Fellow Wine Lovers,
Wow, that was a long month! Anyone who is used to celebrating their birthday, in normal years, the day after 28th February has been made to wait an extra 24 hours this time round and I know for a fact that amongst those celebrating today are my wife’s daughter, my son’s sister and my niece’s cousin – many happy returns of the day to all of them!
So, as it’s now March 1st, St David’s Day, it’s the the day we always celebrate how very Welsh we are. Wyn has got a daffodil salad for lunch, whilst Alecs is sporting a rather splendid leek in his buttonhole – both are looking forward to bakestones at teatime with a pint of Brains later on but don’t want to be drawn into talking about the rugby or the value of spoons made of wood…
However, by Saturday, it’ll all be over and we’ll be English again, gazing at the drizzle, contemplating mid-table mediocrity and saddling up our horse to slay a dragon….
… and reading the wine news.
One of you, who shall not be named for reasons that will soon become apparent, directed us towards the following story. A new wine has been released, called Simp Wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon, made in Walthamstow, apparently using grapes from Spain and Lebanon rather than Wanstead and Tottenham. Anyway, at this point things become a bit more interesting and frankly we ended up going down a bit of a wormhole, thanks Matt. With a nod to a traditional method of grape crushing, the grapes for this wine are crushed by feet but not just any feet. The feet involved belong to a lady called Emilie Rae, who is, according to Matt Wikipedia, a foot fetish influencer and Only Fans content creator, whatever that means. However, by all accounts, people pay £40/minute to look at her hooves, which means that she is a very successful businesswoman, with 320,000 followers all clamouring to buy her wine proving that she certainly knows how to monetise her ‘brand’.
The wine is limited release (no confirmation of how many units) and is retailing at £100 per bottle, which is a clear bargain for a wine made by Tony Mortimer and Brian Harvey, particularly when you take into consideration that a bottle of Grand Puy Lacoste 2006 from us costs £98!
As a footnote (!) to this whole tale, on the wine website they claim that all the grapes were crushed by Emilie and to support this they show a video of her feet in a bucket of…. white grapes!!
Moving away from the Weird World Web, our next piece of news comes from GQ, because we like to look sharp and live smart, as you can tell. The article we were reading was reminding us of the nine shared factors that the longest lived people on earth seem to share, even though they may live in Sardinia, Japan, Costa Rica, California or Greece. The list, on www.bluezones.com, doesn’t necessarily seem hugely surprising – exercise, eat better, manage stress etc or as Dan Buettner puts it:
- Move Naturally
- Purpose
- Downshift
- 80% Rule
- Plant Slant
- Belong
- Loved Ones First
- Right Tribe
And most significantly
- Wine @ 5 – People in all blue zones (except Adventists) drink alcohol moderately and regularly. Moderate drinkers outlive non-drinkers. The trick is to drink 1-2 glasses per day (preferably Sardinian Cannonau wine), with friends and/or with food. And no, you can’t save up all week and have 14 drinks on Saturday.
Have to say, we wholeheartedly concur.
Sport offers us little this week:
“Everything I have built in my professional career has been taken away from me” – thus spake Paul Pogba, after he was banned from football for 4 years for having elevated levels of testosterone in his system, both in an initial test and the follow up B test. It’s so refreshing to see the gazillionaire footballer taking full responsibility for everything.
As it’s not far from 5pm, we should probably prepare some wines for tasting over the weekend.
For the white we’ll be visiting Italy again and opening an old favourite: Cantine Colomba Bianca Vitese Grillo 2022 – £13.99. Grillo is a crossing of Catarratto and Zibibbo and has lovely lifted citrus and tropical fruit character, a touch of minerality, great mouthfeel and a zesty finish. Established in 1970, Colomba Bianca are dynamic, very quality focused and also just happen to be the biggest Italian producer of organic wine – so a winner all round then: a diverse, gut friendly organic wine that’s perhaps great for your plant slant!
Obviously the red has to be a Cannonau and San Costantino Cannonau di Sardegna DOC 2022 – £19.99 seems the perfect fit. Cannonau is the most important red wine grape native to Sardinia, and possibly the oldest variety in the Mediterranean being the origin of Grenache or Garnacha. The 15 hectare vineyard is located on a gentle slope between Alghero and Sassari and is run by Giampaolo Parpinello and his son Paolo. It has a deep red colour, medium bodied on the palate with mature red fruits, a touch of white pepper spice and a nice elegance to the finish with some gentle dryness of tannin framing those red fruits really rather nicely.
And with that, we’re on our toes, as Emilie might say!