Sunday, February 05, 2012

Peter Broderick -- Sideline

Here is a very fine song from a talented young American musician named Peter Broderick (b.1987).

The writing's strong, as his is performance; I think one of the most affecting elements of it is that you're introduced early on to that beautiful, melancholic, fragile chorus -- then, finally, you get to hear it on top of the piano.

I'm not going to write any more. But have a listen -- I'm sure it will grab you.

 

Monday, January 30, 2012

Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs in Great Britain

I get email.

Suzie writes with a fine story to tell of a weekend visit to her Mum's place where, in a bout of attic-box-raking, she got her paws on a very old book with a long note in it from the author to her great great grandfather. The book -- how about this for a title? -- is called Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs in Great Britain, Chronicled from the Earliest to the Present Time; the author was Mr William Andrews.

Here is the truly wonderful tale from the page which Suzie screen-grabbed for me. Enjoy it...


The whole book is free to read online -- you can view it here -- though surely this is one you should track down during an afternoon of pleasurably relaxed trawling around some secondhand bookshops?

- - -

Famous Frosts, with its incredible stories of frost fairs on the Thames, does call to mind Nasa's climate change vid ... just in case you were still in any doubt about the issue.


Sunday, January 22, 2012

Morgon, Côte du Py, Domaine Jean-Marc Burgaud, 2010

I should point out, before I make my negative comments about this wine, that I spend a lot of my time acting as an unpaid trade envoy of The Wine Society, boldly coercing my friends, family and clients to become members. I have opened many hundreds of bottles from the Society, and have been truly delighted with every single bloody one of them.

So. The Jean-Marc Burgaud. Why did I buy it? And was it a stab in the dark? No -- I love the better wines of Beaujolais (the crus, if you must), especially the heftier styles of Moulin-a-Vent and Morgon (map here). I harbour especially devotional feelings for the Jean Foillard Morgon Cote du Py, a truly beautiful wine, worth every penny of its £20 price. If you've never bought any, may I suggest that you stop reading this -- honestly, go on: open another window in your browser -- and buy a case of it immediately? You will be very, very happy if you do this. (For some reason (tiny production volumes?) it's not sold by the Society.)

It might be fair to say that when I bought the Burgaud I was optimistically hoping for a bit of Foillard-lite: that wonderful combination of uncharacteristic (for gamay) spiciness and pure fruit. I drank my first gobful of the decanted Burgaud at a rather nippy 12°, so I certainly wasn't readying myself for a wash of Californian richness, but what was on offer was austerity itself: unwaveringly narrow, tannic tartness. A wee while later (God bless you if you're still reading, truly), the wine had warmed up a bit, but that straight-as-a-die tightness was still all that was on offer. Pfft.

24 hours later: has the asperity of the initial experience yielded to something I wouldn't "have to work at". No, sirs and madams, no.

As for the notes accompanying this wine on the Society website? Well. Allow me to state here, in a gentlemanly -- but forthright -- manner that the man responsible for describing this wine as "fabulously rich and fruity" is a scoundrel, a blackguard and a wayward vagrant.

I have yet to decide what to do with the second bottle -- maybe I'll have it replaced; but maybe I'll keep it until the end of its window, in 2017, to see if something else evolves in time...

It's striking that it's taken me several years of dedicated buying and drinking from the Society to, finally, encounter a wine I wasn't enamoured of. My love of the Society remains undimmed. The new list arrived in the post yesterday, with this legend printed at the back:

2011 proved an excellent year for the Society, thanks to you, its members, who continue to give strong support. Good trading allows us, as a non-profit-maximising co-operative, to thank you in the most practical way with price reductions on more than 300 wines in this New Year List. These are not short-term headline-grabbing discounts but modest, sensible price reductions for the benefit of as many members as possible. 

I shall drink, once more, to the health of the Society's noble causes.

Sunday, January 08, 2012

More shit written on wine labels *

Back in August of last year Old Parn drew our attention to some of the awful, witless shit-crap you may occasionally be unfortunate enough to read on the label of your wine bottle. You know the sort of guff: the mere pretentiousness of things like, "Seductive spicy notes played by the Shiraz, harmonised by the floral, violet undertones of the Viognier. Culminating in a symphony of flavours." Through to the malfunctioning Babelfish of, "garnet rims and purple glints," and, "good backbone and fleshy to the mount".

Well. I went to a little London food and wine event a couple of months ago with @crepple, organised by and for producers from Puglia.

