Vertical drinking

[shewhomust]

Last night we visited friends for a celebratory birthday and housewarming dinner. We started with the tour of the new house: a nineteenth century terraced house with spacious rooms, many original features (including window shutters and some seriously ornate plasterwork) a very desirable attic and a small back yard which is already full of flowers. "This will have to go,"said Helen, showing us into the master bedroom, one whole wall of which consisted of fitted cupboards - worse, of mirrors which form the sliding doors of the fitted cupboards. And she slid back the door, revealing the wine rack.

Despite stashing her wine in the wardrobe, Helen is a wine professional, and we drank some delicious wines: two sparkling wines and a rosé from English winery Chapel Down, and three clarets from different years from Château Laniote - not hard to guess, this one, since this is an old friend. And a dessert wine from the Coteaux de Layon, all fruit and burnt honey.

My palate is not, by a long way, in this class - and it's just as well, as my purse isn't either. But I'm chastened to note that of the Chapel Down sparklers, I preferred the cheaper - all freshness and fizz - to the more expensive wine, whose more complex flavours didn't sit so well, to my taste, with the sparkling wine; and of the Saint Emilion, I preferred the 1995, while the experts agreed that the 2001 was far superior.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I love Chapel Down. We discovered it over ten years ago, when driving around the South East, and occasionally make a trip to Tenterden to get some more of their fizz...

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Well, I know that fizz is something we do well in England - but the depth of the classier fizz was unexpected. The rosé was lovely, too.