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!

A serious sherry: Hidalgo Oloroso Viejo

Today I attended a sherry tasting at the offices of William Reed, in Crawley, for Drinks International magazine. It was quite civilized - we were just looking at 23 wines, a mixture of Finos and Olorosos.

You can learn a lot from a tasting like this. The finos were all quite different, with a few showing marked reduction, which I've never come across in sherry before. The Olorosos were, on the whole, quite lovely. We had four rather special very old Olorosos, each with an average age of at least 30 years. One of them I'm sipping now, my favourite wine of the tasting.

Hidalgo Oloroso Viejo VORS, Sherry
Made from wines with an average age of greater than 30 years, this oloroso is something special. It's so complex and thought-provoking that writing a note is quite hard. Still, I'll try. An orange/brown colour, it has a complex, almost Madeira-like nose of warm casky notes and lifted, waxy, citrus fruit. The overall impression is one of combined depth and freshness. The palate is super-complex, with lively, citrussy acidity and warm, tight-knit spicy, woody notes. There's some old furniture, too. It's immensely concentrated and the finish is almost eternal. Not cheap, at £52 from Berry Bros & Rudd here, but this is quite a profound wine. 95/100

Tio Pepe: a legend

I've just finished writing a commission on Sherry, so I thought it would be appropriate to open some. The bottle I chose is one of the most famous of Sherry brands, Tio Pepe from Gonzalez Byas. It's a fino - a wine made from the main sherry grape, Palomino Fino, that has been aged in cask under a protective layer of yeasts, the flor. This protects the wine from oxygen and contributes a distinctive nutty, appley, yeasty flavour to what would otherwise be a fairly neutral wine. Fortification to 15% adds body to the palate.

The result is a remarkable food-friendly wine that's tangy, fresh and salty. It's quite strongly flavoured: as well as being fresh and precise, there's a depth of flavour that makes this the sort of wine that needs a receptive audience. I think it would work brilliantly with a range of foods, but it's something I'd have to think carefully about serving to dinner party guests, because fino sherry is a bit of an acquired taste.

I love it, and it's something I reckon we should drink more of - along with the other styles of sherry such as amontillado and oloroso. The good news is that it is pretty affordable, too (this is around £8 a 75 cl bottle, and there are cheaper alternatives that are also good). As an aside, it's really good news that as one of the most visible brands of fino, Tio Pepe is such a good quality wine. Remember: the key to fino is buying the freshest bottle you can get your hands on, and then drinking it up within a couple of days of opening. Pictured are Tio Pepe adverts from 1966 (top) and 1975 (below).