I met one of the wine producers; he was a jolly likable fellow, and his wines (mainly reds) were fairly nice, if not outstanding. I took his wee brochure away with me. Here are some of the descriptions therein:

"Is a very great red wine. It has color red ruby with purplish reflexes. The perfume and ethereal and persistent, the taste, justly tannico warm and harmonic with notes of leather and of spice." (I swear I've transcribed that exactly as it appeared.) 

"Gotten by the grape of Troia and Merlot, it has color red ruby, perfume yielded with signs of forest fruits, soft and harmonic taste with a good fullness gustativa." 

"The taste is dry, with an acido/tanico equilibrium." 

And so, incomprehensibly, on.

Aye, so we could snigger at this unfortunate gibberish, but do you know what? The wines are decent. They deserve an audience. So why not -- at the very least -- ask at least one relatively literate mother tongue speaker to read your copy before publishing it on an internet, or in a brochure? I might actually drop them a message, you know, and -- politely, mind -- ask them to revisit their copy in the presence of someone who could successfully express the sense of "justly tannico warm" in clear, elegant English.

- - -

* My title is a modified version of one written by Old Parn himself.

Saturday, December 03, 2011

The Sampler: Jamie Hutchinson

Every other Friday afternoon Jamie Hutchinson sends a long email to his customers (he's the founder of The Sampler, a pair of wine shops in Islington and South Kensington, notable for their early adoption of those clever sampling machines which allow you to take an affordable mini-gargle of some Chateau Haut-Brion 1982).

I like his emails. Why? They have heart, they're unpretentious and they read as if they've been written by a man who loves the grape. He's admirably consistent, sending out his 1,500 words at the allotted hour every two weeks. The voice he uses is authentically his own: there's levity in it. And the emails are conversational, devoid of that stiff, businessy formality which bedevils so many sales messages, especially those from large corporations.

Friday's email included a link to the report on The Sampler's buccaneering buying trip to the southwest of France; I especially liked JH's wry introduction to several of the most outre wines he discovered...
• Les Cavailles Blanc 2009 £17.30. Made from the tediously familiar blend of 70% Mauzac, 20% L’en de Lel, and 10% Oundenc and fermented in cement.
• La Combe d’Aves Rouge 2007 £19.60. Again, just your everyday blend of 50% Braucol and 50% Duras. Very elegant in style – that lifted, natural nose and a red fruited and refreshing palate.
• La Grande Tertre 2010 £28.20. Sticking with the international varieties again, this is 90% Prunelard and 10% Braucol. 
Sign up here, people.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Steven Pinker: how to speak

It's good to hear someone big-brained with a love of language speak beautifully, isn't it?

The most striking example of this I've ever heard, in the flesh at least, was from Steven Pinker at the LSE in 2010.

Near the end of the fifteen-minute Q&A session which followed his talk he was falteringly posed a long question which could be better expressed as: "You're an atheist. Aren't you, in calling for religion to be eradicated, just as bad as the religious zealots who want to force their religion on unbelievers?"


His response would have been notable if he'd been given 24 hours to write it down; that he delivered it on the hoof, in front of 450 people, makes it truly remarkable...
"As a thorough-going atheist I would not have a desire to eradicate religion. I think it's important to come to the best collective understanding that we can about the nature of the world and the nature of morality and justice -- and that will often require overturning long held religious beliefs. But religions themselves, as social institutions, have obviously evolved, thank goodness: the way all of the major religions are practised now is very different from the way they were practised a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago: thanks to the enlightenment, thanks to the pressure from secular reason. There's no reason why that couldn't occur and all of the things that are valuable about religion -- that they are places for people to meet, they're forums for ethical discussion -- can continue to exist; but as long as it doesn't entail that we indulge propositions about the world that our best reason indicates are incorrect, or moral arguments that our best moral reasoning indicate are indefensible."
- - -

I'm looking forward to reading The Better Angels of Our Nature; Pinker's 2007 essay, A History of Violence, on the same subject -- the decline of violence -- is a compelling, and compellingly optimistic, primer.

Saturday, October 08, 2011

Competitive eating

The main - only? - question to be asked of competitive eating is, of course: WHY?

To grasp some of the horrors of the pursuit (past time? hobby?) check out the records page on the Major League Eating site. One stand out for me is:

Mayonnaise
4 32-ounce bowls mayonnaise
8 minutes
Oleg Zhornitskiy

One thing though: the record holders do actually appear to be athletically trained and conditioned -- no six-belly fatties here.

I know with great certainty that I will never eat competitively.

Friday, October 07, 2011

Shooting fish in a barrel

DJ Flula holds forth entertainingly on an English idiom even, or perhaps especially, when his English grammar is at its most skew-whiff.

"I don't need to make a pouring of the fish into the barrel -- and then shoot those."

