Australia's young guns, a tasting

There was a collective deep intake of breath in the UK wine trade today, as everyone prepared for the London International Wine Fair, which is the big event in the calendar each year, and begins tomorrow (Tuesday). It will be a crazy busy three days, with lots of people in town from around the globe - from a journalist's perspective an embarassment of riches, making it hard to know just who to spend the limited time available with.

Today there was a pre-fair lunch with Australia's 'young guns' at Ransome's Dock restaurant. The young guns weren't all that young, to be honest. I mean, I was younger than some of them. They were Stuart Bourne (Barossa Valley Estates), Samantha Connew (Wirra Wirra), Linda Domas (Linda Domas Wines), Marty Edwards (The Lane), Mac Forbes (Mac Forbes Wines), Matt Gant (First Drop) and Celine Rousseau (Chalkers Crossing). All of them brought a few wines along, and there were also a couple from Ben Glaetzer who was meant to be there but had visa problems. Pictured above is Linda Domas in full flow; Mac Forbes is at the end of the table.

The wines were pretty interesting, and the food was excellent (fillet of red mullet with saffron, potato and fennel broth, followed by lapin au vin, followed by some nice cheeses). Standout wine for me was Mac Forbes EB1 Pinot Noir 2005 from the Yarra: 6 h foottreading, followed by 24 h maceration, then pressed to barrel. Remarkable stuff, which has put on some colour during its long elevage and is now super-elegant. Mac has spent some time with Dirk Niepoort in the Douro, and this shows in his approach, I reckon.

Ransome's Dock is hard to get to - the easiest route is through Battersea Park from Queenstown Road station. It's a really nice walk, and pictured is the view of a gasholder and Battersea Power Station that you get as you leave the park.

A great weekend, and New Zealand's top Sauvignon Blanc?

So, Fiona and I were given a nice present by our good friends Karl and Kate. The deal was they would get to look after our lovely children and RTL for the weekend; we would get to go to a five star hotel in London at their expense. Very generous of them, especially if you've met our children and hound.

We kicked off our 30-ish hours of liberation by a long lunch at the Tate Britain. The food here is solidly good - simple and effective, with a modern-British feel. The wine list is sensational and fairly priced. The surroundings are nice, too.

I struck gold ordering the wines: a bottle of 2006 Clos Henri Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough (£29), and a half of Crozes Hermitage Vieilles Vignes 2005 from Domaine du Murinais (£12). The Clos Henri was simply the best Marlborough Sauvignon I've ever tried - big, multidimensional, rich but precise. The Murinais Crozes was all that you could ever expect from a modestly expensive Syrah - pure, sweet fruit with lovely definition and an almost Burgundian elegance. No hint of rusticity.

We wandered the gallery a bit. Turner is the dominant force here - and you can understand why, because his work is remarkable. Afterwards we headed off to the hotel (Renaissance Chancery Court, Holborn) where we slobbed out, with the help of some Pol Roger NV. Then this morning we got up late before finding a fantastic breakfast spot a short walk away from the Charing Cross Road. Now we are home, and the kids and RTL shall shortly be returning. It's been a brilliant weekend.

A big birthday weekend

Fiona's mother is 70, and so we've been hosting an epic of a surprise birthday weekend here chez Goode. Family have flocked to Feltham from the corners of the world (well, Geneva, Devon and Herefordshire, to be more exact) for three days of celebration. We've been accommodating most of the participants, with some overspill booked into the Travelodge over the road. It's been exhausting but great fun.

Families are great. I love the way everyone is thrown together - a melange of ages, interests and personality types - and yet it seems to work pretty well most of the time. There's a richness to it. And as generations transition, there's a natural renewing of it all. It doesn't grow stale.

