Category: Paul

Eight drinks were served in total at the Cambridge Wine Merchants Champagne tasting, which will make four posts. Alongside the wines, we also had a selection of cheeses and breads and some slightly spicy meat slices. When we arrived, we were presented with a Kir Royale cocktail, made this...

It’s such excellent hosting when a wine of good quality is served when at a friend’s place for dinner. Especially if it’s inexpensive, which makes it more of a talking point. In this case, the wine was Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc, from Marlborough in New Zealand (in my opinion,...

On the spur of the moment, we decided dinner at our local Café Rouge (Bridge Street, Cambridge) would be entertaining. And we were right! The restaurant was packed, so the delivery speed wasn’t its usual fast pace, but everything arrived eventually and tasted as delicious as usual. I decided...

The Home Farm is from South Eastern Australia and in this case the year 2008. It’s a remarkable blend of Semillon, Chardonnay and Chenin Blanc. It’s also a decent 13%. They’re quite right on the bottle talking about passionfruit flavours on the body, but it’s also highly complemented with...

Over a film with a friend, I shared a bottle of Ai Galli – a Pinot Grigio blush at 12.5% from Italy. Delle Venezie was the region and the year 2008. There isn’t a great deal to say about this wine, but it was a fine example of one...

Occasionally, Sainsbury’s does a deal on some of its vintage cava, which is always pleasing, as my friend clearly thought, as he’d bought a bottle when I went round for dinner. It’s from 2007, and I forgot to check, but I’d guess about 12.5%, although frankly the lower alcohol...

This Lindemans Cawarra was a pretty decent south-east Australian Semillon-Chardonnay blend, in that order. It was a decent 13.5% and had quite an excellent nose – difficult to distinguish from some of the better examples from the same region. There’s a very helpful label on the back with two...

This was a Chardonnay-Semillon blend from 2008, made by Heritage Road, with subtitle ‘Moonstone’. It was south-east Australian and 12.5%. There’s really only one thing to say about this wine: classy. Its flavours were so similar to a lot more expensive Burgundy whites that I was quite taken aback,...

There are many things you can grill, ranging from a cheese-coated mushroom to the latter stage of a cheese-topped shepherd’s pie. My favourite is a chicken leg – drumstick and thigh together. From the fridge, this takes me, on my grill, about eleven minutes on each side, and I...

This was new and quite novel rosé, it apparently (from the front of the bottle) being made entirely of Chenin Blanc. Knowing this to be impossible without false colouring (which might well be illegal depending on where it’s from), I made a cursory investigation on the back of the...