So, I’ve started a new blog called (appropriately) “Another flamin’ blog“.  It’s going to have a much broader remit, covering lots of different aspects of my personal and professiona life.  Wine will no doubt crop up on occasion, so stay tuned.

Thanks for reading this far!

I’d picked up a magnum of Chateau de L’Hospital 2003, a Graves, a couple of months ago in the Jonzac Leclerc.  I think it cost me 26 or 28 euros…certainly less than 30.  I’d been meaning to try a magnum since reading somewhere that it is regarded as the ‘proper’ size bottle from which to drink decenbt red wine.  Something about having the perfect ratio of wine to air in the bottle.  It’s probably a load of old guff, but I bought it.

Having said that, the wine was delicious (as I’m sure it would have been coming out of a regular 75cl bottle).  Oz Clarke says of Chateau de L’Hospital that “the Merlot-dominated red is round and supple with smoky red fruit” and I’m in no position to disagree.  I don’t think magnums last twice as long as a normal bottle though as we seemed to get through it quite quickly.  So much so that I had to dig out another bottle to keep us going (not another big one though…).

It’s wine fair time in the supermarkets here at the moment.  I always find it quite frustrating – so many great wines, so little ability to justify buying them all!  One of the holidaymakers staying with us last week asked me to help him choose some wine that he could buy now and drink at his daughter’s 18th birthday party (she’s currently two).  He couldn’t have chosen a better time really, with supermarket shelves groaning under the weight of thousands of bottles from the 2005 vintage for the first time, which will improve brilliantly over the next 15 years or so. 

The choice, obviously, was huge but we restrcited it by price (no more than 20 euros a bottle) and stuck to the Medoc as I thought these would age nicely.  The 2005 Chasse-Spleen looked good value at 19,95 but, by the time I made it to Carrefour on Monday (the wine fair having started on Saturday) they had completely sold out!  So I went for a dozen bottles of Chateau Poujeaux 2005 at the same price, and six Chateau Potensac 2004 at 16,50, which looked like good value.  Should make for some fine drinking at the birthday party (though I’d keep it way from the kids).

The Leclerc wine fair starts today and I’m toying with possibly making a trip down to Jonzac.  We generally pick up a few bottles of any new vintage of Chateau de Reignac - a delicious Bordeaux superior that punches well above its weight – and the Leclerc catalogue tells me they’re stocking the 2005 at 7,95 euros which is an absolute bargain.  Robert Parker gave it 91-93 points…

Some French friends of our have recently been on holiday in the Haute-Savoie, a region right across the other side of France from us and famous for Mont Blanc (the mountain, not the chocolate sauce that comes in tins…or the pens), Lake Annecy and ski resorts like Chamonix.

Knowing our passion for all things edible, our friends very kindly bought us some regional gifts – four different cheeses, a spicy saucisson, a beautiful little cured and smoked ham and the bottle of Mondeuse.  After having lunch out yesterday, we decided to snack on the cheese and meat last night and, as only seemed appropriate, to open the Mondeuse.

Robinson talks of “the curious deep-coloured, racy, slightly bitter red Mondeuse”.  I didn’t get much bitterness, to be honest.  We found the wine quite light (unsurprisingly more Burgundy in style than Bordeaux), very fruity and exceptionally fresh.  You could almost taste the mountain air!  It was delicious and, though I think it might be tough to find in supermarkets this far west, I shall definitely try to hunt some down.

Inevitably, considering we were drinking a fair bit of it, the discussion turned to wine.  We’d already sunk a bottle pf 2002 Chateau Poujeaux, a Moulis-en-Medoc, and were halfway down a 2003 Chateau Belgrave, a Haut-Medoc – both very nice.  Mark will readily admit to being far from knowledgeable about wine, but was keen to learn.  We covered a broad number of subjects; the challenges of over-production in the Bordeaux wine region, the less-than-clear labelling of French wines to most of the world’s wine-buying public, the traditional ‘negociant’ system of trading wine in Bordeaux which makes it very hard to visit and buy direct from chateaux, the main Bordeaux ACs, grape varieties and more.

Mark was keen to see if he could spot differences between wines, so I decided to give him two wines that should, in theory, be quite contrasting.  One was the 2003 Chateau Belgrave Haut-Medoc we were already drinking and the other was a 2004 Chateaux Beauregard, a Pomerol and therefore a Right Bank to the Belgrave’s Left.  The Beauregard is made solely from Merlot and Cabernet Franc grape varieties; the Belgrave containing these but also a good proportion (nearly a third) of Cabernet Sauvignon and also Petit Verdot.

