Great British Food – it is great

It was only in 2005 that French President Jacques Chirac memorably damned British food with those astonishingly ill-chosen words, ”you can’t trust people who cook like that“. So, there was no doubting his view, which was once that of the world at large – even the British themselves. When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, very few people seemed interested in good food in Britain at all and looking back it seems the menus, both at home and out, were very limited and dull. I well remember watching items about the French lifestyle on Blue Peter and hearing that old cliché; “the British eat to live, while the French live to eat.”

In those days there were still the last vestiges of the old British view that things should be plainly cooked, that anything fancy was suspect and that being interested in food was not quite right and really a funny foreign idea altogether. Certainly the British of the day were unlikely to indulge in earnest conversation about food, the way Spaniards will about Jamón, the French about cheese or the Italians the relative merits of oils and vinegars.

So, if Chirac has made that statement in 1975 I would have probably agreed with him, but all that really has changed now. Enjoyment of food now seems to be an integral part of British life and food is no longer regarded as just fuel. I love eating out anywhere I go in Europe, but in reality the variety and quality of food available in Britain now is as good as anywhere – different, but certainly as good. I don’t just mean fine dining either, this country is full of exciting affordable places that turn out delicious food at all price levels and from an enormous array of ethnic backgrounds.

However food isn’t only about eating out, restaurants and fine-dining. It’s also about the ingredients and this is where it seems to me there has been a more profound change. Everywhere I go there seem to be local producers of fabulously tasty things, wonderful cheese shops and delis and nowadays we all take it for granted – my mother would have loved it. She died in 1978 when just buying spaghetti involved a special journey to an Italian shop in town and we had to bring our garlics and olive oil back from Spain.

One of these exciting food producers really appeals to – The Artisan Smokehouse – me and I have been fortunate enough to try quite a few of their products. Frankly if you are at one of the events where they show their wares – I regularly bump into them at the excellent Three Wine Men tastings – then you just cannot miss them as the smell is wonderfully enticing. I love the smell of smoked food and so it always beckons me over.

However, much as I like the aromas and flavours of smoked food, Tim Matthews has a palpable passion for it – which is why he and his wife Gillian started The Artisan Smokehouse some seven years ago. Talking to him he really does come across as a sort of Heston Blumenthal of smoking. There doesn’t seem to be anything he won’t have a go at smoking and precious few things that he hasn’t actually smoked – even maple syrup apparently.

Indeed Maple seems quite a thing with Tim, he does all his smoking over natural maple wood chippings and I know from personal experience that maple wood has a wonderful smell of sugary maple syrup.

Tim and Gill Matthews

“It started off as something fun to do, but we now supply delis county-wide and see ourselves as part of the growing Suffolk food mafia!” said Tim.

In truth the smoking process is only something that I have a superficial understanding of, but whenever I speak to Tim he really draws me in. He is passionate about his craft and food in general, flavour seems very important to him and this enthusiasm is infectious.

His passion shows in the foods he produces and in the raw materials he smokes. The flavours he achieves strike me as being very delicate. Sometimes with smoked food that is all you can taste – the smoke. With Tim’s products the smoking seems subtle and integral to the other flavours. The texture and the flavour of the raw material are as important as the smokiness.

Truthfully though the thing that originally got me interested in his wares seems pretty unsubtle, it was smoked garlic. He smokes whole heads of British garlic and the aromas are just so enticing. Wrapped in foil and roasted, the soft flesh of the garlic is unctuous and delicious with a rich smoky note and pungent character – trust me it is fabulous on toast!

I am not the greatest fan of smoked salmon, but their Freedom Food Smoked Scottish Salmon was a revelation with a deep flavour that seemed to have a fruity quality to it. Even better, to my mind, was the Freedom Food Hot Smoked Scottish Salmon Fillet, the flakes of fish were firm yet succulent with a fragrant flavour reminiscent of Chinese tea. The hot smoking actually cooks the fish and so the texture is unlike most smoked salmon and like a piece of cooked fish, but with that delicious fragrant smoky quality.