On Friday I drove up to Malvern to pick Fiona's Auntie Moira up. It was a straight run, some 2 h 20 min, and as I arrived early I went for a walk on the Malvern Hills (above), which are always spectacular, even on a rather chilly, overcast spring day. The return journey was not so straightforward though, and took five hours. Ouch. We arrived just after Fiona's mother, and the surprise welcome. The dinner that followed was great fun, and despite a critical mass of kids, there was no nuclear explosion.

Yesterday, we left all the kids under the watchful care of Hannah, the oldest cousin, and her boyfriend Josh, as we headed off to lunch at Dean Timpson at The Compleat Angler in Marlow (above). It's a stunning setting on the river, sandwiched between the lovely bridge and the weir. The food was really, really good: top quality, with service, presentation and attention to detail of Michelin star standard. I spent some time with the wine list, which has some excellent producers shoulder to shoulder with mediocre ones. In the end I ordered a Vidal Syrah from Hawkes Bay, which was quite elegant and old worldy in style, and a Bordeaux Sauvignon Semillon that was crisp and fresh (and was also the least expensive wine on what is quite an expensive list).

I can't help but mention ££££. You expect a top quality joint like this to be expensive, because it costs a lot to do a restaurant really well. But it was the way it was expensive that left me a little disappointed: the menu itself is good value, but all the 'unseen' items, such as water (we were poured eight bottles at £4.80 each), espresso (£4 a single shot) and drinks seem excessive. I'd much prefer it if restaurants put their margins in their food. People look at how much they spend on the total bill when they consider returning; at the prices Timpson charges per head when all these extras are included, he's batting with the big boys, and will end up being judged with more scrutiny.

Today is the final day of the epic. Overall, it has been a superb weekend. Now we're trying to persuade Fiona's brother to issue us with an extended invitation for Geneva this summer.

Long lunch and a walk in the park

So Fiona and I, now with time to spend together without the kids, decide to take lunch together. We head off to Edwinns, a brasserie in Englefield Green, next to Windsor Great Park. The sun was shining and it was all very spring-like.

It was really nice to have lunch together, but the lunch itself was not good. I enjoyed it because it was nice to be with Fiona. But I don't want to go back to this place again.

Edwinns doesn't have a set lunch, and has the same menu for lunch and dinner. The first think that struck me was that it was expensive. We're talking London restaurant prices, with starters £6-8 and mains hovering around £15-20. That's fine, if the food justifies it, but our food today was pretty ordinary pub grub standard, of the sort that doesn't require a skilled chef. My main of slow roasted pork was overcooked, with an overpowering, rather gloopy, treacly sauce. It tasted like it had been cooked, and then reheated. Fiona's starter of scollops and pancetta consisted of pureed peas, overlaid with some salad, then with three crispy slices of pancetta on top and three over-done scollops round the outside.

The winelist was upsetting. It was really short. All the wines were perfectly adequate, drinkable commercial offerings, but that was it. There was nothing I felt even vaguely interested in trying. It was so predictable and dull. All the wines by the glass were 250 ml servings, which is one-third of a bottle (there was no option to have a 175 ml glass).

Maybe Edwinns is serving its target clientele well. Perhaps their punters aren't usually very discriminating, and don't have high expectations for their food and drink.

Looking at the website (http://www.edwinns.co.uk/) I see that it's part of the Bluebecker restaurant group. My guess is that the dishes are prepared centrally and then put together/reheated/simple elements cooked at each restaurant, thus alleviating the need for skilled kitchen staff.

After lunch we had a nice walk in the park.

Great wines from Mr Duck

What better way to start my freelance life than a long lunch, with some great wines.

Today was the Luis Pato ('Pato' is Portuguese for 'duck') tasting and lunch at London's leading Portuguese restaurant Portal. Luis is one of Portuguese wine's great ambassadors. Not only does he make great wines, chiefly from an unfashionable grape variety (Baga) in an unfashionable region (Bairrada), but he also does the leg work of presenting them to journalists and merchants across the globe. And he's a friendly, engaging guy, albeit in quite a low key sort of way.

