Upon rediscovering this blog, I rediscovered this post. How naive that turned out to be. I am now proud holder of WSET3 (with distinction, as well as the same for 2) and French, Spanish and Italian Wine Scholar qualifications (all with highest honours. Entirely unsurprisingly I got completely hooked on wine education. Level 1 was…
Tag: Wine
Bojo Nuvo
No, this is not an ode to our highly esteemed Prime Minister. I am talking about Beaujolais Nouveau. Beaujolais is (most traditionally) a red wine from around Lyon in Eastern France. It’s made with the wildly unfashionable Gamay grape and is a generally a fruit forward, easy drinking style. Because of this easy drinking style…
Mulling things over
I have a long history with mulled wine/gluhwein/vin chaud or whatever else warm wine with spices in happens to be called in different cultures/parts of the zeitgeist (my favourite being Glogg, because it’s really nice to say). I’ve used it to accidentally get an astrophysics department at a top university wasted and to choosing a…
On being a wine wanker
On the eve of London Wine Week (yay!) I thought I’d take some time to witter on about wine. Increasingly over the past year or so wine has become my drink. This is both utterly unsurprising, and, given my love of beer and cocktails, completely shocking. There’s a lot of reasons why this is the…
Week Week Prep!
WINE WEEK! It’s time for London Wine Week again! They’ve stopped doing the by location book and replaced it with an app. While this works when you’re on the ground, it’s not so helpful for the obsessive nerds among us who want to plan. As a result of this I have prepared! I’ve put together…
Meh!
I’ve just been to a wine tasting. I tried 14 wines. I liked none of them. It wasn’t that any of them was intrinsically bad per se (actually, that’s unfair, one of them really was), they were just all decidedly meh. G-FORCE German wine fair is currently still going on in the basement of a…
City Wine Fair
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…
It’s been a while!
Hello Internet! I’ve not been writing for ages*. Sorry. I shifted from computer programming and data analysis to writing for a living and it made blogging feel too much like work. It also made me a bit miserable, but that’s something I’m now working on. One of the ways I’m working on it is to…
Chateaux-en/Chat Owen
A friend/colleague of mine has a grapevine. In North London. They’re muscat grapes. Last weekend he and I decided to attempt to make wine from them. We got a reasonable crop from them, although if we’d have harvested a week earlier we’d have gotten a whole lot more. A local wood pigeon found them and…
It’s really a very good year
I’ve been on holiday! Lovely girlfriend and I have just gotten back from a week in Madeira. While the destination wasn’t chosen with the fortified wine in mind, I’m sure you can see where this post is going. While we did drink some amazing wine from all over Portugal, which will be discussed at some…
Epilogue
Now the dust has settled (and I’ve written up the individual days!) I thought I’d give a few summary thoughts on Wine Week. I drank over 50 wines throughout the week. Only one of them was actually bad. Several were stunning. I found a lot of new places I’ll definitely be going back to for…
Weekend Weekend [part 2]
After a slow start to the day due to that last glass of Sherry (and the rest of the wine too), we ambled towards Tottenham Court Road. The plan was to make our way down through Covent Garden. We were foiled at our first stop. Twice. First, the friends we were supposed to be meeting…
Nerdy Booze 