Just before trying the smoked fish I wondered what wine to have with it. Something about the aromas of the food made me think of  that Grüner Veltliner would be good, so went in search of a bottle. However I found a lone bottle of something else that got me thinking and changed my mind. I am glad I did as the combination was perfect:

2008 Dr Frank Rkatsiteli
Dr Konstantin Frank’s Vinifera Wine Cellars
Hammondsport
New York Finger Lakes A.V.A.
New York State

An unusual grape, Rkatsiteli is from Georgia, but was widely used throughout the USSR, including Ukraine as well as more widely in Eastern Europe. It has an aromatic, floral and spicy kind of character, so will appeal to fans of Grüner Veltliner and dry Furmint.

This was great with both the smoked salmons. Just a lingering succulent softness showed this was a mature white and it balanced the acidity, which was still enough to be a perfect foil to the smoky flavours and fatty feel of the smoked salmon. The aromatic and fragrant nature of the wine was a great match for the fish too, as was the delicate spice character. A terrific dry white wine and a great combination – 90/100 points.

The 2010 vintage is available in the US from the winery at $15 a bottle.
Dr Frank’s wines are available in the UK from Wine Equals Friends.

A hamper from The Artisan Smokehouse

The meats are equally good by the way, the Smoked British Fillet Beef is so tender and fresh tasting with the flavour of the meat and that of the smoke sitting perfectly together. Tim’s Smoked Free Range Duck Breast is delicious too, despite being smoked you can taste the duck as well as the fragrant smoky flavour – it would be great in a gourmet salad.

I was also delighted to be able to try his speciality Violino di Capra – marinated, cured and smoked goat leg – which was stunningly delicious, fragrant, delicately meaty and fragrantly smoky.

The smoked meats would be wonderful with any red that wasn’t too strong by the way, earthy, umami flavours help too. Wines with the weight of a rich Beaujolais or fruity Pinot Noir are perfect. A smooth Syrah or a Barolo could be good too, like Spar’s excellent value earthy and meaty 2007 Valle Vento Barolo.

So, as you can see from my reaction to a small cross section of the range from The Artisan Smokehouse, what they make is delicious and terrific quality. It strikes me that one of their hampers would make a wonderful present for the foodie in your life.

The Artisan Smokehouse
Tim and Gill Matthews
Telephone: 01394 270609
Email: info@artisansmokehouse.co.uk

http://www.artisansmokehouse.co.uk

The Rusty Pig’s cooking chorizo

The Rusty Pig 
As if all this smoked gorgeousness wasn’t enough, I was recently tutoring a wine tasting and Robin Rea was giving tastes of the charcuterie that he makes down in Ottery St Mary in Devon. Robin is an experienced chef and still cooks at River Cottage HQ, but he has a passion for curing and air drying charcuterie. I really think what he makes is as good as anything I have had from France, Spain or Italy – the chilli salami was amazing, intensely hot and sweetly tasty by turn, like a gourmet’s Russian Roulette! It was all, as Robin says, “pigging delicious.”

What’s more, it isn’t only a shop where you buy amazing sausages and bacon, you also can eat there.

Robin in full swing

Rusty Pig
Robin Rea
Telephone: 01404 815580
Email: robin@rustypig.co.uk

http://www.rustypig.co.uk/gb.aspx

It would seem that Chirac was completely wrong, we have thrown out that old view of British food and are now as keen as anyone else to eat great food, cook great food and to produce great food.

Inventing Wine – the history of wine debunked

Ancient amphorae in the wonderful wine museum at Domaine Gerovassiliou in Greece

I love history and part of the pleasure I take in wine comes from this interest. Anyone who has attended one of my courses or tastings – and if you haven’t you really are missing out on something - knows that to me wine is closely intertwined with history. It has always seemed to me that there is a cultural identity and rationale for all wines and wine styles. This is by definition stronger in Europe where wine making has been a part of the landscape for far longer than it has in new world regions.

