In February 2024, I spent 3 days at Elkaduwa between Kandy & Matale, visiting Sembuwatte Lake and Hunnas Falls Beaming Down We left scorchingly hot Colombo at 6 in the morning and drove towards Kandy on the A1, stopping at Leone Cafe in Weweldeniya for a breakfast of hoppers, curries and tea. Green View Holiday…
We celebrated Christmas with the family in London. Nadja, Alma and Lotti flew in from Germany. We drove down from Harrogate. 22 Friday It rained all the way to London. The only stop was at Leicester Forest for a cheese sandwich and coffee. That evening, a selection of new wines from South Africa were tasted…
Soon after Christmas in 2022, we spent 3 days in a delightful wood cabin in the Black Forest We left Kleinbottwar after breakfast and drove 118 km along the A81 towards Loßburg on the high plateau of the Northern Black Forest at an altitude of 600-800 metres. The source of the Kinzig, which crosses the…
We spent ten days over Christmas in Kleinbottwar – a pretty little wine village in the Württemburg region of Germany on the Murr river, around five kilometres northeast of its confluence with the Neckar river. Christmas Festivities started on the 23rd. Hot Glühwein was drunk with sausages in the evening with neighbours. There were heaps of…
Armistice Day – 11 November, was a Friday. It was also my birthday. I drove that morning to Long Melford in Suffolk for a weekend with the family. The elegant Old School House in the shadow of Melford Hall was our home for the weekend. A few glasses of Louis Roederer later, we walked to…
Kleinbottwar Kleinbottwar is a small village in the Baden-Württemberg wine region of Germany. It lies halfway between Ludwigsburg and Heilbronn on the Murr river and is an outlying district of the town Steinheim an der Murr. The Summer of 2022 was sunny and hot. In the last week of August, I spent two days at my son’s house…
The hilltop village of Château Chalon on the Premier Plateau with vineyards on the slopes below it is a wine village in the Château-Chalon AOC in Jura, 37 km north of Clairvaux-les-lacs. The AOC, created in 1936, is regarded as the unofficial grand cru for vin jaune of the Jura. The soil is grey marl and there are…
Clairvaux-les-lacs is a small French holiday resort near two lakes in Jura. The day in Clairvaux starts with the visit to the boulangerie for fresh baguettes and croissants to be eaten with copious amounts of salty butter. The small CarreFour Express is the convenient grocery store. There is also an Aldi and a large Bi1.…
We were up early. The vineyards on the slopes across the road were bathed in sunlight. We had breakfast, said goodbye to Laurence and Charles, and drove south along the tollroad towards Dijon, stopping at a Total for a tank-full of E98 and at an Aire for a picnic lunch. We arrived in Clairvaux-les-lacs in…
The overnight P&O ferry from Hull docked in Rotterdam just after 7 in the morning and we disembarked thirty minutes later. Formalities were minimal. The Dutch immigration officer smiled, said ‘good morning,’ stamped our passports and said “Bring some champagne.“ The drive to Ludes in Champagne was made long and arduous because I forgot to…
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