The wines today were very impressive: the triumvirate of top reds, Vinhas Velhas, Vinha Barrosa and Vinha Pan, from the 2005 vintage, are all exceptional wines that need some time in the cellar to show their best. Quinta de Ribeirinho Per Franco 2005, a small production number, is also exceptional.

We were treated to some older wines. By way of almost bizarre coincidence, one of the three older wines on show was a bottle I'd recently opened for Portuguese journalist Luis Antunes when he came to dinner (the report is here). It was the Vinhas Velhas 1995, and I wasn't expecting much of this when I showed it to Luis, because I'd bought it a decade previously in a Majestic bin end sale for just a few pounds, while I was visiting my brother down in Southampton. But it's a wine that has aged really well, and it gave me a strong reminder that Bairrada makes some serious, ageworthy wine. We also tried a Vinha Pan 1995, which was even better and still quite tannic, and a 1985 Bairrada which was very evolved but still alive.

One of the best wines we tasted was the 2005 Vinha Formal, a white wine of great presence, depth and minerality that will age beautifully - it's one of Portugal's best whites.

Apparently you can still buy vineyards in Bairrada for between 125 and 400 Euros per square metre. Tasting these wines makes me think this might be a gamble worth taking. Luis reckons Bairrada is best for sparkling wines, whites, and high-end red wines. With a quality minded approach, you could make some great ageworthy reds here that combine elegance and power to good effect - think Nebbiolo from the great Piedmont terroirs, and you have an idea of what Baga at its best can achieve.

Portal performed. Eel pie to start (no connection with the island), then a stunning slow roast wild boar that had been seeped for 24 h in Madeira. The green bean and chorizo mash it came with didn't complement it terribly well, but the boar was so sensational I didn't mind. Pudding was custard tarts. Very Portuguese, and utterly delicious.

Lunch at Bentleys with Craggy's Steve Smith

I'm slightly worried that readers will get the impression that most of my days consist of a long lunch, with some wine. That's quite unfair, although, of late, this may have been more common than it used to be.

Anyway, today I lunched at Bentley's (see http://www.bentleys.org/) with Steve Smith MW of Craggy Range, along with a handful of other journalists. It was a low key, rather jolly affair.

The food was fantastic. I had stuffed squid and then pheasant with foie gras, both of which were perfectly executed. The wines were Craggy's Te Muna Sauvignon Blanc 2006 and 2005 Block 14 Syrah. They're both lovely wines. Te Muna is all about texture - a rich but still-fresh Sauvignon that's a great food wine, and Block 14 is dark and peppery, with restrained richness.

We had some discussion of naturalness in wine. Steve mentioned how NZ studies showed the efficacy of using a white cloth under the vines to reflect sunlight back onto the bunches of developing grapes. 'But I don't like laying down left-over petroleum product in vineyards', he added. So instead he's been using osyter shells which reflect light and also add some calcium to the soils. It's a more natural solution.

We talked about wine additions. He doesn't see too much of a problem with chaptalization. 'But I have a huge issue with adding tannin', he mentioned, 'which changes the structure of the wine. There's also a big debate about reverse osmosis. 'I would have no issue with using it on juice to remove water after rains', says Steve, 'but I would have a big issue with altering the wine after fermentation, or using it to reduce alcohol'.

We could have discussed these issues all afternoon, stretching into the evening. But unfortunately Steve had to leave for a photoshoot. In a florist's. The man's a rock star!

Lunch at Portal

Today, I had lunch at Portal, London's leading Portuguese restaurant. I was there to interview owner Antonio Correia (above), who established the restaurant in St John Street three years ago. I'll publish the interview elsewhere; for now you'll have to make do with a brief restaurant review.

The ambience is great, with stylish decor and great use of natural light. The food is fantastic. I had a brilliant octopus carpaccio with squid ink and potato foam, red pepper sauce for starters (pictured) and the followed this up with black pork loin with deep fried potatoes, coriander, parsley and a tomato sauce. The flavours were great; the food was visually very appealing; the service was flawless. The wine list is 70% Portuguese and this is where you want to hunt, because Antonio is a Portuguese wine expert and puts a lot of effort into this. By the glass selection is quite good (but could be a bit broader) - I had a glass of the Quinta do Portal Reserva 2003, which was really nice.