"Fish in a bag I think better than fish in a barrel that you have just made shoot of".

Well put sir.

[Via Ricardo, in Moscow.]


Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Bert

I was sad to hear that Bert Jansch (he had the perfect name for his occupation, didn't he?) died today, aged 67 -- it would've been nice to think that he could still have continued to record and perform, as I'm sure would have been his wont, until into his ninth decade at least, just like the bold BB King.

It was Dave Boyle Sr, in the early 1990s, who first played me Jansch's music (Dave had already confirmed his impeccable taste in the matter of the 6-string by also introducing me to Leo Kottke's tunes).

I can still remember well my first hearing of Angie and the distinctiveness of that muscular, angular style of his: the fluent bass lines contrasting beautifully with so many nimble little hammer-ons and pull-offs.

I saw him play live twice: once in the mid-1990s (with some of Pentangle), once on his own at the Tron Theatre in 2000; the latter was probably the perfect size and setting for him.

He was a great player.





Thursday, September 29, 2011

Garp

"If you are careful," Garp wrote, "if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane."

The World According to Garp, by John Irving.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Eleven Minutes Late

There are great pleasures to be found in Matthew Engel's book, Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain. It's deftly balanced stuff, combining stylish, wry levity with belt-and-braces history. I've not finished it yet, but I'll damn well recommend it.

Here he is, on the first of his major trips, from Penzance to Dundee non-stop:


At Bristol, we got a fresh crew, and I regarded them the way an old lag looks at a new screw. I'd been going for four hours now, a third of the way. Who did they think they were, coming in and taking charge? I'm a lifer, me. This is also the way railway staff regard each new franchisee. One guard I met in the north, who had been in the same job for twenty-five years, tried to list all the different companies that had ordered him around, and the different-coloured uniforms he had worn. He gave up in despair.

As Engel writes in his prologue:

I love trains. I hate trains. This is a book about trains. This is not a book about trains. It is a little about me. It may be a lot about you. This is a book about the British.

I also loved this passage, written in a style which pays knowing homage to the commentators and journalists of the Victorian age:

In 1868 the Midland Railway, determined to compete with its rivals to the east and west, pushed through a new line south from Bedford into its awesome new cathedral at St Pancras. Then it marched north to conquer Scotland by building the Settle and Carlisle line through some of the bleakest landscape in the kingdom at a terrifying cost of men and treasure.

To Amazon, or the library, with you.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

In praise of The Wine Society

Do you enjoy a wee drop of wine from time to time? Whilst you're not given to the economically ruinous and frankly distasteful business of chucking £1000-a-bottle-claret down your thrapple, do you care enough about getting a decent bottle to sidestep the two-bottles-for-a-fiver options offered by your local 24-hour grocery shop? Well, if you enjoy wine, may I urge you to join The Wine Society forthwith?

Why should you join? The main reason is that the Society (full name: International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society Ltd) is a mutual. As Will Lyons put it in the Wall Street Journal:

"...as a mutual, the Wine Society is owned by its members, so the primary concern of its management committee is, in the words of their buying director, Master of Wine Sebastian Payne, to offer good quality wine to members at minimum-added cost. The day-to-day concerns of other international wine retailers, such as growing profit margins and increasing market share, come second to finding and selling the wines its members want to drink."

This is the very thing - one needn't be in thrall to the writings of Karl Marx to realise that the Society's model is damn near perfect if what you're about is good drinking for a sensible price: it's a large, long-established, well managed and resourced organisation whose profits go back into the business, and not to meddling, pin-stripe-clad investor types.

Not only does mutual status bring you a better quality of vino, you'll also find that there are other small pleasures to be had in what the men who say "Damn!" (from A Bit of Fry and Laurie) would call "the customer experience", such as the Society's use of its own fleet of vans and drivers - you'll find that you're spared the travails which often go hand-in-hand with having stuff delivered by a courier company. The Society also widely and clearly publishes its telephone number and email address - phone them and there shall be no death-by-Vivaldi.

It costs £40 to buy a lifetime share, and there is no ongoing commitment to buy. The Society is A Very Good Thing.


* Two wine bloggers - both proud Society members - worthy of mention are Tom Parnell and Simon Woolf.

- - -

One wee suggestion I have for the Society concerns the structuring of its offers of wines en primeur.

Let's say that, like me, you'd like to order a couple of cases of a decent 2010 Bordeaux such as Chateau Angludet, costing £250 per case of 12 bottles (plus VAT and duty). I already own a case of the 2009, and I'd really like to have the 2010 too: both are good (though quite different) years, and it strikes me that I could pass a rather jolly evening, sitting by myself on the occasion of my 50th birthday, with a bottle of the 2009 and 2010 in each of my paws.

