Double Magnums & Imperials & Sunday opening...

I was looking to offer you a new Grűner Veltliner from Austria’s Anton Bauer but alas the wrong cuvée was delivered so let me pause until next week and re-stock, re-try and then pitch.

Well having wrongly predicted that Helen would win “The Apprentice” Final when actually “nice but dim” won instead, I did say I’d make a gesture. Right, for my penance, I will open this coming Sunday and any walk in sales or phone in sales (except En Primeur) I will knock off 5%. Or if you spend say £ 100 or more I’ll throw in a free bottle of Premier Cru Sauternes! Sir Sweetie however was wrong. Having called the last two, Helen and Tom, back into the boardroom, he should have said, “Neither of you actually merit a quarter of a million investment so I am moving the goalposts. The same money is there but I am employing you both, you’ll have to work together.” The only time Tom was successful was under Helen’s leadership anyway. He missed a Dragon’s Den trick. Two desperados would have effectively taken half each to secure the or rather their position. I think Lord Tate & Lyle is losing his touch.

This Sunday, 24^th July -

OPEN 11.00 a.m. until 6.00 p.m.

Come and have a wee glass of the Sauternes if you like.

An offer on Imperials of:

Château Brande-Bergère “Cuvée O’Byrne” 2009 Bordeaux at £ 150.00 per Imperial

Last year we offered some 25 Cases En Primeur (in Bottles & in Magnums) of this exclusive little import. Monsieur Dalibot is just about to bottle this 2009 Vintage (his finest) and as a one-off (for his family and for us) will bottle this in Imperials (8 Bottles). This is a really special offer, hand-bottled for us and one I highly recommend you indulge in. We need to know A.S.A.P. as he is beginning to bottle now. Not as good as but it’ll unequivocally be rarer than an Imperial of Lafite-Rothschild!

Weekly Indulgence and still on big bottles:

3 Double Magnums each of:

Domaine de Chevalier 1996 Cru Classé de Graves at £ 255.00 each

&

Château Brane-Cantenac 1995 Margaux 2ème Grand Cru Classé also at £ 255.00 each

Two terrific wines, fabulous format, for drinking now or a decade or two hence.

(These are due in stock in a week or two.)

Bordeaux 2010 – la dernier cri

Coincidentally, later today I will be e-mailing all of our En Primeur buyers my final offer (a mere dozen wines) plus my heartfelt view of what En Primeur now actually means. So for want of a better phrase, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Silly-season:

Is it just me or does anyone else think Rupert Murdoch looks like Homer Simpson?

Is A.A.Gill A) having an affair? B) being Ghost-written? C) his mind diverted by the Phone Hacking Scandal? I don’t actually have the answer but no fewer than three mistakes in his Sunday Times column this weekend so something surely is awry! Answers on a post card.

Funny thing Superstition, is it mere 50-50, coincidence, something else? Last week the 7^th Earl of Harewood died. On the 18^th June 1944 he was injured in battle before being carted off by Jerry to Colditz. Nothing unusual in that. The 6^th Earl was injured in WWI, on the 18^th of June. The 2^nd Earl too, Battle of Waterloo. You guessed it, 18^th of June, 1815. I think the 8^th Earl should perhaps stay at Home in June.

“I know I am just a fad.” – Pippa Middleton

“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” – Oscar Wilde 1891.

Wines - coming & going - Burgundy / NZ / SA...

 Coming & going:

We are all but out of the 2009 Vintage of the continually well received Jean Daneel “Signature” Chenin Blanc, one of South Africa’s greatest white wines. The good news is that we will soon be shipping up to 100 cases of his 2010 Vintage. There will be a time lag here as the Southern hemisphere is a long way by boat so we will be out of stock for a few weeks. As a temporary foil we can highly recommend the Adi Badenhorst Family White from the same region.

We have also just received a fair few cases of the fabulous Bourgogne Blanc 2008 Henri Boillot. Many of you have followed this cracker from previous vintages. At £ 19.50 this is not your typical Bourgogne Blanc but in truth I would love to test this against a classic Village wine like a Puligny-Montrachet or Chassagne-Montrachet etc from an unheralded producer in the likes of M&S. I would still be pretty confident!

We have also just received our 5 case allocation of Felton Road “Bannockburn” Pinot Noir 2010 from Central Otago in New Zealand. A perfect summer time Pinot. I am apprehensive on price as at £ 28.00 as his is now competing with some recognized Burgundy. Though outside of Burgundy, Central Otago is of course a terrific place for Pinot Noir. Even with Berry Brothers at £ 37.50 a bottle and down to £ 33.75 by the case this is not the automatic buy that it once was. For any die-hard Felton Road customers that I haven’t just put off, let us know!

