The Weekly Wine

Fellow Wine Lovers,

If it wasn’t bad enough that you’ve spent most of the week puzzling what day it was, those chaps at Park Vintners have only gone and sent their Friday email on a Thursday!

Apologies again, we will be closed all day tomorrow (Friday) as previously mentioned.

Out in the wider world, Donald Trump has been reindicted (is that even a word?) for the January 6^th shenanigans. Some parts of the original indictments have been removed to comply with the Supreme Court’s requests, but he’s definitely back on the naughty step. 

Fresh from inviting us all to join him in the Downing Street garden, Kier Starmer has been in Berlin for some Currywürst with Olaf Scholz. A new bilateral agreement has put a ‘whole spectrum of relations on an entirely new footing’ we’re told.  Did his TGV to Paris get there in the nick of time for an opening ceremony; will his morning meeting with Macron finish in time to catch Team GB play the Aussies in wheelchair rugby?

Whilst we ask questions about Paris, France has just entered the Top 12 chart of countries with long spells without a government. So far, they have racked up 43 days. Obviously, that’s not a figure that’ll trouble the Belgians who have three entries in the Top 12 one of which tops the charts with 592 days! Germany joined in too, managing an impressive 171 days in 2021. You can’t help but wonder if countries function better without the political element can you?

Still on the subject of Paris, the Paralympics opened last night. Look out for Sarah Storey, competing in the cycling road race and time trial at her ninth games. Strong hopes in the velodrome too with Kadeena Cox and Jody Cundy. Hoping to make a big splash in her first Olympics is 13 year old swimmer Iona Winnifrith, bon chance!

Something we saw this week that put a smile on our face was a story about a burglar in Rome. He broke into an apartment, but was arrested after he stopped in the middle of the burglary to read a book about Greek mythology. Apparently the book was “The Gods at Six O’clock” by Giovanni Nucci. It examines The Iliad from the point of view of the gods and highlights the interpretative power of the work with regards to current events. I learnt from this that Hermes is the god of both literature and thieves!

In Galicia, La Vuelta is tackling the up and down bits. Ben O’Connor is still rocking the red jersey, Wout van Aert is climbing like he weighs 10 kilos less, Primoz Roglic is still upright, and Eddie Dunbar wins stage 11 as I type this sentence!

Anyway, I’ve taken up enough of your Thursday, you need to get on with your work, or just call the waiter over for another cold one.

It’s back to school next week so I suspect we’ll need a glass of wine. Saturday we shall pour a taster of V Sauvignon Blanc (£12.99) a classic from Marlborough that is all crisp, fresh and lovely. We’ll chase that up with Beaujolais Villages Cuvee Six (£13.99) a very easy drinker with red fruit and soft tannins that goes with almost anything food wise.

I’ll leave you with news that it has already snowed at Lake Tahoe!

Cheers.

Fellow Wine Lovers,

First up, a quick admin reminder:

The shop will be closed all day next Friday, 30th August, due to a close bereavement.  We hope you understand and apologise for any inconvenience caused.  We will be open again at midday on Saturday.

Now, you may have noticed time and again that Wayne has rather strict parameters as to what constitutes ‘proper sport’.  Simply put, if it’s got a bike involved it’s a proper sport to be taken seriously, anything else is just a pastime or a hobby.  Cycling is profound, it can be used as a metaphor for many of life’s struggles, it’s not for the faint hearted and it’s not light hearted.

Mock cycling at your peril.

On August 14^th 2021, the Vuelta a España, Spain’s most serious and profound bicycle race, kicked off (probably the wrong term but pedalled off sounded worse) inside Burgos Cathedral, which was unusual for a Saturday.  However, having visited this cathedral with my daughter a few years earlier, I can report that it is certainly big enough to house a peloton and that it’s nowhere near as exciting as the ice cream shop around the corner, according to my girl.

Anyway, a serious building for a serious sport.

Fast forward to Thursday 22^nd August 2024, also known as yesterday.  Stage 6 of this iteration of the Vuelta started in the famous Andalucian town of Jerez de la Frontera.  An opportunity perhaps for Roglic and the boys to pedal through the solera at Bodegas Alvaro Domecq or take a spin around the bullring before getting on with the serious stuff, but no, this was not to be.  The peloton, as well as the lead vehicle for Vuelta Race, paraded through the Carrefour Jerez Sur.  Yes, you read that right, the stage started in a supermarket – sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

As discussed, a serious building for a serious sport!

