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.

The Best Man's Bottle -With Photograph taken by the Best Man Himself

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.

Here we go again! Voting irregularities, electors facing poll closures before they can mark their “X” and electronic machines short-circuiting due to rain storms. God Bless America, it makes you long for the hanging chad.

I love a bit of Pork Barrel. Does my rump look big in this?

Obama or McCain is the choice that faces the voters in the bankrupt superpower across the Atlantic and we Brits are seemingly more transfixed by this election than we are by our own first past the post madness.

It looks like it’s Obama, but the commentators are mindful of the Bradley effect, a reference to the 1982 election for the Governor of California whereby the black Candidate Tom Bradley went into the election with a 20 point lead and ended up losing by 100,000 votes. Apparently, when it came down to it, the public couldn’t vote for a coloured fella. Hmmm.

I love election nights – National Elections, local elections, by-elections (who can forget Newbury 1993), Presidential elections – I can’t get enough of ‘em. Election nights are like great sporting events infused with real drama played out by protagonists who put everything on the line backed by parties who do anything to win. I’m happy to confess that I taped a full eight hours of the 1997 British General Election, edited it down to a 90 minute highlights package and still regularly sit through the fall of Portillo and Mellor. There was more drama that night than a title decider at Interlagos.

So, what to drink on a night like this? It’s got to be California but my choices are limited by the outlets available to me after a busy day. I ended up getting the tube back to Kentish Town which gave me two real choices – Oddbins or Somerfield. The former was the first stop and wow, what a disastrous paucity of choice these guys are currently offering from North America. 6 wines, none of which I had any confidence in buying, so a sharp exit and quick right down the high street. Oddbins have new owners so lets pray to Bacchus that a return to roots is on its way – a modern wine tragedy.

We're Ravenswood - don't mess with us or we'll 'ave yer. And yer mates

Somerfield, on the other hand, stocks one of my bankers – the Ravenswood Vintners Blend Zinfandel, 2005. The Vintners Blend is full of fruit and from Sonoma California and is as dark as haunted wood and punches more than the 13.5% Alcohol on the label. If this bad boy isn’t carrying a full 14.5% I’d be amazed. And that’s the problem I’m currently having with this vineyard. They are currently marketing their portfolio as “not for wimps” with the website providing a helpful dictionary definition of the adjective.

This just doesn’t sit comfortably with me. It’s part of the “big reds” marketing approach that seems to wear “fullness” (read alcohol) as a badge of honour, a neo-con positioning of a once noble varietal. If this wine had a political mandate it would already be raining missiles on Iran. The truth is that these wines are better than that, and the Zinfandel being produced at this vineyard deserves more respect, the Lodi in particular.  

I’m currently two glasses down with a strategy consisting of BBC coverage until 1.30am (full bottle consumed) followed by four hours kip and then a 5am alarm call for the final results. 

Who do I want to win? Well for me the choice isn’t a choice at all. I cut my political cloth resenting the Thatcher era, rejoicing the emergence of the New Labour only to be disillusioned by the suffocation of the left wing alternative just as Capitalism begins to give up the ghost. If Blair taught us anything, he taught us that the message of change is the illusory concept designed to make us swallow the continuity of status quo. Obahma stands for change in a political system that just won’t tolerate it.

But hang on, I’m ignoring the elephant (or should it be pig?) in the room! Miss Palin, it’s time to go back to Alaska – VOTE OBAMA!