A glimpse of how it was – Priorat 1997

For a long time though I have questioned whether we get it quite right and if these identities are as strong as we like to believe. In the wine world we take for granted that there is a continuum from the Ancients to now. Wine originated somewhere near Georgia, Transcaucasia, and spread from there to the Greeks and Romans who took the vine and wine making to other parts of the Mediterranean and, more importantly France.

But in truth I know how great the improvements in grape growing and wine making have been in my time in the trade. So, I wonder how true this continuum really is? I have suspected that wine in the past was very different from how it is today. I am certain it is riper, cleaner, fresher, fruitier and technically better than at any previous point in history and many developments have made it that way.

I certainly like the idea of being in touch with the ancients when I drink wine, that feeling of beeing at one remove from the Roman tending vines in Campania or the monks of Clos Vougeot when we drink a modern wine from those same slopes, but how true is it?

The sixteenth century wine press at Clos Vougeot, still in occasional use

I do wonder, given how recent many of the things are that we think of as traditional. Fish and chips and eating chocolate only appeared a few years before my grandfather was born while Indian food must have been entirely different before Portuguese sailors brought the chili to Asia and Italian cuisine must have been similarly unrecognisable before the tomato arrived in Europe. As for wine traditions, I am well aware that contrary to the dry examples we expect today, Entre-Deux-Mers and Savennières were sweet until the 1950s.

Recently I discovered a wonderful new book on the history of wine. It questions many things that marketeers want us to believe and constantly made me look at many aspects of wine afresh:

Inventing Wine: a new history of one of the world’s most ancient pleasures
by Paul Lukacs
Published by Norton at $28.95 / £20.00
Also available from Amazon.com as well as Amazon.co.uk and Waterstones in the UK.

Reading Paul Lukacs’s book has reinforced my suspicion that in reality there is very little link between wine as we know it and what was consumed in the past. Nowadays we choose wines for different reasons and we expect different things from them compared with wine drinkers of yesteryear.

Paul Lukacs points out that today’s well made wines in fact have very little in common with the rudimentary liquids our forbears drank. Central to this fascinating book is the realization that for most of history wine has not been drunk out of choice at all but nessecity. What’s more there has been little to chose between wines from individual places as they would all taste unpalatable to our modern palates. Indeed unless one was lucky enough to drink it very soon after harvest, all wine would have tasted sour and unpleasant throughout much of history. As Paul Lukacs says, wine was simply “a source of nourishment and inebriated escape.” Therefore it was not until quite recent times that wine came to be enjoyed for its taste, but for what else it could provide. Wine was mysterious, early man could not understand how it was made and so it was widely believed to have magical powers and to be a link to the gods, a view that persisted for thousands of years. What is more water was largely impure and dangerous to drink, so wine was the safer option, whatever it tasted like.

The evolution of the wine bottle was crucial to the development of wine as we know it today. Before wine could be bottled and sealed with a cork it was a race against time to finish the cask before the wine turned completely sour.These examples are at Domaine Gerovassiliou in Greece.

The mention of Pliny as being more a connoisseur of resin than the actual wine was a fascinating insight into how awful ancient wine must have tasted for the flavourings to be so important. Pliny’s writing about the characteristics of the different resins though did put me in mind of how we discuss oak today – and although it does other things, surely most oak is merely a flavouring for most modern wines?

Lukacs makes a pretty convincing argument that true modern wine as we understand it has only emerged from about 1660 onwards when Arnaud de Pontac began selling his wine as the product of a single estate. This wine was Château Haut-Brion and Samuel Pepys tasted it on Friday 10 April 1663, memorably recording in his diary; “drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with.”

