Virtual around the world wine tour

[Marchbanks]

Finally, a bottle of Châteauneuf. I don’t think I’d ever have too much trouble picking out a Brunier one, their house style seems immediately obvious to me. This one is starting to go a bit brick-coloured around the edges, but there’s plenty of life in it yet. Fruit, power, concentration - it’s got the lot, really. And I still have one left before starting on the 2015s, 16s, 17s etc. etc. Not to mention Piedlongs. The Brunier Châteauneuf section of the cellar is looking very healthy.

Vieux Télégraphe takes its name from a semaphore tower built at the top of the vineyard in 1792 or 1821, depending on which source you read. Not many references to semaphore in my collection, but a couple of suggestions by iPeng for ‘tower’. One was Living in the Heart of the Beast by Henry Cow, which I didn’t understand at all. The other was Illinois.

‘Vieux’ was much easier. No end of suggestions. I chose something from my preferred, non-up-himself Eno period…

Then as I found myself sitting in near-darkness eating bread and seriously herby fromage frais from the local dairy I realised I was in a Stormcock mood. It only happens rarely, but when it does nothing else hits the spot quite like it.

As you can see from the photo, cat 1 was in a good mood - at least if all the ‘read your cat’s mood from its tail’ guides are to be believed. That tail was wound round my leg frequently last night. This morning she backed away when she first saw me, then ran off halfway through her saucer of salami. Maybe it’s the pregnancy hormones. Cat 2 couldn’t believe its luck and snuck in behind my back to polish it off. It scarpered when I turned round. Little bugger.

 

[Marchbanks]

The last bottle (virtually speaking) in France is Jean-Paul Brun’s Le Ronsay 2020 Beaujolais. I found this lurking, forgotten, in the basement and thought it might be a suitable accompaniment to a sausage and cheese lunch. I don’t usually like drinking at lunchtime and generally don’t have anything to eat either, so a holiday seemed a perfect excuse. And that’s pretty much Le Ronsay. Nothing complex, nothing to dislike at all. Just knock it back, smile and fill your glass again. If you want something by JPB that will engage your brain and tastebuds, go for l’Ancien.

Note that the cat hasn’t spotted my treachery of eating at lunchtime. That makes up for last night when I was visited by all three in turn. Cat no. 3 (ginger) slid stealthily in my direction in search of bowls of food in near-darkness after 11pm. About three metres away, it looked up and saw me. It nearly jumped out of its skin, then froze - I have never seen a cat’s posture demonstrate the thought ‘Oh, shit!!’ quite as clearly before. A very hasty exit followed.

I widened the music search parameters to ‘Brown’ to give myself a chance. From the list I went for the Dukes of Stratosphear. My Love Explodes is probably one of my Desert Island songs - Dave Gregory’s gleeful Beck-isms are brilliant, and the gong strikes are so perfectly judged that I burst out laughing nearly every time.

Then I went for Zappa’s YCDTOSA vol. 4. Brown Moses leads into The Evil Prince, which has great three-vocalist singing and one of my favourite Zappa solos. An even better one is on Stevie’s Spanking from the second CD, in which he proves his style is head and shoulders above his bandmate Vai, whose preceding speed-of-light solo isn’t in the same league. The video is worth watching too, shot from a camera mounted on Zappa’s headstock.

 

[mandryka]

The last bottle (virtually speaking) in France is Jean-Paul Brun’s Le Ronsay 2020 Beaujolais. I found this lurking, forgotten, in the basement and thought it might be a suitable accompaniment to a sausage and cheese lunch. I don’t usually like drinking at lunchtime and generally don’t have anything to eat either, so a holiday seemed a perfect excuse. And that’s pretty much Le Ronsay. Nothing complex, nothing to dislike at all. Just knock it back, smile and fill your glass again. If you want something by JPB that will engage your brain and tastebuds, go for l’Ancien.

It's too young -- you should have waited a couple of years. This is the surprising conclusion of my experience with Le Ronsay.