Last night I drank...

Sixth Stop: Turkish Eggs

Not a picture of what I drank, but next stop in the trail of amazing eating and drinking over the last 10 days – Kopapa on Seven Dials in Covent Garden for Turkish eggs in the sunshine before locking myself away in a large windowless space for ANOTHER wine fair over the weekend. Good fair, but I’d sort of had enough of wine by then, so no pictures. Turkish eggs are poached eggs on a base of thick creamy yoghurt covered in chilli butter and perhaps other sorts of smokily delicious herbs and spices, served with a thick slice of sourdough toast: aka The Breakfast Of The Gods. I have a long-standing love of Kopapa and must go back soon for dinner, but manage breakfast at the counter (or now outside if the weather continues as is) about once a month for the Turkish eggs. Did I mention the Turkish eggs?

Fifth Stop: 10 Greek Street

Back to W1 on the Wednesday night with a lovely group of customers, producers and colleagues to the ever-wonderful Greek Street. Downstairs this time to the private dining room which was actually welcomingly cool on a stifling night in Soho, so welcoming in fact that we had to be gently encouraged to leave just before midnight (by which time I think I’d managed to get into a heated debate on the monarchy) when we realised that we were indeed the last people in the restaurant. Cameron the chef came down to fillet our sea bass baked in salt, which was so meltingly soft and sweet and moist that I can’t even really begin to talk about it without descending immediately into hyperbole. We drank some Grand Cru Chablis from Laroche amongst other things (taking full advantage of the stupidly well priced fine wine list, of course), finishing with a bottle of the sparkling red Lambrusco to freshen up after dessert (the chocolate/salt-caramel tart which is one of the only desserts that I Go A Bit Funny over), which I love but which our French colleagues were considerably less impressed by. Spoilsports.

Fourth stop: Vinoteca Soho

One of the best things about LWTF week is that it’s a good excuse to take out customers and producers for some lovely meals in town, often to great new places that I’ve been wanting to try. On Tuesday of the fair, we made it to the newest branch of the small-but-perfectly-formed Vinoteca group. Owned by ex-Liberty employees (so how could they ever really go wrong?!), this new Soho site is absolutely gorgeous – a sort of Manhattan mixed with Vienna/Berlin feel to the space with bare brick walls, vivid green banquettes and vintage drinks posters on the walls, and a great airy lightness during the day. The food was simple but delicious, including a fair few plates of their superb cold meats which they slice freshly upstairs in the restaurant. We drank a few different bottles, my highlight being a Biodynamic Savigny Les Beaune from Domaine Jean Fery recommended by the manager Will, which was still very young but so vibrant and bright that it was entirely delicious already. Their wine list is wide, varied and fascinating, with a good selection also by the glass and the carafe. It’s just a great addition to the ever-burgeoning Soho restaurant scene which makes it even easier to spend all my money eating and drinking within the W1 postcode.

Third Stop: London Wine Trade Fair

This is where most of Liberty Wines Sales Team spent most of last week (yes, last week, that really sunny, hot, amazing week) in the ExCeL centre out in London’s Docklands. This is our stand, this is where I was, surrounded by incredible wines and most of my the British wine trade for a busy and very productive few days.

Second stop: Kanye and Jay Z: Watch the Throne at the O2

To be brutally honest, I think I enjoyed this more in retrospect when I realised how phenomenally lucky I was to get to sit in some of the best seats in the house (just in front of most of the Radio 1 djs) for one of the biggest hip hop shows of recent years. Bits were pretty incredible, bits were pretty loud and the beer was predictably pretty awful.