Another glimpse of the past, vino rancio ageing outside in demijohns, Castille 1997

It was only handful of wines though that could become such vins fins, as they needed to command a high price and be sold to consumers who were happy to pay that price. Most consumers had little or no choice about what they drank until many hundreds of years later when technology was finally applied to even the most ordinary wines – I well remember how basic Jumilla wines tasted during the 1970s and would not like to experience them again. Broadly speaking until quite recently, in historical terms, a high quality wine was one that had few or no defects. Only relatively recently did it come to be seen as one with “particularity and provenance” – the concept that came to define vins fins. It was these different characteristics – or particularity – that made some wines more famous and sought after than others.

I found it especially illuminating that the word terroir, is actually a recent one, certainly less than a hundred years old and not the ancient term that I had always assumed. Which begs the question if the concept existed before the word and if so, how did they explain it?

What is more wine does not exist in isolation, so this book touches on social history generally. The urbanisation and secularisation of Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, beer, spirits, tea, coffee and chocolate and the industrial revolution all play their part in the story, as do more modern developments in wine making and globalisation.

A modern winery in Bordeaux 2012

This is no holiday book for the average consumer, you need to be interested and it leans towards an academic style – indeed I much preferred the content to the writing, but Paul Lukacs’s story of how fine wine – vin fins as opposed to vin ordinaries – slowly developed in various places from the seventeenth century onwards is a fascinating read. I certainly feel enriched and better informed for reading this book. It seems to have something new to say on every page and puts a great many things into context that have perhaps been falsely romanticised for too long.

Happy Christmas to Everyone

Well here we are, Christmas is upon us and another year almost over.

2012 seems to have sped by, but it has been a full and exciting year for me and Quentin Sadler’s Wine Page. I have visited some wonderful places and experienced some terrific wines and my readership has doubled once again, so thank you for reading my articles. I hope that you have enjoyed them and that they have sometimes helped you to select the wine that you drink. May I thank you especially if you have left a comment here, it can be a lonely business writing this page, so it is nice to hear back from you.

On that topic, can I make a plea that those of you who comment on Facebook also post the comment on my page?

I will report back on my wines of the year very shortly, but in the meantime I just want to wish you all a Happy Christmas and a peaceful, healthy and prosperous 2013 – oh and do keep coming back to Quentin Sadler’s Wine Page.

I will raise a glass of Champagne to you all on Christmas Day and hope that you too are enjoying some delicious wines at this festive time.

For the Love of Cheeses – a lovely guide to buying Cheese & Wine in London

Doctor Samuel Johnson famously said; ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’

As a Londoner I think he got it spot on, it is a great city, vibrant colourful and teeming with life and it has got better and better over the forty odd years that I have known it. The things to see and do have improved, as have the shops and especially the food. There are restaurants the equal of anywhere, casual cafés that remain little local secrets and gastro-temples with world-wide reputations. There are wine shops, food shops and delicatessens that keep Londoners supplied with good things to eat and drink. Some of them are famous to all of us, while others remain known only to the people who live in the part of London that it serves. That is the thing about London you see, it doesn’t really have just one centre, but is in reality a group of villages joined together and lots of enjoyment can be had exploring these mislaid corners of the UK’s capital.

So, if you are a foodie, how on earth do you keep track of all the best places in London to buy your wine and cheese? Other than heading off to the well known Harrods Food Hall, John Lewis’s Food Hall, Borough Market or Whole Food Market in South Kensington it isn’t always easy.

Well, now you can relax as help has arrived. Recently I have been telling you about some rather lovely books about wine and food that I think will make great presents for Christmas and here is another:

The London Cheese and Wine Guide
Published by Allegra at £11.95
Also available from Amazon.co.uk and Waterstones in the UK at between £9.10 and £11.95.

Even if you don’t want to buy any of the things they mention this is a beautiful little book whose contents cannot help but make your mouth water. The publishers claim that it is the ‘definitive guide to the best places for cheese and wine in London‘ and to me that is a very exciting prospect indeed. I love wine shops, book shops, food shops and cheese shops. Time spent rooting around in any of those is never time wasted and I have certainly become aware that London is home to more and more cheese merchants of late, I have just not known where many of them were. Now I can just flick through this guide, drool over the photographs and head off to wherever they recommended.

