Are you local?

Buying wine from a local shop is usually a thoroughly miserable experience. Unless you live in Constantine Bay.

“Constantine Bay Stores – Fine Wine and Provisions” stands next to the local surf shop and is a stone’s throw from the Treglos Hotel (where WineOfTheWeek is currently staying with Junior).

And it stocks a whole bunch of Berry Brothers & Rudd wines.

Yes you heard me. The local shop sells the wines from one of the world’s oldest, and fines merchants.

After stumbling out of the sea at Treyarnon today (with an intact surf board but heavily bruised ego) I dragged myself into the store in search for a re-vitalsing ‘Redus Bullus’ and came out with a bottle of La Bastide La Vincent from Gigondas.

I counted nearly 60 wines from Berry Bros list in the Constantine store including a selection of Berry’s own label range and it was all that I could do to refrain from ‘whoop, whoop’ ing.

Clearly the locals round these parts have some serious money to burn but what a pleasure it was to avoid having to choose between the terrors of Blossom Hill and Jacobs Creek. Which of course is no choice of all.

When we say fine wines we MEAN Fine Wines

Oz? Oz? I'm coming to get you Ozwald...

First it was Hugh Johnson’s priceless garden antique  and now it’s Michael Broadbent’s bicycle. Yes, dear readers, a crime-wave seems to be sweeping over Britain’s most revered wine writers.

Back in March this year,  Mr Johnson had a 17th century astronomical sphere  ”half inched” from his Essex garden. Johnson, the legendary glass sniffer, lives in Saling Hall in the village of Great Saling and often opens up his gardens to the proletariat (God bless yer Guvnor). A reward has been offered but no news yet…

The tale of Broadbent’s bike is, with respect to Lord Hugh, a little more distressing. Stolen from his garage at the beginning of June, Broadbent describes the bike as “a very old white Dutch ladies bike with a basket on the front and back”. Ladies bike Michael?

The bike was regularly featured in Broadbent’s Decanter column and was so beloved that those nice chaps at Decanter clubbed together to buy him a colourful branded bicycle helmet. Unfortunately that was stolen as well.

So, who’s next? On the recent BBC4 show about Berry Bros,  Jancis Robinson was seen pointing her pink Flip camera at unsuspecting winemakers. I’m worried what signals this may have sent out to Britain’s criminal underworld. You could get £20 for that Flip from Monkey Joe at Kentish Town West. Watch out Jancis.

What’s absolutely certain is that no one could possibly steal Malcolm Gluck’s ego. I mean, where would you find a getaway van big enough?

I recently saw Dean Spanley at the cinema and for the second year running found myself watching a movie that used that sweetest of Hungarian tipples, Tokaji, as a plot construct.

In this latest example, Fisk Junior (Jeremy Northam) shares a bottle of Tokaji with the Dean (Sam Neill) and discovers that his drinking companion starts to regress into a past life existence as a dog.

Intrigued, Northam arranges a succession of dinners with Neill, each time plying him with more Tokaji and each time eliciting more back-story about Neill’s adventures as a four legged hound. 

Yes, that’s right folks, Tokaji is the drink of choice for mediums everywhere. Dean Spanley is a wonderful oddity of a shaggy dog story, but it’s not the first film to feature Tokaji….

Last year’s  adaptation of Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass also featured Katherine the Great’s elixir. This time out, Tokaji features as the sweetie of choice for Daniel Craig’s Lord Asriel. But wait! Who’s that adding poisoned powder to the Puttonyos? Oh no! The glass is poured. The arm is raised. The clasped goblet drives towards the eagerly  awaiting mouth! Lyra – warn him! Don’t let him drink it!!!!. An awful movie, salvaged only by a sterling performance from the Hungarian.

I’ve blogged before about my favourite “wines featured in movies” but I wonder, dear reader, which wine would feature in the movie of your life?
 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d91Ol7rui4&eurl]

Took a quick trip down to Berry Bros. & Rudd (BBR) today. Lucy needed to drop off a shirt for one of her clients in St James’s so a good excuse for me to visit the grandest wine store in London.

