host a Hugel Tasting Dinner for us at Rudding Park. We will sip chilled Muscat on the terrace and drink Riesling Classic 2007…
The other day I tutored a tasting of seven Burgundy Premiers Crus for the Harrogate Medical Wine Society. After a glass of well-chilled Hunter’s Sauvignon Blanc, we started the tasting with the only chardonnay of the evening, Saint Aubin Premier Cru Sur Gamay 2002 from the Nuits-Saint-Georges negociant Jean-Claude Boisset. The Sur Gamay vineyard is…
A week ago, in a cramped and airless room on a cold and blastery day in Harrogate, I tasted ten fine, old wines. Barometric pressure was not really low enough to make it a true ‘Root Day’ according to the Biodynamic almanac. The corks however were pulled at the last minute to guard against old…
Seven days in the great vineyards of Burgundy.
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