Even if you never use it to buy anything it is a lovely book to own, if you like cheese and wine that is. It is beautifully designed and feels strangely tactile and satisfying to hold while the photographs get me salivating every time I dip in.

The book is more of a guide for reference than one to read, although I have whiled away a few happy hours with it, and it is well laid out and easy to navigate your way around.

The first section deals with cheese, including how artisan cheese is made, followed by a chapter listing London’s best specialist cheese shops. They are each given a page with opening hours and contact details together with the owner’s name, an idea of how many cheeses they stock. There is a pricing index too as for each shop we are given an idea of the price they charge for Brie de Meaux, Mature Cheddar, Parmigiano-Reggiano and Stilton.

It isn’t only cheese that goes with wine though, so the next chapter covers London’s best delicatessens in exactly the same way. Then just when you think the possibilities for buying artisan cheese must surely be exhausted you reach a section on London’s food markets. This brief chapter outlines the cheese specialists at Borough Market while a market directory and cheese trader grid tell you who sells good cheese in every London market.

We have now arrived at the mid-point of the book and it moves on to wine. An excellent chapter gives specialist wine merchants similar treatment to the cheese shops, some of them are pretty well known, but many are tucked away and might not have sprung to mind before. Then just to give even more food for thought, this is followed by a really exciting chapter on London wine bars and one on restaurants who offer a particularly good selection of cheese and wine.

Then just when you are feeling utterly stuffed they provide a section on the correct way to taste cheese and how to pair cheese with wine – which is a lot more difficult than most people imagine.

Any Londoner, or visitor armed with this book, will now be able to track down all these wonderful, but tucked away, little cheese and wine shops as well as the perfect places to enjoy cheese and wine together.

It’s not a big book, but it is bursting with  lovely things and will give you, or the person you give it to, a great deal of pleasure.

Photographs by kind permission of Allegra.

A Feast of a Book

With Christmas coming I am telling you about some wonderful books that would make superb gifts for others or even a sneaky treat for yourself.

Recently I wrote about an excellent guide to the wines of Bordeaux and now I would like to recommend something altogether more sumptuous.

I am especially fond of Asian food, to my mind the cuisines of the Far East are some of the most exciting and mouthwatering of all. I find it almost impossible to resist the vibrant colours, fragrant aromas and exotic tastes of Asian food whether from Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Korea, Japan, Sri Lanka or the Indian sub-continent. And yet as a wine lover I often find it very hard to find a wine that goes with such food. It is so very easy to limit myself to a narrow range of wines and styles that I know work with Asian food, that I could well miss many more exciting combinations and experiences.

Well, help is at hand. Two friends of mine, Patricia Guy and Edwin Soon have got together and created a beautiful book that deals with this very subject:

Patricia Guy & Edwin Soon researching their book

Wine With Asian Food: New Frontiers in Taste
By Patricia Guy and Edwin Soon
Published by Tide-Mark at $24.95
Also available from Amazon.com as well as Amazon.co.uk and Waterstones in the UK at around £20.99

Partnering Asian food with wine can be tricky and this book starts with an excellent analysis of why. In Europe we often drink wines from a country with food in the style of that country – drinking local with local often works well, Red Burgundy with Boeuf Bourguignon, Sancerre with goat’s cheese or Chianti with a rich pasta ragu. Expanding on the problem Patricia and Edwin tell us that with most Asian meals ‘several dishes are served at the same time and are shared by everyone present‘. This of course is different from the European tradition where there is one dominant dish and means that ‘the wine chosen for such a meal has to be versatile‘.

The other main difference with Asian food, although this is creeping more and more into what we eat over here too, is that the defining characteristic of the meal is not what is cooked, but how it is cooked. As Patricia and Edwin point out, ‘the true flavour of the dish may be determined by the cooking method, the sauce, the use of seasonings or the blending of ingredients. Indeed it may result from combination of any of these elements’.