Overall, a very positive experience.

Nice lunch, cold rugby and sherry

So we had a nice lunch today. It was a small affair - a sort of unofficial farewell do. As I mentioned in my blog a couple of days ago, the place where I've been working as I've been developing my wine career is closing down, and we are being made redundant. My boss treated our small department of four to lunch at his club, the Atheneum.

The Ath is a remarkable institution - a club predominantly for distinguished intellectuals from the arts and sciences. We had a very enjoyable lunch in a lovely setting, washed down with the house claret, which is a delicious Cru Bourgeois Bordeaux from 2001. This wine, selling in the restaurant at £17, is utterly delicious: savoury, intense, a bit gravelly, with great balance and poise. This is what you want from a good claret. No wonder the majority of wine sales here are this particular wine, because it is just so well chosen.

This evening I spent three of the coldest ever hours of my life watching elder son play rugby. It was a tournament at London Irish, and it was utterly freezing. His team got hammered. They looked about half the size of some of the others. At this age group, U12, there is a remarkable diversity of sizes and developmental stages: some of the kids looked almost adult-sized. Fortunately, elder son's team didn't make it past the five group games so I was home by 21:15.

I'm currently sipping some more of the fantastic Hidalgo Oloroso Viejo I mentioned last week. With sherry and madeira, nothing beats time. When I get my life more in order, I'll try to make sure I always have great sherry or madeira on the go at all times. What a nice thought!

Wild Honey with Hannes Sabathi

I met with young Austrian winemaker Hannes Sabathi (pictured) today for lunch.

The venue was Wild Honey (newly Michelin starred) in St George Street. It's simply fantastic: some of the best food I've had in a long time - my slow-roasted pork belly, served with a remarkable risotto, containing chorizo among other things, was close to perfect. Hannes had a gorgeous looking medium-rare roast of veal. My creme brulee to finish with truly was perfect. The ambience is good too. The only thing that let it down a bit was the patchy service: at one point we were presented with someone else's desserts, and it took an age to see sight of the wines that Hannes had bought with him.

Indeed, the restaurant seemed very confused by the whole process of bringing wines along, even though this had been negotiated at the time of booking. In the end we got them, and remarkably they didn't charge us any corkage.

So, how were Hannes' wines? Not yet 28, and running the family winery, he seems to be doing a brilliant job. The winery is in Sudsteiermark (Southern Styria), which specializes in Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Chardonnay and Muskateller. The Klassik wines are precise and fresh, while the Single Vineyard wines have real personality and depth, allied to a minerally precision. There's also a reserve line, and the two Sauvignon Reserves I tried, 2003 and 2006, are among the best expressions of this grape I've yet to experience.

Lunch at Tate Britain

Had lunch today at Tate Britain, which has a brilliant restaurant as well as some rather good paintings. I was with the team responsible for the London wine trade fair, discussing this year's top 100 tasting. Hamish Anderson, the well-known head sommelier was in attendance and so we let him choose the wines for us: he chose very well. Praepositus Sylvaner 2006 from the Alto Adige was really expressive, aromatic and melony, and the Clonakilla Shiraz 2001 from Canberra District was sensationally good, with expressive, Rhone-like meaty, peppery notes alongside the pure dark fruit. My food was superb: pigeon on white cabbage for starters (gamey, rich) and then a duck cassoulet that was one of the best I've had. A really impressive experience in a lovely setting. Pictured below are some rather attractive freshly pruned plane trees round the corner from the gallery.

Malbec and meat - a heavenly marriage

Did you know that the annual consumption of beef by an adult in Argentina is 68 kilograms? Incredible. Someone has worked out that this equates to a seven ounce steak each, every day.