And whilst this is all going on, The Junior Tour of Wales has had to re-route due to the draconian 20mph speed limits enforced across the country – apparently the bikes are fine to exceed this limit but the support cars are not!  Hmmmm…

You probably realise by now that it’s been a bit of a quiet news week and Phil Space has been enlisted to help write this epistle. 

One of our regional contributors (York office) pointed out something we all missed last week – one of his great pals, Nadim Zahawi, had forwarded him a poll from YouGov HQ revealing that “One in four Britons think they could qualify for the 2028 Olympics if they started training today”.

I know, that’s a lot of us.  If we consider that the UK population over 16 years old stands at just over 42 million then, according to the poll, over 11 million of us are going to make it to Los Angeles in 2028 – that’s roughly the population of Belgium!  So, if we got 70 medals this time and only sent 327 athletes, we should come back from California with over 2,000 necklaces in 2028 – cannot wait!

This breakdown made us smile though:

• 39% of 18-24 year olds
• 34% of 25-49 year olds
• 23% of 50-64 year olds
• 15% of 65+ year olds

There are some very ambitious pensioners out there who, I imagine, will focus rather more on the golf than the rugby sevens!

Speaking of percentages, having done our own research, it would seem that 80% of the residents of Wimbledon are currently not resident in SW19 and we imagine will remain wherever they are until next weekend, having taken advantage of the late summer bank holiday weekend that we are just starting.

For the lucky 20% of you who are still in situ, here’s what we are going to open this weekend.  It would seem that the weather is going to be a bit iffy tomorrow (Saturday) but the prospects for sunshine without showers are looking good for Sunday and Monday, so let’s focus on sunny drinking…

This weekend, we’ll mostly be drinking Pinot Noir.

Barton Pinot Noir Rosé 2022 – £12.99 this is another cracking wine from our chums at Barton, down in Walker Bay, South Africa.  Pale salmon coloured in your glass with lovely aromas of red berries lead on to a palate that is crisp and dry with raspberry fruit and a creaminess to the finish.  Excellent balance of freshness and fruit and dangerously easy to quaff – we think this is a real winner and if it was from Sancerre, it would be twice the price!

Paringa Estate Peninsula Pinot Noir 2022 – £32.00.  Can one have a ‘go to’ Pinot Noir?  If you can, then this would be the one for us, hailing form the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia.  Slightly unfairly referred to as their entry level wine, this has more sophistication and character in its little finger than a number of New World Pinot’s demanding higher prices.  Lovely ripe fruit on the attack with some gentle spice coming through towards the finish and a fabulously long and silky finish – being Aussie, it doesn’t mind a bit of barbecue, so light those coals!

That’s it from us for this week, remember not to go to work on Monday and to not visit us on Friday, we’re off now to find out how we can become a start line for the Tour Of Britain!

Serious stuff.

Fellow Wine Lovers,

Where shall we start this week? Alex is back, busying himself with the spreadsheet that Wayne shouldn’t touch.

Unfortunately, Wayne did touch.

No lasting damage but some things could have been achieved quicker! Alex’s Spanish holiday was clearly hotter than here, as he is currently sat in a sweater!

Further afield than this building, Trumpolina and Elon Muck have had a rather rambling chat/interview/ love in for a couple of hours on Twitter. Given the huge success that Elon has had with Twitter, we’re a bit surprised any politician would want him anywhere near their campaign but, hey ho, I guess being one of the wealthiest men on the planet opens doors. I can’t imagine why Elon Muck would switch sides to back a candidate that wants to introduce 100% tariffs on imported Electric Vehicles but will continue to investigate…

In other news, it turns out that the Altar Stone at Stonehenge has been rerouted from the far north of Scotland, rather than South Wales as originally thought. It makes the feat of moving the six tonne lump of rock all the more impressive given the distance. How did they do it, and more importantly, why? We suspect caber tossing…

In an ironic twist to the saga, it seems the PhD student who did most of this research at the Curtin University in Western Australia, was born in Pembrokeshire, where previously the stone was thought to come!

