27 Years = 5 Bottles
INSTEAD OF BIRTHDAY candles, I happened to mark my years in a tally of vials filled and drained with a colleague yesterday. I think this totalled 27 (five bottles). Please forgive my slightly hazy recollections today...
At lunch, an entirely agreeable entire bottle of Moroccan red, Domaine Riad Jamil '04 Carignan quite powerfully lifted the scented spirits of moist lamb cubes with its raspberry perfume, served at the rather cute Original Tagine, Dorset Street.Moving further down the curio tour, Michel Rolland's Grover Vineyards Cab Sauv rolled into the dim focus of the apparently 'recently refurbished' (by spiders?) Gordon's Wine Bar,
Charing X. This oily wannabe was suspiciously redolent of Kaffir, with a few teaspoons too much sugar. A literally bog-standard Hautes Cotes de Beaune was by comparison flimsy. I was similarly nonplussed with the Chilean Echeverría (the Merlot rather than unpopular Mexican President Luis Echeverría Álvarez). 
A hop, skip and a drunken jump to Busaba, a hip Thai canteen on Wardour Street with particularly thoughtful lighting, meant time again to strike the dinner gong. An astoundingly flavourful, silken monkfish curry and energetically bitter rose apple salad delivered the most precise, controlled, contoured expressions of Asia I have known. Turkheim Riesling cold-showered the palate clean between mouthfulls... 
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Anyway, I did manage an outside wine tasting 'gig' this evening at Bankside Restaurant in the City, which it is, beside the bank of England. In fact it feels like a bank vault, but without any signs of - in this case culinary - riches, e.g. their idea of canapés ... a defecation of mash potato.*
Read Billie's perspective on the day HERE.
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