Fellow Wine Lovers,
Spain travel warning as Britons to face soaring temperatures in top hotspots – Daily Express 17th July.** (see footnote)
Did you hear? It’s summer in Europe and it’s hot. Many, many UK column inches have been printed warning us if the dangers of going to Europe and meeting Cerberus or Charon – last year it was the ferry ports being overcrowded, this year it’s the weather; one is almost starting to feel like there is some sort of animosity between the UK and the mainland!
Glancing quickly at the Spanish and Italian press though, their coverage seems less meteorologically fixated. La Nazione, in Florence, has a front page headline discussing a local restaurant no longer being allowed to put tables on the pavement, whilst El País is more concerned with power outages due to air conditioning usage, the 143,000 litres of olive oil being sold as Extra Virgen when it’s been mixed with lesser product (two headlines that appear every year, I think), and, of course, the upcoming general election on Sunday.
Not so many headlines about the weather.
However, this does lead us to a heartfelt plea from Wayne who, in case you don’t know, is not going on holiday until September and so will be chief helmsman from now and all through August. It can get a bit lonely for him so, if you were to decide to avoid the Furnaces of Europe and indulge in a London staycation, he would be delighted to see you and have someone to talk to! Plus, at the moment, he is juggling watching the Tour de France, The Ashes and the British Open if you’d care to join – not something you could necessarily do in Montalcino.
Plus we’ve got strikes a plenty coming up: the tubes, the railways and the buses are all out at some point in the next few weeks; the doctors are out now; the baggage handlers at Gatwick are also joining in the fun – it definitely feels more and more like you should stay put and drink wine with Wayne!
As we watched our Members of Parliament yesterday scuttle back to their constituencies for six weeks, we applaud Rishi the Reshuffler for keeping members of his Cabinet firmly on their toes. Nothing quite like going off on holiday on a Thursday completely uncertain of what job you’ll be doing when you get back, if any – excellent people management, almost Machiavellian we’d say. When you take into consideration the 3 by-elections scheduled for the last day of term plus the announcement, on Wednesday, of a new Tata Gigafactory to be built in Somerset, possibly just over the road from Somerton & Frome, you could be forgiven for raising a quizzical eyebrow whilst reaching for your copy of The Prince!
In our world of wine and associated drinking, all the press is talking about is the duty rise that we warned you about a couple of weeks back. Further research on our part has revealed that wines over 14.5% will likely go up by £2 on the shelf, which, when we looked at our selection from the valleys of the Rhône, the Barossa and the ‘policella led us to a deep, long sigh. None of this will happen until August though, so there’s another good reason for you to pop in sooner rather than later to buy wine from Wayne!
As a spoiler, here’s what he’ll have open this weekend:
New Hall Vineyards Bacchus 2021 – £16.99 (equivalent to 23p/ml) – The vineyards of New Hall, established in 1969, are located just outside of Purleigh, Essex and are home to some of the oldest plantings of Bacchus in the UK. They certainly have the most – 44,500 vines – and supply grapes to a couple of well-known English Wineries that, frankly, are not very close to Essex. The wine has a vinous, limey nose that leads you into a fruit focused medium dry palate with lovely hints of elderflower and a reassuring zing on the finish – all for a refreshingly low 11% abv!
A Los Viñateros Bravos Volcánico País 2021 – £17.49 (equivalent to £2.33/10cl) – from Itata in Chile, this is a bit of a favourite of ours. Over the years we have tried our fair share of wines from the grape variety País and an awful lot of them have been a bit ordinary and we could easily understand why it was, for the most part, distilled into Pisco. However, this is not like any of the others – really lifted aromatic fruit on the nose, fresh and juicy, almost spritzy even in the mouth and with really fine tannins. A proper vin de soif that’d be perfect with some slow cooked pork on the barbecue and, again, a refreshingly low 12.5% abv.
And with that we’re done. I’m off to watch the cricket, he’s off to watch Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One – neither of us have managed to get tickets to Barbie, yet….
¡Hasta la proxima!
Wayne & Alex
** We also have heard an interview with the BBC’s Vatican correspondent who was able to confirm that the Pope was indeed a Catholic, followed by an American expert on ursine biology who was able to confirm what bears do in the woods.