I went to The City Wine Fair yesterday. Today I am feeling a little rough.

Surprising!

It was… mixed. There were some excellent wines and some great people who loved talking about wine. There were also some mediocre wine that was massively overpriced and some people who really didn’t care (despite in theory being there to sell wine!).

We arrived in time for a Rosé masterclass. It was great! I’m not really a rosé drinking, because I always think of it with being off-dry and not great. That was exactly the starting point of this class, and went on to prove us very wrong! We tried pink fizz, great reasonably priced almost oily, bone dry ones through to some barrel fermented/aged  ones that would give a similarly priced White Burgandy a run for it’s money (given that White Burgandy is my favourite, that’s saying a lot!). The presenter was great too. He new his stuff and wasn’t precious about buying wine from supermarkets and chains and stuff. My favourite was one called Château de la Soujeole. It’s made by a former rugby player and I thought it was delicious mix of red fruits, peachy flavours, minerals and cream. The girls next to me made being sick noises when they tried it though, so obviously not to everyone’s taste!

Outside of the masterclass there was less to write home about. There was an absolutely amazing Riesling, which you can’t get over here called Sven (no, don’t become a wine importer!), a delicious champagne called Michel Gonet and some pretty good Rioja’s. We had the Rioja’s in order of age from a brand new one to a 10 year old one, which was fun.

Other than that, it was all a bit meh. As I’ve already said there were a lot of wines claiming to be “fine” and thus costing £20+, but being not as nice as something you could pick up for half that at Majestic (which was also a dirty word to a fair few people there), being sold by people who really didn’t care/want to be there/wanted to flirt with the guy on the next stand. I wonder how much that’s people taking advantage of the apparent snobbery around Majestic/Lidl/other places that sell good wine for cheaper (or just not “grand marques”).

I did manage to accidentally piss off a rep from a website called idealwine.com, by describing it as like ebay only for wine. Ooops.