Wine Bluff

Someone asked me to do a bluffer's guide to wine as she was worried about parents' nights at her son's school. Well, I am assuming a lack of desire to become a full time alcoholic like me but a desire to impress somewhat. Thing is most people know less than they think and even the ones who know a lot had to start somewhere – the rare exception which comes to mind were the guys at the Theatre of Wine down the Trafalgar Road in Greenwich who actually knew more than they were willing to let on. Here are a few simple tricks:

Hold your glass up to your nose and take a good whiff, make a face and mutter "Mmmm … closed" with the right amount of disdain. Nine out of ten times, you will be spot on.

Learn to gargle. I don't mean after you brush your teeth. Serious wine snobs pucker up their lips to the rim of the glass and suck wine in like through a straw (except there is no straw) with much noise. You should too.

Look at the label – if it is from Australia, Chile or some other New World vineyard, chances are the wine would have too much oak. You may, if you so wished, comment on that. Again, you'd probably be right nine out of ten times. Also watch out for the word "unoaked" on the label. Just in case.

Name drop. Ask would it be big enough for RP? Also you should prefer Jancis' perspective and by the way, JO is the other Oliver guy, Jeremy not Jamie.

Avoid talking about notes of tar, eucalyptus and mint or any other flavours about which you have no clue and definitely steer clear of terrior – stick with youth and fruit. Most wines at most social occasions will have a preponderance of both so you can safely comment on either. Or even both.

Talk about the wine's structure – I have never worked out what that means.

There you have it – go have a drink. Do this in remembrance of me and if you get unstuck, start reading here.

Shanghai – last word

I think I now know what form Michael Schumacher will be reincarnated in – an overweight, foul mouthed, middle-aged female taxi driver in Shanghai. What the lady in question did not know about braking late and over steering was probably as thin as the cigarette paper she rolled her smokes in. She did get me from my office to Nanjing Road in less than nine minutes, swearing like the fish wife she would have been had the taxi company not found her true calling  - take her out of her Volkswagen Santana and put her in a Formula One car, she could go places.

Formula One champions don't fade away, they just resurface in the taxi queue on the mean streets of China. 

Ambivalence – Shanghai

Shanghai. Oriental setting and the city don't know what the city is getting. Night before last, I was driven at breakneck speed to my hotel and the car whizzed past dimly lit construction sites where workers, having downed tools for the night, were bedding down in the uncompleted hulks of the concrete superstructures. Barely months ago, these were open fields. There is so much construction going on in Shanghai it beggars the imagination.

I have seen the scale model in the municipal planning exhibition on an earlier trip and it is monstrous – it is so staggeringly gigantic the best way to see it is from a bridge they built two floors above the model. And that's just the model. In real life, the scale is not really something you can appreciate at street level. Take a drive along one of the elevated highways, the ones which lead to the bridges over the river. Then you get the Blade Runner, scary city is swallowing me up, feel big time – life imitates art. Only more real than reel.

It has the symmetry of New York, only chunkier. Steeper, bigger and perhaps not better, but just bigger. Architecturally, it has the indiscipline of Tokyo but not quite its charm. It has none of the precariousness of Hong Kong, nor the clean lines of Singapore – land is cheap, build em' big and the city seems to go on forever.

Yet under the sphagetti ribbons of the elevated roads, beneath the ever worsening haze from cars above and other industrial pollutants, there are patches of green and the most improbable temples – small, quiet and standing in immaculately manicured mini parks. Not much, just a path of pebble, twenty yards of lawn and neat rows of herbaceous borders in front of stunted beech trees propped up by stakes. Next to these, narrow alleys with pre-war houses on one side. A couple of storeys high, red brick and peeling plaster, tiled roofs and memories.

Where there are these, there must be hope.

Bog Blog

2 places outside Japan where you can find Japanese wash jet toilets:

HSBC Building, Shanghai

Singapore Airlines Silver Kris airport lounge, Seoul

Horizontal Meditation 1999

It was always going to be a questionable year. We tasted 11 wines last night at Wine Garage – Leoville Poyferre, Branaire Ducru, Rauzan Segla, Latour Haut Brion, Le Gay, Troplong-Mondot, Pichon Baron, Montrose, Rouget, Pape Clement and Monbousquet.