In a direct comparison, Mark could definitely tell that they were two significantly different wines but (like me) struggled to fine the descriptors to describe the differences.  The Beauregard was fruitier and also has a smooth richness that the Belgrave lacked.  The Belgrave – as with many Left Bank wines – was spicier and had a minerally edge.

Mark likened the tasting to that of looking at a colour spectrum; flavours not being separate but blending into one continuous series of subtly changing tones.  While someone with an eye for colour, he said, could pick a crimson from a Persian red, he was still at the stage of telling green from yellow!  Nicely put, I thought.

Still, the arrival of old buddy James Warren and family here at Les Chapelles for a fortnight’s holiday is a considerable (and welcome) kick up the backside in terms of drinking…and of particularly drinking decent wine.  Over the past few days, therefore, we’ve enjoyed some splendid wines.  Of particular note have been a 2004 Chateau du Tertre Margaux Grand Cru Classe (5th Growth…but better than that!), a 2004 Chateau Yon-Figeac St-Emilion Grand Cru Classe (very kind gift from the Warren’s) and a 2002 Chateau Pontet-Canet Pauillac (equally kind gift from our friends the Hounshams).  Every one of them was delicious.

Speaking of our friends the Hounshams, they hosted a lovely lunch last Sunday for us all.  I took along a few bottles of wine but their names fail me now!  Always my downfall…  I do remember a couple of nice Lalande de Pomerols.

I’m off out this afternoon to buy some wine as we’ve got some more friends popping over for drinks this evening, so will hopefully have some more to report soon!

We got down there at about noon so had a walk and lunch at a lovely little bistro, Le Central, before checking into our hotel, La Maison du Bassin.  It was as fantastic as my parents had described.  Very cool, very laid back and very comfortable.  We had a splendid room with a gorgeous terrace.  The weather wasn’t great so we decided on having a very lazy afternoon of reading, dozing and drinking a rather lovely bottle of red that we has smuggled into the hotel!  It was the ’99 Chateau Cap de Mourlin – A St. Emilion Grand Cru Classe - that had been gifted to us by a couple who had been staying in one of our gites a week or two ago.  It was absolutely fantastic…rich, buttery, fruity, utterly delicious.

We had dinner in the hotel restaurant and decided, given the location of Cap Ferret, to go completely seafood.  After a fish soup, I had local oysters while Michelle had tuna and we both followed these withpan-fired turbot.  The food was wonderful, and I chose a bottle of white Abeille de Fieuzal 2003, the second wine of Chateau de Fieuzal in the Pessac-Leognan, to go with it.  Really nice – subtle, a little oaked – but a great partner to the fish.  The wine list, though small, was very impressive.  In fact, it featured a vintage from all five Bordeaux first growths.  Neither of us could manage pudding.  In fact, we needed a walk along the beach to aid digestion…

The next morning dawned bright enough, but by breakfast it was hammering down.  Rather than stay in a damp Cap Ferret, we thought we’d take a chance on the weather inland being better and decided to drive across to the other side of Bordeaux and have lunch in St. Emilion, as neither of us had been there before. 

As you near the town, you start to see beautiful chateaux dotted across the hillside and, I have to say, I got quite excited!  Some roadworks caused us to take a longer route into the town, which allowed us to pass a number of well-known chateaux, including Pavie and La Gaffeliere.  I also spotted Ausone in ts unique position on the limestone steps to the south of the town.

Given it was outside the summer season, the town itself was quiet and we parked centrally and wandered down its steep, cobbled streets packed with wine shops with extremely tempting (though premuim-priced) displays.  It’s a beautiful, charming town and well worth a visit (though I can imagine it gets absolutely packed in the summer).  We got chatting to the owner of a local wine shop who – amongst other things – asked us if we knew where we were going for lunch.  A bit of local knowledge later we were wandering through a couple of tiny backstreets to a restaurant called L’Huitrier-Pie where we enjoyed a lovely lunch and half a bottle of Chateau Montlabert ’01 – A St. Emilion (obviously) Grand Cru.

We took a nice stroll around the town and I resolved that the new destination for the London to France cycle ride next year will be St. Emilion rather than Bordeaux…a much more fitting end to the adventure.  Plus, we came across the amazing-looking Hostellerie-de-Plaisance, which I think might be the ideal place to recover!

