Birthday wine

Today is my birthday. The good news: I am still in my 30s. The bad news: not for much longer. How do I feel about this? I feel the same way I would if I was due in work early, had forgotten to set the alarm, and had woken at 11 am.

What have I done with my life so far? I feel just the same as I did a decade ago, or two decades ago. But the facts speak for themselves: I was born in the season when Man City last won the 1st Division title (now the 'Premiership', of course). That's a long, long time ago.

Presents:
West Wing Series 1 DVD box set
Spooks Series 4 DVD box set
Tripod for camera
Trendy shirt
Modelling clay (from one of my boys)
Butter fudge (from the other boy)
£50 amazon voucher
Three sent but have not yet arrived

Tonight we celebrated my birthday, and also the fact that eldest son's school cricket team won the Middlesex county title at Lords.

Three wines. First, some fizz. Champagne Pommery Brut Royal is rather good. It's rich, rounded and fresh, with lovely toasty vanilla flavours and bracing lemony acid (£24.99 Oddbins) - I gave it 92/100. Tappanappa Whalebone Vineyard 2004 Wrattonbully, Australia is the second release of Brian Croser's new red wine, from a vineyard he first made wine from in the 1980s. It's superbly balanced, with rich, sweet fruit nicely countered by good structure. A wine that I feel will age well, and which has a real sense of class to it. I gave it 94/100. To finish with I'm committing infanticide with Quinta do Noval's Silval Vintage 2000 Port. Concentrated, structured and stylish, I'd expect this to become aromatically much brighter over the next decade. Satisfying and bold, and worth 93/100 in my book. I apologize for all these scores, but they merely represent a shorthand way of saying how much I liked the wines.