Fellow Wine Lovers,
Now, we’re not necessarily Boris’s number one fans but we did feel for him when the media snark yesterday turned to his health. We would all hope, having been hospitalised with a life threatening illness and subsequently being told some quite scary lifestyle home truths, that the move to appoint a personal trainer to help you get into shape would remain, you know, personal. It’s not news; in amongst all the things he’s ‘achieved’ in the last 6 months or so, this should be the lowest on the trolling list – however that’s not how news works these days…
From the world of heavy weight prize fighting, we hear that the current belt holder, 74 year old Donny T, has been trash-talking his next opponent, 77 year old Joey B, suggesting that he’s been taking performance enhancing drugs and that they should both take a drug test! History shows that he did the same with Hillary C in 2016, which she ignored, but nonetheless it looks like he’s going to use the same playbook for this fight, which might be an interesting sign of what is to come.
But what performance enhancing drugs are septuagenarian millionaires interested in, we wonder? Taking our minds out of the gutter, we discover that Donny confesses to a ‘one aspirin per day’ habit whilst Joe has yet to comment. Considering both their ages and, dare I say it, the well documented high level of legal prescription drug use in the USA, I certainly doubt that one aspirin is the end of the story but I’m not sure it ends in a meth lab either.
As a side note, Donald Trump is already the oldest President of the USA to take office and Ronald Reagan was 77 years old when he left the Oval office whilst Boris Johnson is 55 years and a bit.
Stung by all the criticism we received last week for failing to talk about wine in a weekly missive that misleadingly calls itself ‘The Weekly Wine’, the word from on high was that we need to concentrate a bit more on vinous matters rather than, say, the Tour de France.
Well, where to start. I imagine the deluges we have had over the last few days will perhaps dilute some of the fruit for this year’s vintage in the UK unless we get some decent sunshine again over the next few weeks. Equally, depending on how the canopy management has been, and I imagine most vineyards might have kept a bit of leaf on to protect the grapes in the recent hot weeks, then there is a risk, again rain resultant, that the leaves might have provided insufficient protection to the ripening fruit beneath and we could see lots of lovely grapes lying in the mud, beyond hope of vinification.
Still sure you want us to talk about wine?
With the much anticipated return of the schools next week and with that a small sense of routine returning to perhaps a handful of local households we thought we too would return to a bit of normality with the re-launch of our monthly case club. To those of you as yet unaware of this, for the past 8 years or so we have been putting together two cases a month, one containing 6 bottles for £60 and the other with 6 bottles for £100. These cases attract a better discount than what would usually be offered in the shop plus they contain wines that we enjoy, the occasional bought in bin-end, often some esoteric stuff that we think people should be trying and of course some old favourites. We call it, rather cleverly we thought all those years back, The Park Vintners Wine Club.
I’ve attached the tasting notes for the September case (or at the very least, I intend to attach them), have a look and see what you think. In a nutshell:
- The club is completely free of obligation – you let us know that you are interested in it and give us your email address.
- Then at the start of each month we email you with the month’s selections, at which point you say ‘yes, please’ or ‘no, thank you’.
- If you say ‘yes, please’ we the arrange a suitable delivery time and payment
- If you say ‘no, thanks’ we then leave you in peace until the following month
- And so it goes on
We have a number of customers who have been taking this on a monthly basis from day one, some who dip in on a quarterly basis and others who use it purely as a simple Christmas gift solver – and buy 6 cases! There are no rules, no red tape, just red wine and of course white!
So, if any of this holds any appeal, even if you only end up trying it once, just drop us a line and we can go from there.
Otherwise, there really is no other wine news to report on. Nothing. Big companies are trying not to go bust; wine producers in red zones in France (Bordeaux, chunks of Languedoc & Roussillon, the lower end of the Rhone for example) are scratching their heads a bit with harvest time approaching, wondering whether their pickers will be allowed to turn up and hoping that all the possible lockdown rules won’t be implemented; Rosé wine sales still increase exponentially, although we only sold two bottles yesterday but I imagine a bank holiday weekend will make up for that blip.
And that’s it, really. It really is a bank holiday weekend, when we wake up on Tuesday it will be September and the end of summer so, carpe diem, go and eat street food at Street Eats in Wimbledon Park, and then on Monday eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at a local hostelry involved in EOTHO.
Oh, and raise a glass to Boris if you see him sprint past…