Bordeaux 2010 En Primeur Campaign

With Château Lafite-Rothschild jumping out of the closet, kicking and screaming at £ 12,000 (plus £ 2,400 in vat) per case, we know we are almost at the end of the Bordeaux 2010 En Primeur Campaign and hallelujah to that. I will write on the subject, in detail and without holding back and this will follow to those regulars sometime next week. For totally different reasons, 2010 appears to me to be like 2006 where I felt about only a quarter of the properties were definitely worth buying but the bulk of Châteaux alas not so. The reasons, even a mere four years on, are far more complex and varied and political. Much has already been written with some very valid points from some very respected wine writers, yet I feel nobody has yet completed the circle as to what has happened and why it has happened. Much to come.

Weekly indulgence (£ 17.00 to £ 1,699.00!)

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Remy Martin’s “Louis XIII” Cognac, a stunning concoction at an equally stunning price - £ 1,699.00 per Bottle! At the other end of the spectrum and for any Summer optimists remaining, we do have Magnums of classic French rosé, Le Canon, at a mere £ 17.00.

“Silly-Season”

Well I have to confess that I don’t think I have ever knowingly (or would admit to) buying the News of the World. On Sunday however I was out early in an endeavour to buy a last copy. Long since sold-out however. Rupert Murdoch, much like Michael O’Leary; Arsenal F.C.; Traffic Wardens; Kevin Goad, Head of Parking at Westminster; Adolph Hitler; Gordon Brown and a few other notables and non entities have long since been off my Christmas card list. Having erroneously set his debt collectors on me many years ago (and took a year to resolve, with no apology) it was amusing to think there is a man that set up New Corp States side to pay less taxes but he might come majorly a cropper because the U.S. have punitive bribery laws, unlike this side of the Pond. Couldn’t happen to a nicer man.

I have long advocated that the participants in “The Apprentice” should be simply culled, herded, slaughtered en masse because they are almost to a man so drowning in vanity and self delusion their performance is often only one better than the X-Factor trials. When the wheels start to come off, my God, how these people behave to one another, a version of “Lord of the Flies”. Why would you want to employ any one of these angry little children? An admirable journey and a half by Susan Ma but how annoying and that’s being polite. Poor old Tom, the classic nice but dim and not just for pushing “all British” Christopher Columbus pies!! Not everyone knows that Columbus was from Genoa but anyone thought he was from little old England?! William Drake aside. Gift of the gab Jim almost has it but the only winner can surely be Helen. Normally Sir, Lord, his nibs, his beardy-ness, whatever he likes to be called, loves to shoot down the obvious. But when Natasha after her fast food failure tried her get out clause that “it was such a long time ago she took her B.A. (honours!) in food” that Sugar was defeated and couldn’t be bothered to explain for someone in their twenties, a long time it certainly couldn’t be. He usually would have torn her to shreds but simply couldn’t be bothered. If I am proved wrong and Helen doesn’t win on Sunday night, I will eat humble pie, offer a modicum of humility (unlike the contestants) and make some form of discount next week. After all, modesty is my finest quality!

With the Golf on (grown men who like to dress up like Rupert The Bear but are not merely content with walking through the British countryside) my thoughts briefly to Sport. In the last week I watched firstly “Fire in Babylon” and secondly “Senna”. Though Fie in Babylon highlighted a significant and pivotal time in Cricket’s recent history I would have to say that it was almost amateurish in comparison to the life and very public death of Ayrton Senna. The latter being beautifully constructed and detailed and I would definitely recommend seeing. The only missing factor was why did Senna’s car actually come off at Imola, otherwise a pretty faultless film.

“How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” – Charles de Gaulle (1962)

“A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.” - H.L.Mencken

“I’ve eaten shepherd’s pie at The Ivy and The Savoy, but I’ve never seen anything like the Belmarsh version.” – Jeffrey Archer (2002)

“If at first you don’t succeed then try, try, again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” – W.C.Fields

“I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the question ‘1’. After much reflection I put a bracket round it thus ‘(1)’.

But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true….

It was from these slender indications of scholarship that Mr. Weldon drew the conclusion that I was worthy to pass into Harrow.

It is very much to his credit.” - Winston Churchill (1930)