In fitting with my Tour de France themed title, we started somewhere other than France. In fact it was a rather multinational start. Right by the wristband exchange there was a Freixenet stall. They are expanding their brand out of only doing Cava into a prosecco. I’m not the biggest prosecco fan so went for one of their cava based offering to start. The Freixenet Ice turned out to be WAY too sweet for me. Lovely girlfriend was willing to swap, so I ended up with the prosecco after all. It wasn’t too sweet for me after all. While I didn’t like it anything like as much as the standard Cava, it was nicer than I was expecting. Sometimes I should go with what I know. It’d started to rain. Yay London! This meant that rather than trying the other stalls around the wristband area we moved on.

First stop was New St Wine and our first £5 flight of the week. A Spanish white, a rose from Provence and an Austrian red. Difficult to review. The white smelled great but was too sweet and didn’t have enough depth or flavour to be anything other than meh. The rose wasn’t great either. and The red was definitely the nicest of the bunch, but the first two. had tarred my opinion. However, we did have an AMAZING cheese board and pork pie while we were there.

Next stop Spitalfields. Bedales was far too busy so we ambled round the corner to Vagabond. Opposite problem. Great wines, shame about the snacks. Their theme was Summer Wines. A very dry white which had a lot more depth than I was expecting from something as light as it appeared. Next came crisp rose (again from Provence) and a nice light red. All were great and Vagabond has definitely now on my list of places to go for good wine. The taust wasn’t as nice as it looked/sounded. Ah well. WINE!

We rounded off the evening with a now traditional trip to Taberna do Mercado. The food was as excellent as always and we had a LOVELY bottle of wine called Tiara (yes, that is why I ordered it). It was a white made by Niepoort out of a collection of native Portuguese grapes. It was fresh, green and minerally and went amazingly with all the fish and pork. The only shock of the trip (other than me not ordering another case of port) was that I had something other than a nata for desert!

That was day one. Tonight we’re aiming to be in the Blackfriars/Fleet Street area!