Wine buffs

A few week ago we were sent a flier for Christmas hampers by Les Caves de Pyrene, designed to substitute for their Christmas wine tasting sessions. With my having got connected to these people through their connection with Terroirs, a place which I am unlikely to see the inside of for a month or so yet.

Looking them up in gmaps, I find them to be on a small industrial estate, perhaps a couple of miles south of Guildford, sandwiched between the River Wey and the Surrey police headquarters at Mount Browne. An estate largely composed of single storey black huts, so perhaps a former army camp. Guildford used to be a destination for soldiers on the beano so there must be camps round about and perhaps this used to be one of them.

The list

The bottles

We went for the myrrh version of the hamper, which consisted of seven 100ml bottles of wine, decanted by Pyrene, plus half a bottle of Champagne plus lots of packaging, wine notes and so on and so forth. A bit less than a bottle and a half for the two of us, but drank in bits like this it seems to have more effect than mere volume would suggest. There was even a YouTube video which you could watch as one's tasting went through its paces.

Made up the weight with a couple of bottles of Dolium from Zorjan, the people who brewed the Lazki & Renzki Riesling which I knew from Terroirs. Not included above, but see reference 6. Report in due course.

Being rather new to YouTube, we couldn't get the video to work properly, in the sense that we didn't seem to be able to stop or rewind. And it seemed to remember where it thought you were, so clicking on the pointer to start over just carried on. Even when I played with a what looked like a 'start at time equals X minutes parameter'. But we saw enough to be pleased to see that the Pierre Précieuse that we like was featured on the shelf behind the narrator. Last outing at reference 2, quite possibly another the day after tomorrow.

Instead, we arranged a few snacks to go with the wine, cheese and water biscuits, fresh peanuts and Albert Data Cake, made for the occasion. Or perhaps the day before the occasion.

Started with the champagne, which we thought good, not being great drinkers of the stuff. Chateau Deville, Carte D'Or Brut. Which after a bit of poking around, I run down to reference 3. Maybe we will get some more.

We then got stuck into our seven samples, one small glass of each between the two of us. Which was enough for the purpose. Four white and three red. Four from France and one each from South Africa, Australia and Spain. Along the way I learn that Châteauneuf de Pape is near Avignon, obvious enough when you have been told. While, without thinking about it, I had vaguely thought that it was from Bordeaux or Burgundy. All a bit of a blur now, but the series had been well chosen and it all went down very well. As someone who tends to stick to the same wine through a meal, I could see the point of having a wine with each course. Something offered but declined on our one visit to Taillevent in Cavendish Square, the people at reference 4 and the visit at reference 5.

But I do remember that we took Alberta Date Cake with the Sauternes. Sauternes being something which my all but teetotal father always bought a bottle of to go with Christmas dinner, presumably nothing like as dear then as it seems to be now. Plus a bottle of red.

The peanuts, from Sainsbury's, were described as fresh, which they were in the sense that they had not been cooked or salted. But something had been done to them, perhaps lightly dried in a kiln rather than cooked. So not like the peanuts we got before lock-down from Waterloo Road, or indeed those I used to buy from Cambridge Market as a child (in those days including real vegetable growers from the fens as well as barrow boys), but perfectly eatable.

The wine which had been decanted from regular bottles, did not appear to have suffered in the process, although they did say best drunk within three days of delivery. But we did wonder about the machine that must have been needed to get the plastic lids on, similar in construction to the metal lids on proper wine and whisky bottles. Not to mention the machine needed for these last. How do you get the lid on with its connection to the neck ring intact?

For some reason, the session closed with our puzzling about a rather good restaurant we had taken lunch at, instead of the Salvation Army HQ canteen, on the right as you cross the wobbling bridge near Tate Modern, from the Tate Modern side. More a wine bar than a restaurant, rather along the lines of Terroirs now. No trace of it on the blog archive or on gmaps - where we thought it might have been where the rather grand looking Northbank is now. Owners of the white umbrella in the snap from Street View above.

All in all, an excellent lock-down activity for two.

PS 1: the Pyrene people may not have known that one of the uses of myrrh in the ancient world was  masking the unpleasant smell from outdoor cremations, presumably not hot enough to destroy the smell along with the bodies. But they probably did know that Pyrene was a lady from ancient Greece with a rather complicated history and who ended up buried under a large pile of stones by Hercules. A pile of stones which later became known as the Pyrenees. Not a story which my copy of the Oxford Classical Dictionary deigns to mention. Memory says from a second hand bookshop handy to the Prince of Wales handy to Wimbledon Station, but I can't find any trace this afternoon. So either a shop failure or a memory failure.

PS 2: the video might have worked well had we been a small party rather than just the two of us, with a really big television and a proper driver for YouTube. I could see one having a bit of fun with all the wine tosh if one could go backwards and forwards with it.

PS 3: something gone wrong with the snaps again, with the third snap above having vanished from click to enlarge. And I thought I had been so clever about tweaking the HTML. 

Reference 1: Les Caves de Pyrene - Shop.

Reference 2: psmv4: L'enquête porcine.

Reference 3: Accueil Champagne Deville.

Reference 4: https://taillevent.com/. Microsoft tried to be too clever with the web address. Reduced to copy and paste through Notepad.

Reference 5: psmv3: Wigmore two.

Reference 6: psmv3: Cheese hunt.