Fellow Wine Lovers,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A week full of surprises\nseems to have been the long and short of it. First surprise was really rather a\npleasant one. The nice people in the Canary Islands have been sending us some\nof their wonderful weather, so, barely a minute after putting St. Valentine to\nbed for another year, it feels like spring has sprung.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In what should come as no\nsurprise, news reaches us that restaurants and pubs suffered a slowdown in\nspending in January. Not only were those who did visit only drinking\nwater but apparently they wanted to eat only vegetables too!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s also a new movement\nafoot. It\u2019s been creeping up on us for ages, lurking suspiciously in the\nbackground, a small but increasingly confident minority who may at some point\nbe the mainstream. Until quite recently there were basically two pre-dinner\ndrinks that were popular. On the one hand you had the folks that like to drink\na glass of champagne or something bubbly in a flute. On the other hand there\nwere the people that liked to have a beer, some chilled, some room temperature,\nbut beer nonetheless. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But this emergent minority we\nmentioned above appear to prefer drinking a gin and tonic before dinner. Not\nonly that, but they are also recruiting from both sides. Champagne\nproducers have spotted a fall in their sales and responded with a typically\nGallic shrug and an increase in prices. The beer producers have grown their\nbeards longer, shrunk their trousers, added more hops and started going to the\nsame cool places you find gin producers. It\u2019ll be interesting to see how this\nall plays out as something similar happened in the late 70\u2019s\/ early 80\u2019s – but\nbarely anyone drinks Babycham now!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the politics front, in a\nrare show of humour, the Labour Party re-instated Derek Hatton for 48 hours.\nTheresa May has been in Brussels again this week, allegedly for negotiations\nbut we\u2019re starting to think she just goes for dinner at Quincaillerie<\/em> or\nComme Chez Soi<\/em> on the government dime. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Otherwise some renegade\nformer Labour MP\u2019s (known in some circles as The Hateful Eight) have joined up\nwith some renegade Conservative MP\u2019s (known in some circles as the Three\nAmigos) to form a mixed commons football team called Independent Group. To what\naim remains unclear as they have nobody to play with but rest assured we\u2019ll\nkeep you abreast of developments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the science front, scientists believe they have discovered why zebras have stripes and it\u2019s nothing to do with running faster. It would appear the stripes are there to confuse flies. After dressing several horses up in zebra outfits it was discovered that the poor flies are too confused to land because of the stripes. To us this seemed like something you\u2019d dream up after a long and challenging afternoon in the pub\u2026 \u201cHey, I\u2019ve got this great idea; we\u2019ll dress up some horses as zebras\u2026\u201d <\/em>Kudos definitely goes to the person that managed to sell it to the funding committee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s quite enough guff from\nus for this week except to say that we\u2019ll be opening a couple of Portu-Geezers\non the tasting table this weekend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wearing the white waistcoat\nwill be Ai Galera Mistico 2017 (\u00a38.79<\/strong>). It\u2019s a cracking blend of Fern\u00e3o\nPires and Verdelho from the Tejo region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Adorned in the red slacks\nwill be its sibling Ai Galera Poetico 2017 (\u00a38.79).<\/strong> Funnily enough, it\ntoo is from the Tejo region, but sports a blend of Castel\u00e3o, Trincadeira Preta\nand Tinta Mi\u00fada. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So there you have it, a\nweekend of lovely weather and five indigenous Portuguese grape varieties to\ntantalise the taste buds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sa\u00fade!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fellow Wine Lovers, A week full of surprises seems to have been the long and short of it. First surprise was really rather a pleasant one. The nice people in the Canary Islands have been sending us some of their wonderful weather, so, barely a minute after putting St. Valentine to bed for another year, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parkvintners.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parkvintners.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parkvintners.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parkvintners.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parkvintners.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/parkvintners.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1108,"href":"https:\/\/parkvintners.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions\/1108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parkvintners.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parkvintners.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parkvintners.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}