Champagne really annoys me. There’s been a lot of it about recently, so I’m going to get this off my chest. It’s not that I don’t like it; it’s the best sparkling wine in the world, with an ability to age, a complexity of flavour, and the variation from one producer to another is fascinating. But you really have to pay over the odds for that excellence. Furthermore, poor Champagne abounds and it comes at a fairly high price too. The Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée rules are supposed to protect us from poor wine. To be called Champagne the wine has to come from the area and be made from the right grapes in the right way and the French are very good at enforcing that. But, to be called Champagne, the wine also has to taste like Champagne and to meet a certain minimum standard and the French are very poor at enforcing that. So we can easily spend £20 on a bottle that is trading on its name, not its quality.
Continue reading Sparkling Tips
Category Archives: Andrew Polmear
Stories and news about Wine & Cheese
Blenio – the Wine List
Most people who live near Seven Dials will have noticed, or eaten at, Blenio, the restaurant just south of the Dials with exposed brickwork, paintings by local artists, candles everywhere, and white tiled tables in three partly separate ‘rooms’ on a level well above that of the street. This article is not about the excellence of the food nor the friendliness and elegance of the service but about the wine list. I always wonder, in a restaurant where the wine list has its own unique character, how this came about. An interview with Paula Black, co-owner of Blenio, gave me the inside story.
Continue reading Blenio – the Wine List
Special wine supermarket prices
We say thank you and goodbye to Philip Reddaway and hello to Andrew Polmear who is going to write a regular column about his love of wine
Supermarket wine has come a long way since those early days, the 1960s, when Sainsbury’s first introduced Vin de Pays de l’Herault and Minervois to their shelves for the same price that we used to pay for a Liebfraumilch or Bull’s Blood. I remember the excitement then – we felt we were drinking real wine that seemed to taste of the soil of those sun-baked parts of France rather than a factory product. Things have come a long way since then but there is still a dilemma when you are trying to buy a bottle of wine for under £10: do you buy a full-bodied wine from a reliable area that produces a lot of wine for the supermarket buyers, or do you seek out a wine that has something unique? A wine made with the carmenere grape from the central valley of Chile is always going to be full and fruity, but, in the end, unmemorable. A wine made by a single producer that has come from a small well-defined area with its unique blend of rock, soil and sun can stop a meal in its tracks, and transport you to that part of Italy, France or Spain where it was made.
Continue reading Special wine supermarket prices
Wine from a Muslim Country
Just returned from our first visit to Morocco. What a fabulous country, we enjoyed every minute of our stay in Marrakech. The generous, kind people we met; the lively street life; the tranquility of our Riad; the delicious tagines and the walks in the foothills of the Atlas mountains. The only slight frustration for a die-hard wine drinker like me was the discovery that 90% + of restaurants do not serve wine for religious reasons and that within the ancient Medina itself, where we stayed, there are no retail sales of alcohol whatsoever. I must have been the only rugby fan to have watched the England vs France game (on the telly in a working man’s café) nursing several glasses of mint tea!
Continue reading Wine from a Muslim Country
Comic Books Sells Top Wines
There is no doubt that the No.1 buzz in the wine world is Asia’s sudden conversion to wine. Not so long ago this was a region where whisky, cola, rice wines and domestic grape wines of dubious quality reigned supreme. Today, as I write, it is announced that China is the fastest growing wine importing market in the world – consumption increased 100% between 2005 and 2009. The great wine auction houses, both in the US and UK, Ackers, Zachys, Sotheby’s, Christie’s all look to their Hong Kong offices for growth. Meanwhile, monied Chinese collectors have forced prices to unheard of levels. At the end of last year a case of Lafite 2009 – not yet bottled – went for over £42,000 at a HK auction.
Continue reading Comic Books Sells Top Wines
The Whistler 