by Gareth Groves
Good food would choose Bordeaux. Or so the current marketing campaign for the region’s wines would have you believe. To help prove the link between Bordeaux and fine grub, Bordeaux Wines organised a masterchef style cooking competition for members of the trade and press.
The competition was hotly contested. Two heats of six teams were whittled down to six …
By Juel Mahoney
What’s the collective noun for a group of barons?
That was my first question entering a room filled with Château Pichon Longueville Baron. There’s no other way to describe it – the whole room smelled… expensive.
Take the classic characters of Pauillac and multiply it by ten: cigar box, blackcurrant and cedar. It is an old Bentley of a wine …
By Jenn Sasiadek (with commentary from Ben Collins)
Bibendum’s very own Fine Wine Director, Ben Collins recently held one of his legendary Bring Your Own ‘no tat allowed’ wine dinners. The event was held in the elegant art deco surroundings of Le Café Anglais in London’s Porchester gardens.
The concept is simple: bring a bottle (or few) of top notch wine and taste over …
Hmmm… a wine of the week that hasn’t even been bottled, isn’t on sale yet and won’t be seen in the UK for at least another two years. Such is the peculiarity and ridiculousness of the en primeur system….
by Gareth Groves
A final Bordeaux 2010 piece for a little while, with a few pictures from our adventures from last week. Don’t forget, if you are interested in tasting Bordeaux 2010 for yourself, then get a ticket to our big tasting on May 4th – over 90 chateaux including the likes of Pontet Canet, Pichon Baron, Angelus, La …
by Gareth Groves
Friday’s itinerary was pretty impressive; a roll call of the four Medoc First Growths plus the likes of Ducru Beaucaillou, Pontet Canet and Leoville Las Cases. We’d tasted some very, very impressive 2010s already but there was a very good chance that we’d find our wine of the week somewhere amongst this lot. And so it proved.
However, the day wasn’t …
by Gareth Groves
The only alarming moment of Day 3 came when the hotel rang to ask why we had left without paying and not taken any of our clothes with us. Evidently, the booking for the second night had gone AWOL. We immediately had visions of everything being chucked out on the street and of Ben Collins’ monogrammed Jermyn …
by Gareth Groves
There’s been one main hot topic of conversation today: the name of Alex’s soon-to-be-born baby. With a surname like Marton the options are clearly limited. The current favourite option is Anthony Leoville Marton. Daddy is secretly hoping it might get us an extra big allocation.
Apart from Marton Jr, we’ve been talking about the weather …
by Gareth Groves
The first wine of en primeur week is always the toughest. Without reference to its peers, without some sort of context, it is very hard to rate what is in the glass. Usually we kick off at a First Growth – all good fun but hardly the most representative of the vintage as a while – but this …
By Camilla Bowler
Every year on a Tuesday in mid October, the entire UK wine trade descends, in all its magnificent variety, on the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden to taste the recently bottled new vintage from Bordeaux. Almost exactly two years after the harvest, this is always an interesting time to taste; and an opportunity to see how the wines have progressed from the infancy …
