Our trip started with the early Eurostar to Brussels (the train actually goes to Amsterdam, but stops in Brussels and The Hague too).
Continue reading “Thursday, 13/07/2023: London to Luxembourg”Thursday, 13/07/2023: London to Luxembourg
A trip to the Mosel valley
“This summer, I’m going to Germany to drink lots of German wines.”
Say that to any random person and you’ll probably get a number of confused looks, if not outright mockery:
- GERMAN wines?
- I did not know they made wine out there!
- Aren’t they sickly sweet?
- etc…
To be honest, I was one of those people who thought wine couldn’t be made in Germany.
Or rather, it hadn’t even crossed my mind that it was possible!
Continue reading “A trip to the Mosel valley”My favourites from the Bancroft Wines 2022 portfolio tasting
I was invited to attend this event last June (many thanks to Kat!).
It was quite a huge event with LOTS of producers showcasing a veritable variety of wines, and I quickly realised I could not even remotely try as many as I wanted, so I took a quick executive decision to just focus on the producers from the areas that have been intriguing me the most lately: Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, and neighbouring and “up and coming” trend-wise areas from France such as Alsace and Loire Valley.
Unfortunately left untasted were wines from Friulia in the north of Italy, Abruzzo, many from New Zealand and Australia (I was really looking forward to trying out more of their Pinot Noir and Rieslings), etc, etc.
Here are the ones I tasted and liked the best:
Continue reading “My favourites from the Bancroft Wines 2022 portfolio tasting”Casa Julio (Fontanars dels Alforins)
This was the second birthday surprise for my mum! Lunch at the famous Casa Julio in Fontanars.
The story goes that it was a traditional restaurant, then got an ambitious chef, they did really well, so well they got a Michelin star at some point, then got really stressed about the implications of having the star, and then gave it up and went back to just serving nice food but without the added stress of being in the Michelin guide.
Star or no star, we did want to go both for the first time and also back again—some of us thought we had been there before in one of the pre-star incarnations. But weren’t really sure, as when restaurants are “traditional” it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between them, specially when that visit was many years ago. Had we been there? Did it really matter? No!
Continue reading “Casa Julio (Fontanars dels Alforins)”A visit to Bodegas Arráez (La Font de la Figuera, Valencia)
We visited this winery on the same week that we went to Pago de Tharsys.
How often do you pack two winery visits in a week? Very rarely, I’d say! But it was really insightful as we still had the previous experience fresh in our minds, and it was easy to compare styles between the two.
There are plenty of similarities: both are based in the Valencia province. Both are inland, in mountainous areas, way above 500 m over sea level. They’re independent (not owned by a big group), and they offer various types of products, from entry level to premium wines.
Judging by that, you could expect the second visit to be predictable, samey, boring… but it couldn’t have been any more different!
Continue reading “A visit to Bodegas Arráez (La Font de la Figuera, Valencia)”