BBR is Britain’s oldest wine merchant and they have a great back-story. The company was established in 1698 by the Widow Bourne at 3 St James’s Street in London (opposite St James’s Palace) and they’ve been there ever since. On the outside they may seem like the most traditional of traditional Wine Merchants – after all these are the fellas that have been supplying the big house at the end of the Mall since 1903 and currently hold two Royal Warrants for The Queen and The Prince of Wales. However, they are also innovators and are the undisputed Kings of wine on-line in the UK.

When I found myself immersed in the daily grind of development hell at The Wine Society, I often wistfully looked over at BBR with a huge dollop of green envy. They were well ahead of the curve when it came to the web (launching in 1994) and they continued to embrace on-line advances with podcasks (OK lets forgive them the pun) interactive content, and brilliant blogging. Check out their “wine pronunciation” guide if you want to sound like Gordon Kaye.

BBR definitely exist in fine wine terroir and, although much of their offering may be out of the price range of regular drinkers, it’s the place to go if you’re looking for something a bit special either for yourself or as a gift. I received a Gevrey-Chambertin AOC Vielles Vignes, Dugat-PY 2004 as a wedding gift from my work colleagues from Liberty this summer and the wooden box it was packaged in will remain lodged my wine rack for a good few years yet.

For me Berry’s is the place I go to when I’m in the market for Ridge Geyserville or Lytton Springs and it’s also the place for Chateau Batailley – always dominant in their tag cloud and it feels like they stock every vintage from the past 20 years.

Today I plumped for California – a Frogs Leap Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 from the Napa Valley. I think I’ll take it down to Dorset this weekend and take it round to share with the best man, and a review will follow.

I first discovered Ridge Geyserville at a Wine Society Committee meeting in 2006. These meetings were invariably frustrating affairs – like a kind of parish council meeting writ large. And yet, the pain was (nearly) always eased by great food provided by the caterers at RIBA and awesome wines chosen by The Society’s fine wine guru Shaun Kiernan. The 2005 was also the wine that I gave as a gift to my best man this year (hope you enjoyed it Big Man).

Ridge Vineyards make some of the best wine in America and arguably the world. It may come as a surprise to British readers (exposed mainly to the terrifying volume of brands of Gallo and Blossom Hilll) but California produces some of the worlds leading fine wines and for me the wines produced by Paul Draper at Ridge stand tall amongst the best.

Ridge was established in 1885 was when Osea Perrone a doctor who became a prominent member of San Francisco’s Italian community, bought 180 acres near the top of Monte Bello Ridge, producing the first vintage under that name in 1892. The link to the current incarnation of the vineyard came in 1969 when Paul Draper, a Stanford graduate in philosophy joined the business, after travels through Europe and the creation of a small wine enterprise in Chile. He is known for his crafting of fine cabernets and chardonnays from the Monte Bello estate vineyards, and as a pioneer in the production of long-lived, complex zinfandels.

And he’s also known for phrases like this:

“Wine’s link with time connects it to the human, It has its birth, youth, its maturity, its old age and its death…”
Questions of Taste – The Philosophy of Wine ed. Barry C Smith

Ridge made its first Geyserville in 1966, from nineteenth century vines growing on the western edge of Alexander Valley. The quarter mile strip of vines follows the old San Francisco & Northern Pacific Railway right-of-way. The wines are predominantly Zinfandel blended with Petit Sirah and Carignane. The alcohol is big and the taste full of black fruit and smoky pepper. Drunk with the right food it can come across as liquid chocolate with a cherry glaze.  Ridge have prepared onlne video content on some of the wines and here’s Draper’s guide to the Geyserville Zin.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh-Sv4ZR4Uc]

How Much and Where to buy?
The Geyserville retails at approx £25 a bottle with discounts on cases from BBR and The Wine Society.