Fellow Wine Lovers,
How is the South-West? I read in the press that the traffic on the way down left a little to be desired, but it seems the sunshine showed up on time. If it’s any consolation the Lake District National Park is considering a name change to the Lake District Car Park.
In less traffic related news, Tottenham are on the search for a manager. Alex has put his hat in the ring but there do seem to be a few snags with his application that will take some real negotiating skills. Firstly, there are his commitments on Saturdays; it’s difficult to see how he can be stood on the side-line screaming instructions to Son when he should be here selling wine to you. Secondly, even though he has an extensive knowledge of Italian, he bears no resemblance whatsoever to Brett Anderson or Jools Holland. On the plus side though, he is cheap, with considerably smaller demands on the salary front than Antonio Conte, Rafa Benitez, or even Sol Campbell for that matter. We’ll see where the horse trading ends up shall we?
In other news, an Irish subsidiary of Microsoft, Microsoft Round Island One, made a profit of £222 billion last year and paid NOTHING, ZERO, ZILCH, £0 in Corporation Tax. It might be legal, but is it right that your neighbourhood wine shop pays more Corporation Tax than Microsoft? We think it might be time this was changed, not in a cross party sense, but in an international sense. Time some of these international corporations did a bit more for international society. We’re not sure £500k to Oxfam and a rainbow flag during Pride week really cuts it anymore! Next week the G7 summit is in Cornwall and a key theme will be helping poorer countries to recover from the pandemic, perhaps a start could be made there?
Tuesday’s pop up vaccination centre at the Mosque was a big success, with queues around the block and over a thousand people vaccinated by the time they closed at midnight. Well done to all involved, a step closer to normal we hope. In related news, no countries were added to the Green list this week, indeed we seem to have, rather carelessly, lost Portugal. For the moment Iceland is the only place that’ll have us, I’ve not been but have heard it’s rather pleasant!
Space is the final frontier for some nematode worms this week as they are sent up to the International Space Station. The 1mm worms share many biological characteristics with humans and they are being sent up to identify the molecules that cause muscles to weaken and to test some new therapies to prevent muscle loss in zero gravity. One hundred baby squid have also been sent to help understand the effects of spaceflight. No mention was made of salt, pepper or aioli!
In other space related news, NASA has announced to missions Venus in 2028 and 2030, there’s been no investigation in that part of the Galaxy since 1990 apparently so, who knows, it could be on the green list by 2033!
In wine news the Rosé certainly seems to be flying, the Bordeaux ‘En Primeur’ campaign is grinding slowly on and hauliers are still arriving with the wrong paperwork creating delays and logjams at warehouses. The net result of this is that we run out of things on and off, for which we’d like to apologise in advance. It seems to be happening everywhere though; one of the brewers ran out of cans last week!
Given that we started with sunshine but, now the rain has popped in to save us all watering the garden this evening, I thought I’d end on some Piemonte sunshine. Fratelli Povero Roero Arneis 2019(£14.99) is a cracking drop of white, crisp with a soft minerality and pear and stonefruit character that’d be just perfect with mackerel, fennel and olive spaghetti. Also it wouldn’t be a bad match for those fabulous scallops they’ve had at the farmers market lately!
That’s it from us, have a great weekend and enjoy the sunshine!