We left St. Emilion and headed north east towards home, passing through Pomerol on the way.  I don’t think it will be long before we return…

I read somewhere soon after the Bond film was released that Lillet had experienced a - probably predictably – huge increase in interest and demand.  On the one hand I was delighted.  Lillet was featured in the film purely because it had also been mentioned in Fleming’s original book, not because, like so many other brands, it had paid millions of dollars to the producers.  On the other hand, I wondered if it would be able to cope with the increase in demand.  Reading the website, Lillet takes between 6 and 12 months to mature…it’s not like they could simply turn on a tap and get some more.  I’m sure they weren’t grumbling, though.

Neither Chris nor I had ever tried any so, when we saw it on the wine list of the bistro in which we landed, thought we’d give it a go.  There are two types – red and white – so we had one of each.  Nice, we thought, but not particularly special.  The white was very similar to a Bordeaux dessert wine and the red, as Chris pointed out, had a definite sense of mulled wine.  We both concluded that it was probably best used – as by Bond – to add a touch of flavour and perhaps sweetness to a cocktail.

Leaving Bordeaux on the way to Pau the following morning, we decided to steer clear of the autoroutes and stick to minor roads. Glancing at a map in a newsagent’s (which, on reflection, probably should have been purchased) we saw that there was a direct and very straight route south from Langon to Pau – some 180km.  Navigating by memory alone, we found the road and headed through the enormous vineyards of the the Graves.  We became slightly uncertain that we were on the right road just as we entered a small town called Podensac; coincidentally the home of Lillet.  We didn’t stop, but did pass the very small but very sweet Lillet distillery.  Actually that’s a lie.  We did stop – to look for a map!  When I couldn’t find one we changed direction, nipped back to the autoroute and then a few kilometres further down rediscovered the right road.

Staying on the correct road on the return journey was much simpler, and it turned out that those kilometres we missed on the way down were quite important, featuring, as they did, the villages of Barsac and the much better-known Sauternes.  The reason for Lillet having similarities to a dessert wine were becoming clear…

It was a real bonus for me to pass through these two little villages, the epicentre of the sweet wine world.  Sauternes, as I say, is the more famous.  It’s home to one of the best-known wines (sweet or otherwise) in the world: Chateau d’Yquem.  The Oz Clarke Bordeaux book tells me that, whereas most vineyards work on an average of one bottle of wine from each vine, Chateau d’Yquem is so rigorous about quality that it works on one glass of wine per vine…and has been known not to produce any in lesser vintages (the last time in 1992).

The greater fame of Sauternes is reflected in the village – it’s a lovely little place, very clean with some beautiful houses.  Once you pass over the Ciron river – critical to creating the conditions that allow for the production of such sweet wines – and into Barsac, you’re conscious that it doesn’t attract the same attention (and prices) as its illustrious neighbour.  It’s a little scruffier…

It’s a shame that it loses out to Sauternes, however, as some of its wines are supposed to be on a par.  Ever the fan of the underdog, I shall be searching out some Barsac to try in the next few weeks.

Otherwise, it was the odd beer (and if you’re ever offered some of a local brew called Arrogant Bastard I can recommend you decline…the arrogance, I suspect, describing those who could have ever claimed they’d produced a decent beer) and an extraordinarily large shot of tequila, which was totally unnecessary (but when are they not?).

I left Seattle on Thursday evening, and a rather ridiculous journey took me to Heathrow, then a car to Stansted to catch a flight to Poitiers followed by a train to Bordeaux to meet a very good mate, Chris, who’d flown into Bordeaux earlier that afternoon.  I’d therefore avoided going home altogether between the business trip to the US and an indulgent weekend of drinking, eating and watching fantastic old cars race around the streets of Pau, in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Given that I only arrived at about 9.00pm, Chris and I were staying in the centre of Bordeaux overnight before picking up the car and heading down to Pau.  I dumped my kit at the hotel and we ventured out into the stormy Bordeaux night to find some food and wine.  We decided on a nice little bistro, had a fantastic meal and a very nice bottle of a ’97 Pessac-Leognan (actually a recommendation of the waiter’s after our first choice, L’Abeille de Fieuzal, was unavailable). 

Unfortunately, the two Leffes that followed dinner in a nearby bar added to a bit of jet lag left me unable to remember the name of the chateau the following morning!  All Chris and I could recall was that it had a picture of a ship “like the Cutty Sark” on the label (but wasn’t Chateau Malartic-Lagraviere, another Pessac-Leognan with a ship on the label that we saw in a supermarket yesterday).  I do suspect that, given Pessac-Leognan was the first main Bordeaux wine producing area and therefore central to the start of Bordeaux’s wine trade, there might be a few chateaux from the area with ships on their labels…

The weekend in Pau, while quite wet, was thoroughly enjoyable.  It’s a lovely town and the position of the circuit allows you to watch a bit of racing and then nip off to refuel yourself at regular intervals.  We found our ideally-positioned hotel, located the circuit and then somewhere for lunch…a large, popular bistro called L’Aragon with fantastically original 70s decor (familiar, I’m sure, the anyone who’s visited Pau before).  We indulged in some traditional French fare – sharing some local ham to start, followed by duck for Chris and steak tartare for me – and accompanied it with a bottle of St-Emilion Grand Cru (again, the name escapes me!).

