Archive for the ‘wine’ Category
Yeah, a picture of a giant batch of cassoulet is precisely the way the Holiday Run Streak (Saturday before Thanksgiving till Saturday after New Year) should be represented…that or a mountain of empty bottles. I started working on the stew New Year Day to keep busy and take my mind off the hangover, then struck on the idea that I should have a few glasses of the wine I was cooking with, and a glass of port, then a bottle of prosecco, then a chianti with the casoullet.
Then a half bottle of Vin Santo with an enormous quantity of biscotti.
Then, I went for the daily run…a little over 3 miles of heavy haulage:
Friday I had to go to Oxford to get the lab started back up for the kids’ return from the holidays. There is a point at which there is nothing to do but wait for the pumps to catch up for about an hour so I used that time to stretch out and go get some fresh air (a crisp but sunny noontime met me):
Finally, the Saturday after New Year Day rolled around and I could put the Holiday Run Streak (43 consecutive days of at least 3 miles per day) to rest. That is, after one final trot, this time starting in Trowbridge. It was raining and cold at the 9:30 start but due to warm up (and rain even harder). Fortunately, there were breaks planned and sites to take one’s mind off things.
The course stuck to roadways at first because the permissive footpaths appeared to be flooded and the fields through which they passed were like soup. My shoes remained relatively dry until Westwood where a water main break at the top of the hill added two inches depth to the flood. Soon after the water spout, the road headed down a cliff to the Crossed Guns between the River Avon and the Kennet and Avon Canal.
Assuming the K&A Canal tow path to be passable, I took to it after my beer (the Crossed Guns opened at 10). Unfortunately, it was a slick, muddy mess right up to Bradford-on-Avon and my wet feet were then also coated in clay.
At stop 2, the Dandy Lion, I briefly considered leaving the shoes outside but saw that the floors were bare and decided to go on in as I was. While there, the clouds lightened and I could make out the shape of the sun so I finished up the stout and headed out only to watch as the skies blackened the first half mile before the rain restarted falling at 45° from vertical. Soon enough, though, I was back in Trowbridge at the Stallards where I found a coal fire awaiting. Warming by the hearth with a cider, I decided it was time to stop this nonsense and changed into my dry kit I had hauled around the previous nine miles.
Sunday, I rest from the Run Streak but with plans to start a ‘normal’ running schedule Monday.
This is the last of
Three hundred sixty-seven
Consecutive haikus.
Alright, then, maybe this one would have been more appropriate:
Woke up this morning.
Got myself a beer. Future’s
Uncertain, end near.
I’m really glad to see the back of the haiku, though. Some amused me, fair enough, but most were uninspired as, indeed, most of the DT entries themselves were. The tyranny of the daily post is not conducive to creativity in many of us (or, at least, in me).
Raw numbers (ignoring today and 31 December 2013):
144 Beers (of which there were 60 bitter; 22 lager; 10 stout; 9 pilsner; 8 mild; 6 each of blonde, golden ale, and porter;5 IPA; 3 dark ale; 2 ‘other’ pale ales; and, 1 each Belgian ale, Belgian brown, brown, dark IPA, dark pilsner, IPA/mild, and weissbier).
21 Ciders
5 Perry
1 Cider/Perry mix
4 Ginger Beer
166 wines (of which there were 122 red, 18 white, 18 rose, 3 Champagne, 3 other sparkling, and 2 port)
24 Booze (6 from Drunken Bunny Liqueurs, most of the mixed drinks experiments from Mr Boston)
The number and volume of Gin and Tonic is highly underrepresented, as was the beer but you had to choose one thing per day.
Location, location, location:
Pretty much the homebody, 221 of the DTs were in our house (43 in Eastcott, the other 178 here in Old Town). My pub visits tend to come in flurries of 4 or 5 on a run (therefore on the same day) and those were underrepresented. Because of some overlapping categories, this list won’t add up to only 365:
221 at home
130 British pubs
4 Bremen Germany pubs
2 pubs in Holland (one of which was also a Coffeeshop)
5 in restaurants
4 outside
1 beer fest
1 Church
1 dog track
As far as towns go, 256 Swindon, 57 Oxford (or very close to work), 5 Bremen, 2 Holland, and the balance explained by the multiple pub visitations, next paragraph/list.
