October 2010

Our wine club has meet once a month for the last eight years, not bad going..

Now the next bit you may feel goes on but I would like to give you the background and tell you about how our wine club works to set the scene.

A little background first... My friends and I enjoy getting together for a chat and a glass of wine, so I thought it might be fun to start a wine club, I remember the first one in the summer outside in our garden we all brought along a bottle of wine and 'had a go' at wine tasting, it went okay so we held another and another, we never thought we'd still be doing it eight years on.

The formula that has worked, we meet every third Saturday in the month, each taking a turn to host, the host decides which wine will be tasted, could be a country or grape, each couple brings a bottle that has been wrapped for a blind tasting. The host supplies the food, again no pressure here, it can just be bread & cheese or a full blown meal.

Then we have a tasting sheet, where we make notes about the wine and vote at the end for the best one of the evening. Now this sounds as if we know what we are doing, however, we like to DRINK the wine so usually after the first two have been tasted, the note making gets less and the conversation gets louder, much louder!

There are some among us, I mention no names here, that rarely put pen to paper the whole evening, there are a few that hardly drink (!) and then there are the rest of us...

The group grew at one point to sixteen, as friends of friends joined, you can imagine this is a squeeze round most tables, we are now settled at twelve which works well, most of the time we are all there.

We recently added the extra dimension that the host could invite a 'guest couple' to join the evening...how friendly are we!

Be under no illusion we are not a SERIOUS wine club, we get on well and have fun. We are '40 somethings' with some of us a tad older, again no names, who enjoy drinking wines that are affordable. We do swirl and sniff the wine, it makes us look like we know what we are doing, the main difference is WE DRINK IT!

Enough background..

This months wine club was hosted by us, eight of us were there, the wine of choice was Bordeaux. I had read that most Bordeaux wine that reaches the supermarket under £10 isn't very good and gives Bordeaux wines a bad name, so it didn't bode well..

We ate Jazzed up Sausage and Mash (Jamie Olivers recipe) simple but very tasty, if I say so myself.

The first wine was delicious(note that very technical wine term!)then each bottle got worse as we went along, sadly ours was wine number 4 the cheapest at £5.99 from Morrisons, and horrible, needless to say there was some left in the bottle at the end of the evening. Even those that like a glass of wine or two couldn't drink it.

Though coming in tops was the first bought at an independant wine merchart (Bottleneck, Broadstairs, Kent)and the most expensive at £12.99 Chateau Lamothe-Cissac 2003.

So on this occasion it proved the statement about supermarket wines. If you are thinking what statement, it was half way down the page!

I apologise now for any sneling nistacs, I check my own work..

Time to stick a cork in it.

Bye S.