That’s the Olympics over for another four years. We have the Paralympics arriving towards the end of the month on the 28^th. This week we will have to settle for the start of the Premiership football season.

Except for those of us that like the proper sports. We have the Women riding the Tour de France Femmes and the men riding the Tour of Poland and, on Saturday in Portugal, La Vuelta a España starts. Three stages in Portugal are followed by the rest of the week around the mountains of Andalucía. Then, for the last two weeks, we head to the mountains of northern Spain.

I think early in the season we mentioned the amount of climbing in the Giro d’Italia that turned out to be 42,900 metres. The Tour de France had to go one better (don’t they always?) so managed to find enough mountains to give the riders 52,000 metres to play with. Route designers for La Vuelta said “Hold my Estrella!” The good folk having the luck to be cycling around Portugal and Spain for three weeks will find themselves climbing 61,522 metres! That is so close to seven times up Mount Everest it’s not even funny. Anyway, we think it’s time Sepp Kuss has his day in the sun, so let’s see what happens.

Important Diary Note

The shop will be unavoidably closed all day on Friday 30^th August due to a close bereavement. We hope you understand and apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Weekend Wines

Given the return of Alex from Spain and the beginning of La Vuelta, we shall have to taste something Spanish. We’ll get the juices flowing with Palacio del Camino Real Blanco 2022 – £11.99. A cracking blend of Viura, Malvasia and Grenache Blanc grown in the higher vineyards of Rioja Alta.  With lovely fresh aromas of stone fruit and citrus, framed with a touch of vanilla from a couple of months lazing around in the barrel, we reckon white Rioja, in the modern style, is one of the world’s most under-rated wines. 

Grappling with red jersey will be Time Waits for No One 2022 (£15.99). This organic Monastrell hails from Jumilla which is a little inland from Murcia. Rich, rounded and with lush dark blackberry fruit character I think we’ll be partnering it with some lamb chops on the barbecue!

Let’s get this weekend started, shall we?

Fellow Wine Lovers,

Where do we start this week? Gil Scott Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised came to mind on more than one occasion!

We’ve had outbreaks of violence as rent a mob and followers of Runaway Robinson decided the best way to improve their lot in life was to steal a steak bake or set fire to a library and several police vehicles. Who’d have thought that Nigel, Suella, Liz, Robert, Jacob, Boris and Rishi using all that divisive rhetoric would bring us to this? Somehow, I doubt they’ll get the knock on the door.

On a more positive note it seems the vast majority of us don’t think stealing knock off Crocs or burning cars is a great idea. I do wonder how punching a policeman carries a smaller sentence than disrupting traffic on the M25. But hey ho, sometimes it seems the law is an ass.

Also on the subject of unrest, Carles Puigdemont popped up in Barcelona yesterday and now appears to be playing hide and seek with the Spanish police. You’ll recall he had been living in exile in Belgium after organising an independence referendum in Catalonia that turned out to be illegal and brought all sorts of protest on to the streets in 2017.

Also this week, we had a global stock market crash that lasted just about an entire day before everyone bought the dip and calmed down again. Some people had a great new entry point, some poor suckers sold at the bottom and most of us didn’t know much about it. More scintillating financial news in the near future…

The Olympics are still happening, the sailing is still having problems with the wind and World Records have been dropping like flies in the velodrome. We’ve had two divers score a Nil Points because their dives weren’t quite up to snuff and the men’s 1500m final was absolutely incredible viewing.

Olympian of the week for me was 51 year old Andy Macdonald who became the oldest ever skateboarder at the Olympics. No medals, he finished 18 out of 22 having decided it might be nice if he qualified for the Olympics as a 50^th birthday present to himself. He was no mug on the board, having been a gold medallist in vert skateboarding at the X games on 23 occasions. Chapeau for chasing dreams!

In wine news this week, grape farmers around Lake Balaton in Hungary are already harvesting grapes for their white wines. Following the hottest July since records began in 1901 the grapes are ready a month earlier than usual. Meanwhile in Australia, Treasury Wine Estates, owner of a large number of well-known brands has put some of the cheaper end up for sale. Wolf Blass, Lindemans, Blossom Hill and Yellowglen all have the agent’s board at the end of the drive. If that penny jar is full and you’ve always fancied owning a household name now is the time.

