Stuart Rae, the latest recruit in Berrys’ Fine Wine team, visits London’s rare-breed steak house and reports back…

As my wedding was nearing, the obligatory Stag Do needed to be arranged. What was decided upon involved all the typically testosterone fuelled traits – such as “shooting each other” with paintballs, DRINKING and eating red meat.  The latter activity came in the form of booking the private dining room at the Hawksmoor. 

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The team here are obviously committed to enhancing the wine drinking experience in any way possible, so it was with plenty of gusto that six musical volunteers agreed to create their perfect playlists to accompany some of our favourite Wine Club wines.

Following on from research suggesting that music can enhance the taste of a wine, we rounded up Masters of Wine, Marketing Execs and The Chairman himself and asked them to sample a selection of wines and decide the perfect tune to listen to for each.

The results are interesting – who’d have thought that Alun Griffiths MW would choose a bit of Fleetwood Mac to accompany his New World Cabernet?  Or that manly Jonathan White would have a guilty penchant for Girls Aloud with his fruity Italian reds?  The fact that Simon Staples digs a bit of Stevie Wonder didn’t surprise anyone…

We’ve also got our Wine Club members involved, giving them each five download tracks on 7Digital.com to see if they can do any better than our in-house music lovers. But what about you?  Do you have a penchant for Pink Floyd and Pinot?  Maybe a little Vivaldi with your Viognier?  Let us know what you’d drink with your favourite wines – there might even be a prize in it too…

Despite the title, we haven’t entirely given up wine for the New Year. Wine Matters has, however, just finished Guardian wine writer Victoria Moore’s new book ‘How To Drink’ and what an interesting read it was too. One of the highlights, of course, was a mention of our very own Jasper Morris MW who, as well as being a wine connoisseur (and our Burgundian buyer) is also something of a tea aficionado. Here’s a snippet from the book:

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As I have been based in Italy for the past few months I could well be initiating a new tradition of having Christmas, ‘Natale’, here in Serralunga d’Alba, Piedmont, and I’m banking on the following being served for lunch:

 
Lentils with cotechino (a pork salami) as an antipasti/starter; the dish is thought to bring good luck and it will probably be accompanied by a fresh smooth Verduno Pelaverga from Fratelli Alessandria.

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The waiting is over and our judges can reveal that the winners of our recipe matching competition are…

…OK, so it may not be on par with the X-Factor final, but thank you to everyone who entered our competition to find a perfect wine match for their favourite recipes.  Wine Club manager Katie Cooper and Berrys’ food and wine matching expert Nick Page have now selected their two favourite recipes and chosen the perfect wine to accompany each one.  Congratulations to the winners, who will each receive six bottles of the recommended wines to help their dinner parties go with a swing.  Here are Nick’s comments and recommendations, you can also click on the dishes to get full recipe details so you can create these tasty treats at home – maybe even make one for your X-Factor final party!

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Our new (free!) iPhone App is certainly satisfying wine lovers’ thirst for knowledge as a total of 22,500 people have downloaded it in the last couple of weeks!!

The App allows you to browse our list of over 2,000 wines, as well as consult tasting notes, maturity guides and even watch the popular ‘Virtual Wine School’ videos from both iPhones and iPod touch devices.

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Last Thursday I was moseying my way along Regent Street in a rather good mood, as I was on way to Mark Hix’s brand new restaurant on Brewer St., Soho. I was pretty confident the food was going to be tip-top and was also pretty happy with myself about the wine in my bag to accompany lunch… 1997 Guigal, Cote Rotie, La Turque!
 
Now I was lunching with a customer, who’s knowledge and love of the Rhône Valley is far greater than my own, and I knew he was bringing a fascinating old Chateauneuf-du-Pape in the shape of 1989 Cuvee Laurence from the great Domaine du Pegau. So the scene was set for a grand battle… North vs South, the old vs. the new, and I was confident that my bottle one of Guigal’s legendary La La’s was going to win by the length of the straight!

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Back in early October I was treated to a visit from one of South Africa’s bright young gems, Mullineux Wines, Swartland: Chris, Andrea and their first born John (’JZ’). This is their account.
 
After a somewhat long and difficult trip from Amsterdam (visa issues- it’s not easy travelling as a South African sometimes!), my wife Andrea, son John and I finally found ourselves winding up the road to Serralunga on an appropriately cool and misty evening. We arrived thirsty and excited – perfect for the two-day introductory experience our kind host had arranged for us in Barolo and Barbaresco. I had been to Piedmont once before, years ago while still at University, and most of our European time has been spend in the vineyards of France and Spain, so this was to be a massive learning experience into a terroir and grape variety foreign to the three of us.

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What’s your favourite dish? Whether it’s a posh dinner party special, a Christmas treat or just Mum’s lasagne, finding a perfect wine match can be tricky and, for most people, a bit of a minefield. However, help is at hand! To celebrate the revamped Berrys’ Wine Club which, amongst other exciting things, includes a personalised recipe matching service, we’re inviting you to send us your favourite recipe and win some wine to match!

I’ll then pick my two favourite dishes from all the entries and, with the help of Berrys’ food and wine matching expert, Nick Page, we’ll suggest a wine to perfectly match each one and the lucky winners will both recieve six bottles the receommended wine to wash down with their dish.

All you need to do is email your recipe to wineclubcomp@bbr.com by 20th November 2009, then we’ll notify the winners and share their favourite recipes on the blog.

Berrys’ Wine Club is a bi-monthly service that gives members the opportunity to try new wines safe in the knowledge that Berrys’ masters of wine have selected the very best bottles for them to try. Benefits include discounted tickets to events, money off Wine Club wines, encyclopaedic reference guides, recipes and quite a bit more. Plus you can swap, skip or cancel at any time for absolute peace of mind.