The stars, for me, were the Rouget, Montrose, Poyferre and Troplong. In that order. Tasting notes will appear in due course.

The reward for tasting much wine was more wine – a Canon La-Gaffeliere 1988 and a Lafaurie-Peyraguey 1998. Both were excellent. Oh, and we started with a Piper Heidseck Florens Louis NV.

To be fair, about 3 bottles were damaged by a combination of heat and random oxidation so these did not fare too well. Plus the room was a little warm. Such is the price of drinking wine in a hot climate. Makes me want to re-read Love in a Time of Cholera. So much aging, heat and humidity – the humanity of it all!

Champagne for Larry, bargain!

Happiness is 6 bottles of Pol Roger Reserve NV at $60 each – $10 less than the per case price at Berry Brothers in London. Slightly biscuity, a little sharp but perfect weight and tight mousse reflecting perhaps equal proportions of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier.

Less of a bargain but no less happy are 3 bottles of Chateau Prieure Lichine 2003 at $57 – one of the better results from Margaux of an over-hyped and initially, at least, overpriced vintage.

Menu for dinner next week

Trio of appetisers – timbales of liver and bacon with a port reduction, mousse of eggplant, tomato confit and tomato jellly with salsa verde.

Foam of sesame prawn toast.

Chilled salad of cucumber and apple in a dressing of chive yoghurt and ikura roe.

Pan-fried duck breast in orange sauce with duck ragout in red wine and stewed haricot beans.

Not sure what to do about dessert. 

Disappointing Reds

Everything was done right, the airing for an hour in a cool place. Double decanting and filtration. The 2002 Tim Adams Aberfeldy just did not come good. Everything JO wrote about was there and lurking. The famous length, the nose and the other bits. Violets and fruit, but it did not come together so I cannot see how it justified a 97 from him.

Incidentally, Manchester United drew 0-0 with Sunderland.

Sour Grapes

It's true – wine is made only from sour grapes. Apparently, too much sugar creates some kind of explosion. Anyway, another business dinner last night which descended into some Bring Your Own Bottle extravaganza. We started with a Puligny Montrachet 2000 (very mineral, very gravel – terrior, baby, yeah! good acidity holding up the structure and about at its peak) then had a Almaviva 2000 with the mains (very dark, inky and a touch too much oak). After coffee, we had the 1993 Beringer Private Reserve which our guest (?!) brought (lots of fruit still especially cassis and red berries and a tiny bit of vanilla which I like, lots of glycerine so quite an oily middle but the tiny room we were in was probably a little too warm so both the reds actually flattened out within an hour in each case). 

I get my mixed case of Burgundy samplers this weekend. Can't wait.

A handful of dust

Korea – at the airport on my way out of here before the dust storms hit. The same dust storms sweeping across Beijing and the rest of northern China is about to hit this former renegade province of the Han dynasty. Standing in the way of the coming storms are the cherry blossoms in full bloom. Yes, unexpected as it may be, there are isolated clumps in parks, along the highway and even on a precipice overhanging some railway sidings. This country is so Mafia (and I should know, I've done work for the Silician government, capish?) but I have kinda enjoyed zooming around in blacked out limousines and bowing a lot (though not quite as much as in Japan).

This place has a distinct North Asian feel about it – buildings like Tokyo, smells like Shanghai and feels like Taipei. There's much less traffic and on a clear day, you can see all the way to the mountains. Soushitei, nei? Then there is the old stream that runs through the CBD – they've bricked it up and put pretty stone carvings along it and on the bridges over it so office workers can walk along what looks like a monsoon drain during their lunch hour.

I've managed to avoid Korean food for the entirety of this trip, surviving on hotel food and sandwiches – which is a shame in some ways. I could have been anywhere in the last 48 hours but I'm glad to go home now.