In a perfect world, as the book points out, ‘when you combine wine with food, you are seeking a balance between these two elements‘. I know from personal experience that for many people this involves simply drinking and eating things that they like. For others, like me, it is a more agonised process of considering the nuances and hoping for a perfect combination.

I can be pretty good at putting food and wine together and achieve some superb matches, but I am the first to point out that this is often as a consequence of inspired guess-work as much as anything else and that is why I am so taken with this book. The authors really have put in a lot of serious experimentation and taken the luck out of the process. There are even experiments that the reader can do. So, in the comfort of their own home they can really get to grips with how wines and food interact and what works with what.

In order to makes sense of the food they have ignored the arbitrary political boundaries and instead studied the flavours in Asian foods to create a sort of sensory map or grid. This divides food up into five basic flavours: Fresh and Herbal, Savoury and Rich, Mild and Spicy and Light Smoky, Spicy & Smoky and Fiery and Sweet.

Similarly, by thinking about flavours, textures and weights of wines they came up with a classification to divide wine into seven categories: 1 – Crisp Juicy Whites and Dry Aromatic Wine, 2 – Juicy Whites, Medium rosés and Light Reds, 3 – Woody Whites and Soft-Tannin Reds, 4 – Light to Medium-Sweet Wines, 5 – Richly Sweet Wines, 6 – Red Wines with Chewy Tannin and 7 – Nutty and Rich Fortified Wines.

These classifications or categorisations are expanded and explained and then the bulk of the book takes the reader through a marvellous array of recipes together with a range of wine recommendations with each one. These are given in a very general way for the experienced food and wine matcher and in a much more specific manner to allow the beginner to get to grips with the system.

The whole book reads well and is clearly the culmination of a great deal of work, by which I mean eating and drinking. It looks lovely and is so richly illustrated with photographs of enticing dishes, bottles and vineyard scenes that reading it is nearly as good as travelling around Asia and experiencing the cuisine. Be warned though, there are lots of recipes together with tempting photographs of the finished dishes, so reading this book can seriously make you hungry.

Mountains, Saints and Satellites – stunning quality in Montagne-St Émilion

It is so easy to fall into a rut with wine. There is so much wine available from so many different places nowadays that you have to make a cut off somewhere and for many years for me that cut off was the classic wines of France. Only the cheaper versions though, I have always retained my love of France’s great wines.

My focus is always to find really lovely wine that over performs for its price and for many years the famous bits of France usually failed to do that at the cheaper end. Many of the classic regions of France have enormous fame, but the quality of the affordable examples seldom showed what the top end ones were like – and most of us have to drink the cheaper versions. The result of this was that consumers were often buying the lesser examples of Sancerre, Chablis, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, St Émilion and the like and yet they were never truly cheap, so still seen as bit of a treat. Sadly many of these wines were a pale shadow of the wines that have made the name on their label so prestigious and sought after and so for long gave the impression that France offered bad value for money. For quite a long time the affordable versions of classic French wines were dilute, unattractive and uninspiring as well as being more expensive than many good wines from elsewhere.

By the way it isn’t snobbery that made me avoid them, those who know me will know that price tags do not impress me at all. No, it was the lack of character and concentration that made me avoid these wines. Who wants a Chablis that could pass for a Muscadet in a blind tasting, or a Châteauneuf that offers less character than a Fitou or Minervois?

This lack of quality at the lower end was, in my opinion at least partly responsible for the sizeable minority of UK consumers who nowadays claim to avoid and dislike all French wine.

Drink More Grapes

Ever wondered why people don’t try a wider variety of grapes? I have because I believe that is in part variety that makes wine fascinating. The amazing points of difference between the various grapes and wine types should be applauded, not shied away from. They should be tasted and celebrated rather than deemed confusing.

We should all try as many different grapes as we can, that way we will really see how few most of us actually drink.

