Fellow Wine Lovers,
This time next week it will all be over. The dust will have settled, Alex Salmond will have made his victory speeches, the sound of financial institutions scuttling towards the borders will be deafening and Scotland will have taken its first tentative steps on the road to independence – a road that 49% didn’t want to go down.
Anyway stuff the politics for now, let’s look at the settlement. As with all divorces, this is the moment when shared belongings get split up and returned to their original owners, regardless of whether they want them or not. Having undertaken some particularly thorough research over the last six minutes, we’ve come up with a short selection of items that Scotland brought to the world that we might need to re-pack and say farewell to next Friday.
Inside
The television, the fridge, the toaster, the electric clock, Roses Lime Cordial, Bovril, and dare I mention it, the flush toilet. Oh, and if you have a piano, the foot pedal also needs to go!
Outside
Not such bad news here, as many of the sports they have had a hand in are, let’s say, a tad niche in England.
Aussie Rules was apparently heavily influenced by Scottish settlers in Melbourne; shot put and hammer throw come from the Highland Games, and who can forget shinty and curling?!
Perhaps more significantly, we have to give back golf and cycling. For that matter the pneumatic tyre needs to go too but as we’ll have already returned tarmac we’ll be back on horses anyway!
Oh, and rather bizarrely they want the football dugout back in Aberdeen!
Finance
According to Wiki, the Bank of England was devised by William Paterson and the Bank of France by John Law; however I think we’ll be getting plenty of banks back.
Whisky & Haggis & Irn Bru
Bugger, we can’t let these go – who do we talk to, ACAS, UNESCO?
In the meantime, we still have a week left as the Great Britain we have been for the last 300 years, so let’s just carry on as usual.
This, for me, means I’m talking about Chile.
As mentioned last week, we’re ‘doing’ Chile in September in return for plenty of POS support from Wines of Chile. Pretty much all of this is now in our window and it would be hard to deny that Chile is strongly featured. This week though, I wanted to tie the tasting wines in with another topic that often gets brought up – Organic Wine.
Customers regularly ask if we sell organic wines, to which we reply, ‘Yes. Yes, we do.’
Such enthusiasm can often render people speechless so, to help their recovery and avoid awkward silences, we move up a gear and discuss the differences between organic wines, biodynamic wines and natural wines.
What we try to make clear in this discussion is that we fully support the ideals of organic (not using artificial fertilisers, pesticides in the vineyard etc), biodynamic (similar to organic but using special biodynamic preparations at particular times linked to the lunar calendar, often involving cow horns and hairy big toes) and natural (again, like organic but continuing the non-intervention, no artificial additive strategy in the winemaking as well as the grape growing, definitely involving hairy big toes, usually six on each foot) but we don’t make such practices the sole reason for us buying the wines we put on the shelf.
We buy our wines because they taste good and they are at the right sort of price for how good they taste. If they’re biodynamic too, fabulous, but it’s not a deal breaker.
This all leads me to the wines on show this weekend. Both are wines that we tasted, thought delicious and bought. It was only when they arrived and we looked more closely at the packaging that we found out they were both organic:
Emiliana Reserva Riesling 2012, Bío Bío Valley – £8.99 – previously the Alsace varieties we have tasted from Chile have been deeply disappointing and not worth anyone’s money. I think this was definitely a case of us kissing the wrong frogs – this is a lovely crisp, dry Riesling with lively lime, citrus character and a hint of apple on the palate. Spot on as an aperitif and an all-rounder when it comes to food matching – Wayne recommends Ceviche, I think he spends too many evenings at fancy restaurants!
Novas Gran Reserva Garnacha Syrah 2012, Cachapoal Valley – £11.99 – the classic southern Rhone blend with a twist of south American power and one to consider as the nights draw longer and the game season properly gets under way.
That’s it from us except for one note of admin:
Tomorrow, Saturday 13th September, we will be opening at the slightly later time of 11am due to a morning delivery to Croydon! Sorry for the inconvenience.
So do pop in and try some wine over the weekend and don’t forget to ask us about Organic wine – in the meantime, altogether now:
Ye’ll tak’ the high road and I’ll tak the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye…. (fade to black)