Posted by susie | January 25th, 2010 (by susie)
I don’t know if you managed to catch this week’s Saturday Kitchen but it featured some seriously challenging recipes when it comes to wine matching. Even James Martin admitted Patrick Williams’ Tilapia Brown Creole Fish Stew was a ‘tricky dish to match’.
We’d filmed the wine slots for this week’s show in a freezing cold and wet Sanderstead, just south of Croydon, so it was somehow appropriate that both dishes I had to match were very ‘warming’ in their own
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Posted by peter | January 25th, 2010 (by peter)
It all started on Friday night.
Some good friends had travelled over from Spain and made a significant detour from their busy itinerary to come and spend the night.
Seeing the wonderful local sights of Winchester was a plan that went straight out of the window when the dark and rain set in mid-afternoon. So we turned to tea (fragrant Earl Grey sourced from excellent local purveyor Char) and, soon after, wine of the kind that banishes gloom.
Although it doesn’t say it on the
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Posted by susie | January 21st, 2010 (by susie)
The day’s filming kicked off with the boys (Andy our director extraordinaire and James ‘the camera’ Cook) cheerily informing me that this is the third week in a row that a Saturday Kitchen wine shoot has featured snow – a new record apparently, though not one I’d like to see broken for a few years to come… How cold were my feet by 3pm?!
This week we were in Sanderstead, just south of Croydon, and I had some seriously tricky dishes to match.
The first was Shaun
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Posted by susie | January 21st, 2010 (by susie)
Chablis 1er Cru Montée de Tonnerre 2008, Domaine Moreau-Naudet
Pete and I covered half a dozen of the recent round of Burgundy 08 en primeur tastings and, although there appear to be good and bad wines of both colours, in our opinion it is a wonderful vintage for Chablis. If you’d like to invest in a case to lay down for a year or two then this is our top tip. It shows beautiful leesy, mineral aromas, fabulous freshness, and it is enhanced by a very subtle hint of old
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Posted by peter | January 19th, 2010 (by peter)
This past weekend was momentous in Chile for a number of reasons.
In the first instance, the country broke with 20 years of tradition by electing a right-wing president, billionaire businessman Sebastián Piñera. The country has been ruled by a succession of centre-left coalitions since Augusto Pinochet left office in 1990 but recently accusations of corruption, infighting and political cronyism had irrevocably damaged the coalition parties.
Outgoing president Michelle Bachelet
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Posted by peter | January 15th, 2010 (by peter)
Yesterday I met up with Santa Rita winemaking stalwart Andrés Ilabaca, one of Chile’s leading wine men, and Richard Leaver, who heads up UK operations for the Claro Group (which includes Santa Rita, Carmen, Terra Andina and Doña Paula in Argentina).
Ilabaca was in town having flown in from Denmark, where he had been leading a vertical tasting of the winery’s trademark Medalla Real Cabernet Sauvignon. (“There, it’s even chillier than here!” he shivered when I found him
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Posted by peter | January 14th, 2010 (by peter)
Supermarket giant Tesco is launching what it calls the “lightest ever wine bottle” at just 300g.
Though plastic bottle producers may take issue with this, it represents another important step forward in reducing the environmental impact of the wine industry, a major issue that will become more and more important in the coming years.
The bottle was developed by Tesco in conjunction with UK bottler Kingsland Wine and Spirits, and Quinn Glass, working with the Waste Resource and
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Posted by peter | January 13th, 2010 (by peter)
Though you might not realise it from first appearances, I’ve been led down a fair few dodgy alleyways and corridors in my time.
Some were notably dead-ends. Others were mildly diverting. And some, very rare ones, led to pots of gold. Today’s dodgy corridor was decidedly one of the latter.
Today was lunch in the Krug Room at The Dorchester. With Olivier Krug. Tasting Krug – the headline event being the launch of the Clos d’Ambonnay 1996.
This is a wine that makes headlines
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Posted by peter | January 12th, 2010 The following is a recipe by the wonderful Jo Pratt: mother, author and all-round brilliant celebrity chef.
We adore her recipes and Susie contributed the wine matches for her latest book, In the Mood for Entertaining.
We’re very proud indeed to have Jo contributing her delicious seasonal recipes to our free monthly newsletter. If you want to receive the newsletters and recipes direct to your inbox without having to wait, please subscribe to the newsletter via this page.
The following is
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Posted by peter | January 8th, 2010 (by peter)
Over the last week or so, Susie and I have been working our way through some samples we’ve kindly been sent recently.
Some went straight down the sink (a carbon crime, I know, as well as egregious wastage that we find thoroughly distasteful, but until we find some decent way of recycling such evil wine – and any ideas very welcome on that point – that’s the way it’ll be).
Some went to the neighbours (and, before you ask, yes we do like them, and thus this reflects very
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