Four Candles, Oxford: 20
Far From the Madding Crowd, Oxford: 6
White Horse, Oxford: 4
Steam Railway Company, Swindon: 4
Greyhound, Besselsleigh: 3
Red Lion, Marston: 3
White Rabbit, Oxford: 3
Savoy, Swindon: 3
Hop Inn, Swindon: 3
Beehive, Swindon: 3
Old Crown, Faringdon: 2
Prince of Wales, Shrivenham: 2
Messenger, Swindon: 2
Clifton, Swindon: 2
76 others.
Twenty-nine years on,
Happy anniversary
At least one more time.
Name: Aubert et Fils Brut
Type: champagne
Venue: house
Review/notes: The Wedding Anniversary pub crawl was epic and started at 2 pm. We hit the the Wheatsheaf (normally closed in the afternoon) for a cider then the Steam Railway for a cider and a bitter then the Goddard Arms for I don’t remember what and the Kings and the Old Bank, with a double-back by the Pig on the Hill and the Royal Oak (quite bleak) before we dropped to Byron’s because the Regent was closed as we passed (and we stumbled right by the Hop Inn). Then, the Beehive interrupted the path to the Castle and the Crown before we wasted the evening (again) at the Donkey (after a great meal and a bottle of wine at the Thai Orchid). Close to midnight, we wandered home and hit the champagne just in time to watch Jules Holland count down (but we were listening to Joe Cocker on vinyl, as you do).
I’m glad they refurbished and reopened the place, really. But, we were the only people there at 6 pm and the only staff member decided to leave the place silent as the crypt for 10 minute stretches only to punctuate it with a single (and I should add, very well chosen) song before the next long silence. Baffling, but goes some way toward explaining the empty pub.
The ‘run’ was interrupted a dozen (plus) times as we tried (semi-successfully) to hit every open bar in Old Town and Eastcott this afternoon. We went back to the house once and had to double back for the Donkey after some dinner. Here is the cumulative route:
Happy New Year, Mofo’s!
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Only one day left
In the year and the challenge.
Let’s have a blowout.
Name: Kiri Sauvignon Blanc
Type: white wine
Menu: Fish Tacos using haddock marinated in lime, olive oil, cumin, paprika, garlic and oregano with a sauce made from yogurt, limes, cilantro, capers, jalapenos, cumin, paprika, dill, and a dollop of tahini. Topped with shredded lettuce, onion, more cilantro, avocado, and tomato. Obscenely more-ish nachos to start. Yum.
Venue: house
Review/notes: The bottle suggests notes of gooseberry but more than anything there is honeydew melon in this drier-than-expected and truly sublime wine. Would have been really good with nuts, too, or nibbles out in the sun (stocking up on this for Spring).
Cold day out, sore back, and no motivation so just 3.6 miles today, near home:
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I asked for shiraz.
“That’s MISTER Shiraz to you,”
Responds my bottle.
Name: Mister Shiraz
Type: red wine
Venue: house
Review/notes: This wine would have suited a juicy steak or a greasy rack of BBQ ribs but it was already open when we went for a prawn salad. I, at least, doused mine with some hot sauce.
Run today found me killing an hour waiting for the carpet to dry, so the loop included a stop at the Steam Railway on the way home. This also gave me a few minutes for the sweat to dry before the final few hundred meters on my way to finish the holiday house cleaning.
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A glass of Cockburn:
There’s a bawdy joke in there
But so much effort.
Name: Cockburn Special Reserve
Type: port
Venue: house
Review/notes: Coming in on the home stretch of the holiday blow-out, re-stocking the port was inevitable. It has also been a DVD blow-out with a mini-obituary festival (2014 version) including Charlie Wilson’s War and Good Will Hunting, neither of which I’ve seen before. Also caught Dark Mirror: White Christmas, which was cheery (if you find Rod Serling’s darker Twilight Zone episodes cheery).
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There’s no newspaper,
The grocer’s on war rations.
Happy Boxing Day.
Name: Léon Perdigal Côtes du Rhône
Type: red wine
Venue: house
Review/notes: Surprised we weren’t hung over today, I had a rum and coffee then settled into baking biscotti as soon as I returned from the minimal run for the day.
