Fellow Wine Lovers,
We’ll start the week with some birthdays. Dennis the Menace will feature on a special 50p coin issued by the Royal Mint this week, to celebrate achieving the ripe old age of 75. Weirdly, it’ll cost £15 to buy one, inflation off the charts or the oddness of coin collecting, you decide.
In Spring, National Treasure David Attenborough will be celebrating his 100th birthday with a week of special programmes starting on the 8th May. A new programme will show behind the scenes on ‘Life on Earth’, which was first broadcast in 1979 and has visited 40 countries.
Celebrating his 66th birthday yesterday, the Andrew formerly known as Prince was arrested at his new home in Norfolk. Barely had his birthday crumpet popped up in the toaster than the heavy boots of Thames Valley Police were crunching up the path to his door. He has been arrested on suspicion of wrongdoing in public office, which we suspect is like getting Al Capone on tax evasion. The King says “the law must take its course”.
We bet he’s sweating now.
Elsewhere, South Korea demonstrated that nobody is above the law by jailing their ex-president Yoon Suk-Yeol for life. He was found to have damaged their democracy by trying to impose martial law in December 2024.
In a place where an entire administration feels they are above the law, Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, called for the authors of a NY Federal Reserve paper to be “disciplined”. The paper pointed out that business and consumers are bearing the higher cost of tariffs. He even went as far as calling them an “embarrassment”. One wonders about looking in the mirror. In other Fed news, central bank policymakers warned that progress towards the central bank’s inflation target “might be slower and more uneven than generally expected”. We can’t think why.
Last week’s rugby didn’t all go according to plan; I certainly didn’t recognise that Scot’s team as the same people who played the week before. Looks like Van der Merwe will be back against Wales and that England may have had a chat with themselves. Possibly the game of the weekend will be on Sunday in Paris where France host Italy.
In the other shaped ball, Arsenal seem rather too happy to squander leading positions and rescue a single point from games they really should be winning. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen on Sunday.
In booze news, Brewdog seems to be in rather a lot of bother, up for sale and in danger of wiping out all its Equity for Punk Investors. I think possibly the founders and the toxic work culture have had more to do with their demise than the Chancellor’s tax rises.
On the wine front, we’ll be opening a couple of new Portuguesers this weekend. They hail from the Tejo region of Portugal. Located between Lisbon and Alentejo, it is Portugal’s fifth largest wine region.
Monte da Serra Branco 2024 (£12.49) is a blend of Arinto, Fernão Pires and Verdelho, whilst the Monte da Serra Tinto 2024 (£12.49) is a blend of Syrah, Castelão and Aragonez. When we tasted them we found them to be fruity, but not overly so and really rather good drinkers. Come and have a taste and let us know what you think.
Finally an admin note – next Friday – Friday 27th February, we will be closing early. It’s our annual trip up the hill to help out at the KCS quiz night, so in order to get this all set up, we will be closing at 5PM – apologies in advance.
And with that, we’re off to find out if Pizza Express Woking does deliveries by drone!