Today I was one of the judges at the finals of the Malbec Made for Meat competition, held at the Gaucho, Piccadilly. The Gaucho is a wonderful Argentinean restaurant which also has a wine shop attached to it, Cavas de Gaucho. [Pictured are fellow judges sitting opposite me: Victoria Moore has her mouth full, Anthony Rose is reaching to select the perfect match, and Peter Richards is jotting down his.]

Our task was to taste 14 wines (the finalists) blind with three different meats: pork, lamb and beef, assiging a score to the quality of the match ranging from 1 (poor) to 5 (sublime). It was an interesting exercise, and even more so because there was a steak and Malbec masterclass sandwiched in the middle of the proceedings.

In this masterclass, Gaucho beef expert Ryan Hattingh showed us the different cuts, discussed their merits, told us how to prepare them best - and then we got to eat them. There was loads and loads of steak to munch, and it was lovely. Each of the five different steaks were then matched with a specific Malbec, and the pairing was brilliant in all but one of the cases.

I came away from the session full of meat, and impressed by how well Argentinean Malbec and steak works as a pairing. Malbec and rare Patagonian lamb also works well, but perhaps not as spectacularly, and Malbec and pork is merely an adequate match in most cases. A full write up on the beef and Malbec masterclass will follow promptly on the main bit of the site.

Hard at work at the Bollinger lunch

A bit of a treat today. Bollinger lunch at Bruce Poole's fantastic restaurant Chez Bruce. There was a good turnout, as you might expect - someone commented that if a bomb had been placed in the restaurant, it would have taken out a sizeable portion of the UK wine press.

The food was extraordinarily good, and the fizz didn't disappoint. We kicked off with Bollinger's '2003' - a unique wine reflecting the rather unique weather conditions of that growing season. Atypical for Bollinger: light, fruity and quite expressive. A bit like a top notch new world fizz.

Ghislain de Montgolfier then gave a short speech, in which he mentioned how 2007 is shaping up. Apparently, we're looking at the earliest harvest in recent memory, because of the exceptionally hot April that led to early flowering. As long as nothing disastrous happens before late August, it should be a good one, too.

Bolling Cuvee Special followed, and this was really singing: back to the distinctive house style, that's quite intense, toasty, rich and yet fresh and balanced. The Grande Annee 1997 is a wine I've had a couple of times before and really liked. It's fresh, intense, concentrated and a little bit edgy, with good complexity. Then a rare chance to try the Vieilles Vignes Francaises 1999, of which we drank a good half of the UK's annual allocation between us (it's 12-18 bottles a year). This is quite different: rounded, complex, broad, thought-provoking. Finally, the 1995 RD is a bit of a stern beast. It's just so full-on, with massive acidity, massive flavour, massive savouriness. It will probably last a very long time - drunk now, it needs food.

Pictured: Stephen Brook (left) is entranced by Jim Budd's (foreground) shirt. Neil Beckett is also in the picture.

Glenfiddich Awards 2007

Time for a spot of shameless self promotion. Last night was the 2007 Glenfiddich awards, held at swanky Sketch and hosted very ably by Tim Atkin. I was shortlisted for winewriter of the year, and - amazingly - came away with the trophy. The Drinks book of the year award was won by Williamson and Moore's Wine Behind the Label.

To celebrate, Fiona and I sloped off to Gaucho Piccadilly. The decor is remarkable (right): lots of cowhide, on the seats, on the walls - but all done very tastefully in a striking modern style. As well as the buzzy ambience (this place was full on a Monday night), service was excellent and the food was superb. The steaks here are legendary, but everything else is done well, too. On the wine front, the expensive but extensive list of Argentinean wines is well chosen, and I picked the Amalaya 2004 from Colome high up in Salta, which was a really lovely vivid red blend. The only downsides were the long wait for our food (although there was an unsolicited apology) and the final bill (the food was worth it, but it was on the high side).