We’re almost out of wine but I added a liter of port to the stocks. Looking forward to drying out a bit in January, but for now the party rages on.
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Linus says, “Charlie
“Brown, I know the true meaning
“Of Christmas. Lights, please.”
Name: De Vallois
Type: champagne
Menu: a Thai prawn green curry tonight
Venue: house
Review/notes: I’m barely older than the Charlie Brown Christmas, but it has been there as long as I can remember and we always put it on Christmas Eve if we have a telly. We’ve also had champagne every Christmas Eve, even when we couldn’t really afford it (this one was a Christmas gift from my boss).
For dinner, we had planned a Thai green curry with prawns but I needed a bunch of shit to go in it (lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, some green curry paste) so I did the holiday run streak effort as an arc to the Waitrose in Wichelstowe. It takes a poncy store when you have a bunch of non-standard ingredients to gather.
Charlie Brown, what a block head. Charlie don’t surf, but we think he should.
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No more work is done
But Mad Dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the sun.
…… an edit of Noel Coward in memory of Joe Cocker …..
Name: Fair Exchange Cab Sav – Shiraz
Type: red wine
Recipe: Lasagne-esque chillies rellenos
Venue: house
Review/notes: This is the last bottle of the backpack full of Fair Exchange CS-S I bought as back-up wine at Thanksgiving and it has been a pleasant surprise, pairing well with just about anything we threw at it.
It was also the last day the Chemistry Research Lab would be staffed until New Year and by the time I returned from my lunch run to the Six Bells I found the lab was more-or-less abandoned. I’ll be in at least once during the closure this year, always the most pleasant time since things are largely quiet.
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Life is far too short
To drink poor quality wine
(Too regularly).
Name: Cline Zinfandel
Type: red wine
Recipe: Beef Wellington: Sauté some chopped mushrooms, onions, and garlic slowly in butter till very soft adding a little Worcestershire sauce to bubble down the last couple of minutes. Meanwhile, thoroughly brown all sides of a salted and black peppered beef roast (a cut that doesn’t need a lot of cooking to be tender). Spread the sauce on a puff pastry then wrap this around the roast, seal the whole thing with beaten egg and bake at 200°C for ½ hour then letting rest for ½ hour more. Serve with duck fat roasted potatoes and something fresh and green.
Venue: house
Review/notes: The wine was absolutely awesome. I have its tasting notes, none of which seem to describe any aspect of this sublime beverage. It really deserves to be drunk on its own or with spare nibbles, perhaps while listening to some baroque music wafting in on the summer breeze from a concert in a park. It was among today’s purchase of 6 bottles from Majestic (a wine warehouse chain here in Britain) along with the annual Vin Santo from Franco and Anna.
I had hoped to get the Vin Santo from the new Italian deli which is much closer to the house and far from the temptation of the discount wine store, but as I ran past it dawned on me that it is Sunday and the Gorse Hill trip was my only option. Lugging a backpack stuffed with seven bottles up the Drove Road hill was slow going (for that matter, so was the flat bit along County Ground), but I finished with a full 4 miles (and change):
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Quite windy today.
Gusts to fifty miles per hour.
Must be my diet.
Name: I Crinali Primitivo
Type: red wine
Venue: house
Review/notes: Another excellent wine to go with some curry for dinner. I had an unfortunate lunch (see here or assess from the haiku), so this was a treat to make up for it.
The run was short because I WAS going to have lunch at the Honey Pot which turned out to be closed for a refurb and is getting renamed the Explorer with a note that it is going to specialise in cocktails…just what this town fucking needs, another overpriced yuppie bar. That blows too.
Oh, right, it was legitimately windy today, too, so sticking to the canal path would have been a more prudent choice.
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Wrap in foil, place in
100 degees oven,
Seven til seven.
Name: Barefoot White Zinfandel
Type: rosé wine
Venue: house
Review/notes: The White Zin is like a big glass of watermelon in both colour and flavour. With the 12-hour roasted aromatic pork shoulder, slaw, sweet and normal potatoes it would have been a perfect picnic except it was too cold, rainy and dark out to consider such nonsense.
The run for today was a leisurely loop around the Mesopotamia Walk and into Marston and back, during a break at work.
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Mass spectrometrists:
They’re creepy and they’re kooky.
Well, mostly creepy.
