Fellow Wine Lovers,
Well, my dad has always said “everything comes to he who waits” and I think our patience through much of June and July has paid off – we’ve enjoyed a genuinely lovely bit of summer this week, haven’t we?
Rosé has left the building arm in arm with beer, we’ve cycled the long way home (albeit in the twilight!), and we’ve eaten mostly salad because cooking seemed too much of a faff.
We’ve also had Traingate this week. This is where Jeremy Corbyn seems to have been telling porkies about the availability of seats on one of Richard Branson’s Virgin Trains. I’ve been amazed at how many column inches this has generated, if I’m honest, and the only real winner must surely be Virgin Trains who have sold loads of extra tickets to journalists who have to do their piece ‘in situ’.
Transfer deadline is looming with a Bravo for Manchester City (though not Joe Hart) and rumours that even Arsenal may have bought someone. Everything comes to he who waits!
Formula 1 is back this week, Spa Francorchamps in Belgium is the venue and Lewis Hamilton will be starting at the back of the grid due to a breach in technical regulations. That should bring some excitement to the race; it’s a great circuit for racing on.
In proper sports, La Vuelta a España has pushed on through its first week, highlighting how beautiful that bit above Portugal is. Racing has been good too, with plenty of breakaway action each day, and a fantastic stage steal by Simon Yates yesterday.
So to finish with sport, Bake Off started again this week, did you see it? Apparently more people watched the first episode of this series than the most popular parts of the Olympics. When you come up with something like a Gin and Tonic cake, it’s no wonder there are 11 million viewers!
In wine news, Pic-St-Loup in the Languedoc got a bit of a pasting from hail at the end of last week. This year France has suffered a selection of weather related disasters, with a mixture of late frost and hail storms decimating yields. Champagne and the Loire are expected to be down about 30% each and Burgundy and Beaujolais down about 20%, too. Overall across France it makes about an 8% decline in production.
Tasting This Weekend
As a show of support to those plucky French winemakers we’ll show some Gallic flair this weekend. We’ve just got a new Sancerre on board, so we’ll pull the cork on Domaine Michel Girard Sancerre 2015 (£15.99), whilst sporting the red swimming trunks will be Domaine Treloar’s Ciel Vide 2015 (£11.49), a delicious unoaked blend of Syrah and Grenache, from the foothills of the Pyrenees.
Proper punctuation means Alex is back!
Oh and one last piece of admin – on Bank Holiday Monday we will be closed as usual.
Enjoy the long, hot weekend!