First stop: Weekend in Puglia

There were only two bad things about our trip to Puglia. The first was that we had to come home. The second was….no, I was lying, that was the only bad thing. It was amazing and I genuinely could have happily stayed forever. The hotel, food and wine were all absolutely gorgeous, and we did very little other than lie by the pool, eat and drink. Top wine tips have to absolutely go to the delicious wines of our hosts, Mark and Elvezia Shannon from A Mano. Mark is best known for his Primitivo which has won several Best Value awards over the years in the UK (it still retails for well under a tenner which for superb quality European wine is now rarer and rarer) but in Puglia we drank A Mano’s new sparkling rose, a blend of Greco, Primitivo and Negroamaro, and his Prima Mano, his top wine grown from two ancient vineyards on the coast. I think suitable praise would be to say that we drank it after a 1990 Giacomo Conterno Barolo Riserva and it in no way embarrassed itself, despite probably a difference in value of a few hundred pounds. Top food tip either goes to Mark and Elvi’s home-made pasta and meatballs or the head of a boiled whole fresh octopus. Actually.

A glass (OH that it had only been the one glass) of surprisingly excellent Gruner Veltliner.

I used to live in South East London. I don’t any more and, quite frankly, I miss it. I’m not complaining – I live on the Southbank which is one my life-time favourite places in the world, from the school days when it was merely the place where Hugh Grant made THAT speech to Andy McDowell in one of the 5 films of which we’d memorised every single word, to when I used to eat my lunch by the river every day to escape my stint as the World’s Worst Music Librarian, up to when I’d often wander around aimlessly on spare Sundays during my late twenties. Anyway, I absolutely love living there for about a million reasons that I’m not going to bore you with now, but I do miss having really good local pubs where you can get to the bar without fighting through 57 tourists or commuters, and where you can get good food, good service and properly relax with friends.

Going back to The Tiger in Camberwell for a friends birthday last week reminded me of all of this – it’s a great space, cosy but airy at the same time, really nice staff and good service, food that has ranged from ok to really very good on the occasions I’ve tried it and has been consistently good value (I think my steak, chips and salad came to around £12). But best of all was a rare experience – a wine by the glass that was not only a bit unusual, well priced and good quality but also, despite just being in the fridge without any means of preservation, in absolutely top-notch condition.

I took a picture of the wine list as you can see and searched for more information on this “Weingut Steinschaden Gruner Veltliner” but couldn’t even pin down a definite producer on the internet, let alone UK importer etc. Which is a shame because it was absolutely delicious and exactly how a Gruner by the glass in a good pub should be – appley, crisp and crunchy, a hint of minerality for post-work refreshment and enough weight to stand up to a few bar snacks. YUM!

I am blaming the time to which we stayed (too late on a school night) and how much we drank (too much on any night) on just how delicious it was.

A few pints of very good beers, in amidst multiple glasses of uncommented-upon sparkling wine.

I travelled about 14.5 hours door to door to attend a hen weekend in Somerset last weekend at which I discovered a few key things:

1. In the last few years I seem to have turned from a social, cheery sort into a massively grumpy introvert
2.  Hanging out with 5 people is somehow significantly more fun than hanging out with 15
3. It’s always good to be in the pub
4. It’s always good to have a French person on a pub quiz team
5. It is technically impossible to drive down the whole length of the M4 in either direction without 1 )at least FOUR 50mph average speed sections, 2) a serious accident that brings traffic to a complete halt for between 30 and 90 minutes and 3) a disappointing item of food bought from Chieveley and/or Leigh Delamere Services.

There was much sparkling wine drunk in a large, noisy house near Cheddar, which I’m not going to write about. If you’ve ever drunk a lot of sparkling wine in a shared house on a hen do, you’ll probably appreciate why (Spoiler alert: I didn’t sort the buying, and it was (quite rightly) bought more for quantity and fizziness than anything else.). I will, however, write about swimming in a heated outdoor pool in the only bit of the UK to get any sun over the bank holiday weekend while being handed a glass of wine. Although perhaps not entirely Health and Safety-cleared, the combination of outdoor swimming and drinking is one of the great pleasures of life.