Name: Two Ravens Cabernet Sauvignon Touriga Nacional
Type: red wine
Menu: Chicken covered in a pesto of turmeric, garlic, and cilantro, roasted sweet potatoes, and a Thai style slaw.
Venue: house
Review/notes: An impulse buy because it was on deep discount, this held up well against the heavily spiced and sweet and sour dishes.
1/2 million £ flying to the second floor
A new mass spectrometer delivered to Physical and Theoretical Chemistry was flown into place via a crane, today. But the real Oxford Mass Spectrometry news has to be the roll out of @michaeltmarty ‘s hash tag ( #UniDec ) for some spectral deconvolution software — help make this trend by Tweeting rude-to-obscene photos (like this or this or even the pic below) with the hashtag #UniDec (go on, you know you want to). [UPDATE 12 December 2014: #UniDec got me blocked.]
Oh, yeah…the haiku: Pugsley died.
After the stress of this delivery, I did a short run around the University Parks:
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I could murder some
Tempura Prawns, but who has
Time to prepare them?
Name: Silver Rock Cabernet Sauvignon
Type: red wine
Recipe: Potato and broccoli soup…get an Italian recipe and use it. Alternatively, follow the link in the above Daily Haiku to see a 1 minute cooking video from Japan.
Venue: house
Review/notes: Jackie did the supper down to the wine choice…always frugal, this was a very good one especially for the price (and paired well with the thick soup and cheese).
Easy 3.1 miles out across the meadow to the (closed) Perch and down to the bus stop, today (as the 3 miles or more per day Holiday Run Streak continues):
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Really shouldn’t care
But, artifice amuses
And piques interest.
Name: Comtesse Saint-Hilaire Montagne Saint-Émilion
Type: red wine
Recipe: burrito night — chicken boiled to shreds in tomato juice, shredded and wrapped with black beans and extra mature white cheddar
Venue: house
Review/notes: Great wine but felt a bit stuffy after the bottle so switched to the Atomic Firewater for The Walking Dead mid-season finale (our copy had Danish subtitles).
Still harvesting amusement from the Brooks/MapMyRun Holiday Challenge, this time because MMR responded to one of my tweets:
Two great things about this…first, and most importantly, they’ve completely missed the point that there is no winner of the challenge based on mileage (nor speed, nor duration, nor number of workouts — participation alone gets residents of the USA entered into a random draw).
Second, and the one I liked the most when I first read the MMR response about an hour after it was sent, the cheaters are all reinstated — the most believable of the Top Five, Shervin S, is doing about 19 miles per day at a pace a little below 4 miles per hour while I checked out Tony M yesterday to find he had turned in a run of over 3 miles averaging about 3m46s per mile. Then there is my personal favourite:
Our Dick Mask (Richard M in at #2) has tried the hardest to live up to the spirit and bile of my original sub-challenge by racking up over 10 THOUSAND miles on Sunday (average pace: under 19 seconds per mile). He’s not a runner, he’s Santa Claus:
My own mileage for today, a puny 6½, was at a snails pace of 9½ minutes per mile as I worked on a G-Had trail (map of the route at the GH4 entry for trail #53).
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Thirteen of the Daily Tipples were in the beer category with 12 pub visits (6 of which were Wetherspoons, 5 of those were the Four Candles). The highlight of the month had to be tasting the finished batch of Two Cures, though, with the worst experience of the bunch the very disappointing trip to The Lighthouse:
.
The Chippy Challenge dragged until the last week of the month but there were some spectacular examples (Crispy Cod and Robinson’s Traditional Fish and Chips) and some crimes against cuisine (Marmaris and WingLoon House):
.
The GHadHHH had two minor trails this month, one each versus the Oxford and Moonrakers hashes, both night efforts. More importantly was the treatise on IntifadHHHa and CalipHHHate differences in this confusing era of global Hashlam and its various pretenders.
Pub count: this month only added 8 more pubs to the total and all of them came on runs. Started the calendar year with 1197 and the blog year (19 January) with 1201 so it is shaping up to the weakest effort of the 6 years so far but at 1280 I hope to hit 1300 before the end of 2014.
My rubbish preaches.
Hippies fuck up everything.
Lord, give me some peace.