I also sometimes wonder why some grapes enjoy world-wide fame while others of equal quality struggle for a hearing.

It often seems that a Shiraz will always sell when a Mencia or a Castelão will find it hard to even be tasted.

2 superb grape varieties growing at Contino in Rioja

I recently published an article on Catavino where I mused on this and a few grape varieties that I think deserve to be more loved than they are.

You can read the piece here.

In my opinion it is perfectly possible to really enjoy a wine that you know nothing about and whose label is indecipherable to you after all surely it’s all about how the liquid tastes rather than what words are on the label, isn’t it?

Looking Back at Angers

Last week I was on a rather lovely trip to the Loire Vally in France. Unusually though I didn’t just get to see vineyards and wineries, but a little bit of the surrounding area too – which could be seen as self indulgence, but I think that seeing the place, people and culture around a wine can often help with understanding what makes a wine region tick. Strolling around the French city of Angers in the middle of a working day felt like a lovely adventure – even a little naughty. It was as if it was stolen time that I should have spent doing something more productive – but what the heck.

The city feels quite small, which can be very attractive as you can see it all in a short time without having to cherry pick as you would in somewhere the size of London or Paris. The River Maine flows through the middle of the city and you get lovely glimpses of it from the ramparts of the astonishing Château d’Angers. Once home to Catherine de Medici, this is not your typical Loire Valley Château, but a huge mediaeval fortress whose harsh defensive exterior does not prepare you at all for the haven of peace inside. It is a delightful place for a stroll complete with rampart walk, gardens, orchards and even a small vineyard. Most famously though it houses the Apocalypse Tapestry - well worth a look as it really is one of the jewels of early French culture – strangely enough this castle was also the place where, as a young man the future Duke of Wellington received his military training.

Angers Castle

A tapas crawl in Logroño, Rioja

I have always had a soft spot for Logroño. Most of it isn’t pretty, but it seems to have everything I require from a Spanish city – wide streets lined with cafés and shops, fountains and comfortable hotels, while at its centre is the wonderful old town or Casco Viejo. This delightful pedestrianised zone is a higgledy-piggledy area of narrow alleys lined with bars and over the last 20 years or so it has become a mecca for tapas lovers. In many ways, as the landscape is so unforgiving and the pueblos – wine towns – small and quiet this is the heart of Rioja.

Funny stuff tapas. It is one of Spains great gifts to the world and as much a cultural icon of the country as Paella, bull-fighting and Miró, but in truth I think the story of tapas is more like that of Pizza in Italy. Yes, Pizza is Italian, but it was popularised and made special elsewhere and then returned triumphant to the land if its birth. I remember 1960s Spain. There was precious little tapas then, unless you went to the really big cities or Andalucia. That is where tapas is supposed to have originated as a cover or lid (tapa) to keep flies out of your sherry glass. Originally it was simply a piece of jamón, chorizo or bread, but as the competition hotted up they became more complex and interesting – although I for one always find jamón interesting. Tapas existed in the cities and Andalucia and possibly the Basque country, but in the past it was a simple nibble with a drink. It took the tourist boom to make it famous and to turn it into something creative and gastronomic with groups of people sharing lots of little dishes instead of dinner.

Exciting drinkable and affordable wines

It has been quite a couple of weeks for finding new and exciting wines and I find that is what makes wine really interesting. It might seem strange to some people, but to me wine is only partly a drink, it is also a constant voyage of discovery into places, people, culture and traditions – as well as seeking out delicious flavours.

Most of the time that does not mean that the wines are weird, whacky or odd in any way, just that they are slightly off the beaten track, made in places and from grapes that are a little less well known than they ought to be. It is for those very reasons they often reward trying as they can frequently offer better value than more well known wines, as well as an enormous amount of pleasure.

I have written before about how the majority of consumers seem to only drink wines from a very narrow range of wine styles and grape varieties, which is a real shame when there is so much good wine out there that often passes people by.