So, come the 15th of June 2011 - the day of the release of the first chunk of 2010 Bordeaux onto the Society's website - I ordered the wines, submitting my credit card details in the process. However, as my "Confirmation of Request Only" email states:

"Please find attached confirmation of receipt of your order for wines from the 2010 Bordeaux In Bond offer. These details are being entered into our allocation system and you will receive notification of wines allocated to you by Monday 8th August 2011 at the latest."

I rather wish they would change this process: it seems that my (modest) desire to buy this wine, and my loyalty to the Society, are not compatible. I actually requested a further three cases of wine on 15th June, but, come August, I may be allocated none. (Earlier in the year, a friend and I both requested some red Burgundy en primeur from the Society - I ordered three cases, he ordered an impressively bibulous seventeen cases. How many were we each allocated? One case.)

Another added little frustration is that, if one were to rely on an (ultimately unsuccessful) request for allocation, the wines could sell out in the interim from other merchants running a straightforward, first-come-first-served system.

The Society's lottery system should probably apply to the investment-grade top wines, especially in strong vintages - but for Joe Punter who actually has the radical intention of drinking his £100-£300 claret, a simpler, straightforward purchase system is surely preferable.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Iain Sinclair on the London Olympics

Iain Sinclair appeared on Start the Week (Radio 4) yesterday, holding forth entertainingly on the corporatised fuck-up which is the Stratford Olympic site - you can listen to it here (he is on second).

"It feels rather like the period after the American civil war when the carpetbaggers hit the south, this strange global regiment of weird money men and imagineers and promoters of every kind of scheme."

An obvious potential problem with cerebral commentary of such great, learned depth is that it can come across as too clever-clever, a bit smarty-pants - and, of course, as eloquent and effective a howl of outrage as it is, it could also come across as just that: an erudite whinge, lacking the prescription for an alternative. Mid-chat, Sinclair is asked pointedly by Richard Sennett: "Well, Iain, what would you have wanted instead?" .. and his response is reassuring, because he really has thought about what would have been better in the place of the alienation and sterility of the site as it is.

(Sinclair is also bang-on on the subject of the Gurkhas, hired to guard the site - I've passed by a few of them at the permanently-manned gates near the Greenway cycle path, and they seem perfectly chosen for the job.)

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Pragmatism

This insightful little article on pragmatism by Tim Harford is worth a butcher's; he describes well the flakiness which besets ministerial decision-making..

Politicians and their advisors have repeatedly explained to me the problem: gathering evidence is all very well in theory, but in practice a minister will arrive at their post to discover her predecessor has done little to commission the kind of solid evidence that might be useful when, say, improving literacy standards in schools, or reducing re-offending rates of former prisoners.

When she asks how long it will take to produce her own evidence base, she'll be told three or four years, perhaps longer. Figuring that by then she'll be on to her next job, or perhaps even the job after that, they'll set about figuring out what to do immediately. And action without decent evidence is bound to be dogmatic, not pragmatic. Two years later, a new minister will arrive in seat, and the cycle of ignorance continues.

Harford also wisely compares Silicon Valley and Wall Street, referring to the former's mantra of "fail faster" as being infinitely preferable to the latter's much less desirable "too big too fail".

As Harford says, it's a shame we don't have a vote for pragmatism..

*

"Fail faster" probably owes its existence to Esther Dyson's remark: “Fail cheap. Fail fast. Fail often. Always make new mistakes.”

Monday, May 23, 2011

School of Wine - now north of the river

Right, listen up good people. Green and Blue, the fabulous independent wine shop, are launching their 13-week School of Wine course in the City on Tuesday 7th June (i.e. north of the sacred Thames, for those of you who get all skittish at the thought of heading south).

My thoughts on the utter excellence of this course have already been noted, right here.

You should go. I feel the same about School of Wine as I do about The Wire: jealous of anyone who has yet to start it.

Send your booking request to: rebecca.skinner@greenandbluewines.com

More details here.

- - -

Green and Blue School of Wine

How to taste

Viticulture

Vinification

Northern France

Southern France

Italy

Germany & Austria

Spain & Portugal

Australia & New Zealand

North America

South Africa & South America

Port, Sherry and Sweet Wines

Champagne & Sparkling

Tuesday 7th June

Tuesday 14th June

Tuesday 21st June

Tuesday 28th June

Tuesday 5th July

Tuesday 12th July

Tuesday 19th July

Tuesday 26th July

Tuesday 2nd August

Tuesday 9th August

Tuesday 16th August

Tuesday 23rd August

Tuesday 30th August