Name: Vinsobres Cru de Côtes du Rhône
Type: red wine
Venue: house
Review/notes: Why is my bin liner telling me how to live my life? I’m never buying this brand again.
Spectacular wine. Had first bottle as part of the feast, yesterday, and the second bottle was just as good with the leftovers for breakfast.
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The lonely bus ride
Is not nearly so lonely
When you’re not alone.
Name: Corte Viola Cabernet Veneto
Type: red wine
Venue: Bella Italia, Oxford
Review/notes: Jackie had the bus ticket to burn, so came down to Oxford for the museum and to ride home with me after work (which went a bit long as sometimes happens). It would be late, anyway, by the time we got home so we decided to grab a bite in town. Bella Italia is really just a chain of shops, but they’ve always been tasty and reasonably priced and the atmosphere is better than it should be considering the pre-packaged nature of the place (George Street is nothing but chain restaurants, and this is about the best choice of the bunch).
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Finally saw Chef.
Now, looking for Spanish Lake
And Citizen Four.
Name: Hardy’s Bankside Rosé
Type: rosé wine
Venue: house
Review/notes: Everything I read about Chef used the term “food porn,” and the treats did look good but not obscene…I may not be able to fully define “food porn” but I know it when I see it (a perfect example being Big Night). Still a very pleasant little road trip/family picture, mind.
I snagged the suggestion from the same blog that, yesterday, pitched Spanish Lake — a documentary about a Saint Louis suburban neighbourhood where that author spent some of her teen years and which was just a few miles from my home in Glasgow Village. Lago was the place I formulated my theory that the housing built cheap but superficially “nice” was destined to become a slum in ten-to-fifteen years time; I’ve since watched it happen all over the States, but think it might be fairly satisfying to see it confirmed,here in particular, on celluloid. Don’t get me wrong, I loved St Louis (and still do); but it treated me worse than even I deserved at the time.
The third mention in the haiku regarded a documentary about the Snowden affair, most of it shot in the days either side of him being revealed as Wikileaks’ most famous contributor. Bravery and naïvety in this one, shit architecture and city planning in another, and tasty treats (not least of which include Sofia Vergara and Scarlett Johansson, what I might like to think of as bread for the ideal Cuban sandwich) in the other.
Wine was half its normal price. Good, but only worth 1/3 its normal price.
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It isn’t so strange,
This postbox spotting hobby.
I am not alone.
Name: Viña Maipo Merlot
Type: red wine
Recipe: chicken enchiladas with more cheese than anyone actually needs
Venue: house
Review/notes: Several Mexican style meals this week, including the enchiladas (homemade tortillas, sauce made from fresh tomatoes so still retaining some of the texture…yum).
Elbows deep into mass spectrometer surgery, I had a social conversation with my Russian colleague. Neither of us have weekend plans so it shifted to tourism and that eventually morphed into Cathedrals. I described my favourite which isn’t really a Cathedral, Tewkesbury Abbey, and he suggested Worcester Cathedral (a second endorsement). But, Worcester reminded me of the postboxes and I started grinning; “why are you smiling?” he asked.
I told him that Worcester has been on my short list of places to visit for a while, explaining that one of the very rare Edward VIII postboxes was there. We spent the next half hour in deep discussion on this; I am such a dork.
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The Endless British Pub Crawl 
Thirteen of the Daily Tipples were in the beer category with 12 pub visits (6 of which were Wetherspoons, 5 of those were the Four Candles). The highlight of the month had to be tasting the finished batch of Two Cures, though, with the worst experience of the bunch the very disappointing trip to The Lighthouse:
.
The Chippy Challenge dragged until the last week of the month but there were some spectacular examples (Crispy Cod and Robinson’s Traditional Fish and Chips) and some crimes against cuisine (Marmaris and WingLoon House):
.
The GHadHHH had two minor trails this month, one each versus the Oxford and Moonrakers hashes, both night efforts. More importantly was the treatise on IntifadHHHa and CalipHHHate differences in this confusing era of global Hashlam and its various pretenders.
Pub count: this month only added 8 more pubs to the total and all of them came on runs. Started the calendar year with 1197 and the blog year (19 January) with 1201 so it is shaping up to the weakest effort of the 6 years so far but at 1280 I hope to hit 1300 before the end of 2014.
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