Tasting notes

The Guardian's wine writer, Victoria Moore, describes a bottle of wine:

It is one of the very best, an award-winner, and the vinous equivalent of a whole roasted lamb at a French village fete. It's quite a modern style of Cahors, made with 90-95% malbec; it is fabulously dark coloured and powerful, and smells of cedar and Christmas cake, with firm tannins around which sweet raspberry and fig fruit seem to weave like a sleek cat twisting about your legs.

If this makes you want to drink it, it's Château du Cèdre Le Prestige 2002 and, depending who you buy it from, it costs something over £10. I'll be sticking to the vins de Brulhois, a near neighbour of Cahors at a fraction of the price.

Tall Ships revisited

Among the Tall Ships moored along the Quayside was the Jean de la Lune; built in France in 1957, but now a Scottish ship (a 110 foot brigantine - which tells me nothing, but is a fine-sounding word). My pictures don't do her justice, so here's a better one, but something about her appealed to me - the name, perhaps, or ( the laid-back attitude of the crew? )

The name Jean de la Lune ("John of the Moon") was not familiar, but had a certain resonance. It had to have come from somewhere, and so it had; from an old-fashioned children's song, first published in 1889, with words by Adrian Pagès set to an older tune (which you can hear via the links on this page).

Par une tiède nuit de printemps,
Il y a bien de cela cent ans,
Que sous un brin de persil sans bruit
Tout menu naquit
Jean de la Lune, Jean de la Lune.

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