I was invited to the brilliant gastro-pub, The Wellington Arms,  in deepest darkest Basingstoke a couple of nights ago by a bon viveur of a client. Sadly, as I’m not the most well organised person, I’d left it too late in the day to plunder my own cellar (housed here rather than home, as the temptation is too great!) so I had to make a hasty stop in the shop to pick out a bottle of something modest and appropriate.

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 International Wine Challenge – Wine Merchant of the Year; Direct Merchant of the Year and Rhône Specialist of the Year
Decanter Online Wine Merchant of the Year 

The excitement has almost lowered to a low buzz following our success in last week’s wine awards.

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Alvaro Palacios (left) has been at the forefront of the Spanish wine scene for some 20 years now so we at Berry Bros. were delighted that he could join us and guests at No. 3 St James’s for our ‘Prophet of Priorat’ dinner on 3rd July.

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Nigel Greening of Felton Road Estate in New Zealand gives us an insight into his recent trip to Dubai…

OK, The land of concrete and dust is finally come. Fittingly, I flew in on an Emirates A380, the largest plane in the world. It is an astonishing bit of kit… apparently there is a spa with showers in first class, where they will shortly be pouring our wine (first, that is, not in the shower!)… typical that the wine travels better than I do! I have to ‘make do’ with business, no shabby choice with large beds, and a very roomy bar to lounge in. The thing is just ridiculously big; I think they have to keep the upper deck pressurised even when the plane is on the ground, it is so tall.

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A charity dinner, auction, wine sales and sponsored diet helped raise a huge £150,000 for Wine Relief on Red Nose Day (Friday 13th March).

Berrys’ Big Red Nose Dinner with Ch. Latour and Jancis Robinson MW raised £23,500 for Wine Relief, one of the fundraisers for Comic Relief. The auction, also held in the cellars beneath Berrys’ London shop, saw 15 imperials of top Bordeaux wines from the legendary 2005 vintage raise £37,500 and another five lots made an additional £65,000. A further £6,000 was raised from the sales of Berrys’ best selling wine Good Ordinary Claret in the six weeks before Red Nose Day and £17,000 from a sponsored diet undertaken by 16 Berrys’ staff.

Wine Relief is the brainchild of internationally respected Master of Wine Jancis Robinson and her husband, restaurant critic, Nick Lander. They put their heads together to devise Wine Relief in 1999 which has fast become a key fundraiser for every Red Nose Day campaign since. Wine Relief has raised over £3.5 million as part of the Red Nose Day campaigns.

Jancis Robinson says she was speechless after the event which raised such an amazing total.

“While millions of Britons were watching what sounds like a distinctly superior night of comedy in aid of Comic Relief on BBC1, I spent last Friday evening in the cellars of Berry Bros. in St James’s, London at the wonderful Ch. Latour dinner which, with its small number of hand-picked, rare auction items and some extremely generous bidders, managed to raise an extraordinary total. Coupled with the sums raised by selling Berrys’ Good Ordinary Claret during the fundraising period and the famous Chunky Monkey campaign, which has seen sponsored weight fall off the likes of Jasper Morris MW and Simon Staples,” says Jancis who says she is delighted with the unbelievable total.

Separately at the Berry’s headquarters in Basingstoke, members of Berrys’ fine wine team Matt Tipping and Simon Lubawy (left) ‘did something funny for money’ by painting their heads red in a bid to mimic this year’s Red Nose design.

Last week I went out for dinner with some ‘wine friends’. We always go to a lovely restaurant where the owner lets us bring our own wine – and the pressure is on to bring a really interesting/unusual/just-rather-fine-please bottle of wine to taste blind and share with tapas.

With all the recent TV coverage of Bordeaux and Burgundy, I fancied something a little bit different, and popped down to the Berrys’ Factory Outlet on my way out of work for inspiration. “What do you recommend?” was my question to the shop staff. “Have you tried the oak-aged Santorini?” was the immediate reply.

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I’m not sure how many of you saw the BBC Documentary on us last night but for many of us at BBR it was the first time we had ever seen it!

Over the course of almost 18 months we must have been filmed for approximately 40/50 hours each, all of which had to be condensed into an hour, which was very unsettling as we just didn’t know what to expect. 

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Well after the apocalyptic conditions that graced us last week- a few of us in the Fine wine team decided to treat ourselves to a bit of Burgundy night on Friday, with the first half of the evening being the battle of the Bourgogne Blanc titans.

Four of our favourite white wine Domaines in Burgundy battling it out for the crown of Bourgogne Blanc of 2005. Domaines Coche-Dury, Arnaud Ente, Jean-Phillipe Fichet and Leflaive… anticipation was high!!!

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On behalf of Berrys’ I’d like to wish our thoughts and support to those effected by the current fires in Victoria, Australia. Such loss of life and the horrific images witnessed cannot help but make us take stock of life and be thankful what we have.

The picturesque wine region of the Yarra Valley just on the outskirts of Melbourne is still under threat. I spoke to a friend and former colleague at Yarra Yering this morning who described how the flames came to with 500 yds of the vineyard.

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I’ve just got back from a week on the road (by boat next time surely?) spent reviewing the calibre of the 2008 vintage, one skewed by April frost in the west & June hail in the east.

It also proved a fine time to tap into what’s going on round the edges, especially against a backdrop of chic Kiwi competition & how the ‘home’ of Sauvignon Blanc in particular (notably Sancerre & Pouilly-Fumé) & the Loire in general is responding.

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The Perfect Holiday Destination.

A common dilemma.

For a lot of people, though they might not be able to agree on exactly where it is, they will be able to agree on a number of common attributes.

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