I also managed a few pints of ale. Firstly a half of Wiltshire Gold on the way down in a pub we found in Hungerford in an effort to avoid the inevitable soggy M&S sandwich - no disrespect to the might of the M&S sandwich but after sitting in a car for 3 hours to get from SW London to junction 14 of the M4, you need something a little more substantial and meaningful. Not only did we find a fantastic little pub 10 minutes off the M4 with local ales, a good solid ploughmans on the menu and scores of pewter tankards hanging from the low beamed ceilings, but we also had characterful lunch company in the form of a parrot in the corner. For ‘characterful’, please read ‘at first only mildly irritating, after 5 minutes annoying enough to make me want to chew my own arm off so that I would be able to beat it to death’.

Then a couple of pints of Otter (or indeed Orrr-rrr to accurately recreate the Somerset pronunciation) in the local pub where we were staying when we crashed their very seriously-run pub quiz on the Sunday night. In a very funky glass I thought.

I cannot express how excited I was by this. Due to a very lucky and charmed life going to quite a lot of weddings, parties, work and press functions, I’m pretty hard to impress with posh touches at events. It’s very rare that they’re about enjoyment over impressions, but my god, I was floored last night, almost literally, by the presence of a dedicated Martini Bar at a very chic, low-key evening wedding party we went to.

Just one very knowledgeable bartender, a choice of gin, vodka, dryness and olive or a twist. Absolute genius. A very elegant, chic choice and something which really did create a celebratory air of hedonism, momentarily reminiscent of the smoky Manhattan bars of Mad Men, rather than a drizzly, chilly Thursday evening in the Chelsea Physic Garden. I of course bored the bartender with a million questions about his favourite gins and vermouths, and as well as lots of expertise about spirits, he also agreed to rustle me up a Dirty Martini. He only had a tiny amount of olive brine, so we agreed it was more of a Grubby Martini. Delicious. I’d like to say I stopped at one.

I’d LIKE to say i stopped at one…

Canadian Pinot Noir. Or to be more precise, the Clos Jordanne 2006 Single Vineyard ‘Twenty Mile Bench’ Pinot Noir from the Niagara Peninsula. I then attempted to capture the beautiful clarity, limpidity (aha! I recently discovered what ‘limpid’ actually means and have now used it successfully in a sentence. I am EXPANDING MY MIND.) and colour of the wine as well as the first bit of clear sky London has seen for what feels like a decade. This didn’t go so well, as you can see from what was my least unsuccessful picture.

The colour of the wine really blew me away, a beautiful pure plummy tone, with a little hint of russet at the edges due to its age. It probably was slightly past its best or just not in peak condition, but this may have been more to do with storage in our furnace-like kitchen and the fact it had sat upright under my desk after buying it on staff sale last year. It was still a lovely drink, with some spice and good length to match the fruit that was still there, and definitely worthy of a relaxed Sunday evening.

Coincidentally, a good friend gave us a bottle of the incredible Canadian Inniskillin Ice Wine as an engagement present at the weekend – genuinely a massive treat as this stuff is painstakingly produced from frozen grapes in only a few regions. The water freezes so just the concentrated, sugary juice is extracted, making some of the finest sweet wines in the world. I’ll just have to store it a bit better than the Pinot and make some completely delicious pudding to have it with. #toughlife

Some beer out of a plastic cup on Friday night when we went to see Phil Kay as part of the Udderbelly Festival on the Southbank.

Phil Kay was absolutely fantastic – no relation to Peter, bizarre and clever, surreal and energetic and unpredictable. The Magners Pasture or whatever it’s called was actually an alright place to drink. I all too quickly assumed that it was awful and overpriced and A Dreadful Place That I Would Not Ordinarily Choose but then my Lovely Fiance helpfully pointed out that the beers weren’t really any more expensive than at most central London pubs, and there were outdoor heaters, places to sit down, it wasn’t uncomfortably rammed and, as you can see from pic number 2, it was really quite pretty. (Ok, I think I pointed out that last one.) If London and the Southbank ever get anything approaching a summer, I can actually think of worse places to be.