That evening, we found the bottle of L’Abeille de Fieuzal that had escaped us in Bordeaux in a little bar called Le Grain de Raisin.  It was a 2003 and we both agreed that it was delicious; I’m definitely going to hunt some down in a local supermarket.  Given our hearty lunch, we didn’t think about food until about 10.30pm, which turned out to be almost too late as we were turned away from a number of restaurants before finally settling in Napoli, a rather tacky pizza/pasta joint.  Still, it filled us up and fuelled a night on the town.

Sunday was inevitably a bit more subdued – more racing; less eating and drinking – though we did have some excellent seafood in the evening and a bottle of 2005 Chateau Penin, a white Bordeaux. 

I dropped Chris off at the airport yesterday after a great weekend.  He was keen to pick up a couple of bottles of wine to take back to the UK, so we popped into the fantastic wine department of the huge Leclerc supermarket in St-Medard in Bordeaux’s northern suburbs (just at the base of the Medoc, as it happens).  We spent a happy half an hour browsing, eventually selecting an ’04 Chateau Bouscaut red (Pessac-Leognan), an ’01 Chateau Belgrave (Haut Medoc) and a ’93 Chateau Potensac.  I’ve had a bit of the ’03 Potensac recently and love it, so was intrigued by the ’93 at only a few euros more (about 19). 

It was only on the way to the checkout that we realised Chris would be unable to take wine through airport security as hand luggage and that putting three bottles into his soft bag in the hold was just too risky.  So we put them all back, save one bottle of the ’93 Potensac that I fancied trying.

Of course, I checked the Oz Clarke book for details on the ’93 vintage, only to fine this simple entry:  “1993 – Rain. Rain. Rain.  The Right Bank fared best but all wines need drinking up.”

So that’s what I’ll do, I guess…

During the weekend – and probably under the influence – Mark and I decided that we needed to undertake some sort of significant physical challenge in the next year or so.  He’s up for a marathon and, though I have toyed with the idea of the Medoc marathon, my running hasn’t been very comfortable and I think it might be a bad idea.  We both do a bit of cycling, however, so this seemed like a good place to start.  I’m not sure it ended in such a good place, however…

When Mark and I were at school together, we lived in villages about 15km apart and every now and then we’d cycle between the two houses.  What better thing to do, we thought, than to do the same thing again; to cycle from Mark’s house to mine.  The only thing being that Mark lives in Wimbledon, south-west London, and I live a bit north of Bordeaux, south-west France. 

But, the challenge is set.  We’ve mapped out a route which takes us from Wimbledon to Portsmouth on day one, an overnight ferry to St Malo and then five days of cycling (via my house) to Bordeaux.  The last day will see us jump on the ferry from Royan to the tip of the Medoc before cycling the D2 past some of the greatest chateaux in the world.  It’s about 648km in all…so an average of about 110km each day.

We’re doing it for charity, of course – the chosen one being Wooden Spoon and which has already been very helpful and enthusiastic.  We’re looking to get a small team together – probably 6-10 people – along with a support driver.  We’re already roping in a couple of mates but if you’ve got a burning desire to join us, email me at mark@leschapelles.com.

I’ve started training already.  My theory is that I need to train my ageing body to cycle at an average of 25km/h for hours on end.  Yesterday I rode 55km and managed to keep to pace – clicking through 50km in 1:59:52..though the second 25km was a bit slower than the first.  Still, we’re not planning on doing the London to Bordeaux run until late-May 2008, so I’ve got a while to get fit…

We had a bottle of wine each evening and, to be honest, I can hardly remember any of them!  I can’t say that I’m a fan of the fortified madeira wine itself, so we stuck to various reds and whites from Portugal (we had to, there wasn’t anything else available…).  None of them were particularly offensive; just not very spectacular.  Back home in France now though and we’ve got friends coming over this weekend so I’m off to buy some wine tomorrow to get us through the next few days.  The weather’s great so I’m hoping we’ll be doing a fair bit of cooking on the barbecue (I’ve got a brand new one to put together…how very exciting!) so I’ll be looking for some nice crisp whites and some fruity Right Bank reds, I reckon.