Contrary to popular belief wine merchants don’t spend all their time tasting and drinking wine. Less glamorous pursuits - mainly humping cases of wine around - take up a large portion of our time. So we always look forward to the winter wine tasting season which snaps us out of our winter torpor and lets us discover new wines for the coming year.

Recently, we attended a large and impressive event at Oval cricket ground followed, the day after, by a top end French affair at a rather interesting Eastern European resturant.  There are lots more events planned for the next few weeks and we hope to discover plenty of exciting new wines and to post a few photos and videos of wines that have particularly impressed us.

Watch this space.

We held our first private tasting of the year last night and it was an absolute pleasure. We had a charming group of people in from the Police Mutual down the road and they seemed to really enjoy themselves – none more so than, star of the evening, Melanie, who impressed us all with her ability to read out the clues in a variety of a national accents. Whether the French would be amused at their beloved soil being described as ‘terrier’ is another matter!

The star wine of the evening, as it so often is, was K – Naia, Bodegas Naiades £ 8.99

Gently aromatic with subtle flavours of tropical fruit such as passion fruit, kiwi and guava with an underlying minerality.

I’ve been a bit remiss on the blogging front. After all, Christmas is to be enjoyed not blogged about and January is, as you’d expect, pretty quiet in the world of wine. So, I thought I’d let off a bit of steam by having a moan about :-

1) The weather – enough is enough.
2) The anti drinking lobby and today’s new initiative to state how many cls can be ’safely’ consumed. Maybe all wine bottles should be calibrated to aid us in this joyless business.
3) Radio 2 DJ rejigs – who cares?
4) Argon – £ 60 for a cannister and always running out at inconvenient moments ie. today when I want to put some new wines on ‘The Taster.’
5) Argon again – the spare cannister has been leaking and is empty.
6) Couriers – no argon till next week.