And on that note we shall taste this weekend

Accomplice Chardonnay 2023 (£10.79) Hailing from South East Australia, this is a cracking crisp and gently creamy chardonnay that goes with almost anything. We have a number of customers who use this as their house white, such is its versatility. Cracking value, come and see if it might fit the Wednesday slot in your house!

Geoff Merrill Bush Vine Shiraz, Grenache, Mourvèdre 2016 (£21.99) hails from McLaren Vale, and you’ll have heard us wax lyrical about Geoff’s wines in the past. We really like that he always releases them with a little bit of age and roundness on them. Top stuff! 

Cheers,

Fellow Wine Lovers,

We often like to think of this newsletter as a little view of the world gazing from the shop window. Well, I can tell you that today the view is of mostly empty parking spaces and the occasional passer-by in shorts, invariably carrying a choc-ice. SW19 has been enjoying a few days of summer this week, with real sunshine and a proper thunderstorm to end the day. I’m not sure I’ve ever been wetter!

The Olympics are on, I know some of you are there watching, a couple volunteering, maybe even some competing.  I’ve been watching some on the TV, not the tennis, golf or swimming for me, I’ve been concentrating on some of the more esoteric sports, so many of them you only get to see every four years on TV.

As I write this I can hear Canoe Slalom burbling away in the background, it looks a bit of a crazy sport to me, more Indiana Jones than Matthew Pinsent. The sailing had just been cancelled for now due to lack of wind. I’m looking forward to a bit of fencing later.

I’ve seen the lunatics on the BMX course, great to watch but very scary when you think how many times they must have fallen in order to perfect those forward and back flips, let alone the no hand spins. I’ve also seen some surfing, volleyball and beach volleyball and three person basketball. Whilst we’ve been chatting the sailing restarted and then stopped again. The wind, it would appear, is a cruel mistress.

Still on the subject of the Olympics, I think we should have the person responsible for the Triathlon as the new head of Ofwat don’t you? I was so impressed that after several days of being unclean and unfit for swimming we had an overnight turnaround in quality, despite a shower that had many of the women triathletes sliding out on corners during the cycling leg.

Away from the Olympics the world seems to be carrying on. Trumpolina seems to be running scared of a debate with Kamala Harris, Kemi Badenoch apparently asked for her holiday flight to be paid with taxpayers’ money and Nigel Farage has, according to a former head of the Met’s counter terrorism unit, helped to incite violence.

The country’s financial position might not be as good as the last government led us to believe and still no money back from Michelle Mone. Meanwhile, a man from Portsmouth has been jailed for 8 months for shoplifting 798 Cadbury Creme Eggs in a crime spree that took in 19 shops across Dorset, West Sussex and Hampshire. Imagine his dentist bills!

Back to the Olympics we get on to the proper sports this weekend. The men’s road race is on Saturday, women’s road race on Sunday and then the track cycling comes at us thick and fast on Monday. There’s still some golf on to get the naps in! Chapeau to Andy Murray who retired from professional tennis yesterday after he and Dan Evans lost in the quarter finals of the doubles. He did make me smile with h is tweet of “Never even liked tennis anyway.”

There’s been a lot of talk about the photograph of the surfer, it’s amazing and worth seeking out but the one that caught my attention was Turkey’s 10m air pistol contestant Yususf Dikec. All around him, contestants had special glasses, eye patches and ear defenders whilst he looked like he’d stopped in on the way home from work. Ordinary glasses, hand in pocket all the way to claiming the silver medal. Cool as cucumber!

Wine This Weekend

We’ve got a small parcel of AIX Rosé (£18.49 or 3 for £48) which is a delicious example of the pinks of Provence. Crisp and dry with hints of raspberry and herbs. We’ll open a bottle of that to kick off with, and then will fly the spinnaker and head over to Argentina for a sample of Bodegas Staphyle Iris Malbec (£11.99) a cracking example from Lujan de Cuyo high in the Andes. Tip top with something cooked over coals if that’s the plan once the Olympics have finished for the day.

Salud¡¡