I’m currently enjoying the sun at Womad Festival 2009 at Charlton Park here in Malmesbury, Wiltshire.
I’ve taken a lot of photos so far, many of which are to be found on Flickr here…
If you would like to use any of these, please email me or contact me via www.gregnbaker.me
Naked Wines: South Africa
I was lucky enough to be invited to Naked Wines’ latest tasting for customers at One, Alfred Place (a lovely venue) last night.
I had the chance to taste some of the existing South African range (Arabella, Bruwer Raats) but there were also many new producers showing off their ranges.
Photos to follow, and my simple scores below the jump.
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Polo in the Park, London
London won after a tense final versus New York!
Naked Wines
I’ve recently signed up to a new wine venture called Naked Wines, from the founder of Virgin Wines and 17 former senior Virgin Wines staff. From the press release:
“Rowan Gormley, founder of Virgin Money, the Virgin One Account, Orgasmic Wines and Virgin Wines, launched www.nakedwines.com, on 1 December 2008, to be a ‘Facebook for Wine Lovers’.”
The site “lists 96 wines from 32 small producers, with the focus on up and coming wine regions (like Chile’s Bio-Bio Valley)” and “Customers can also become ‘Naked Wines Angels’, where the winemaker offers 6 bottles of wine for free to encourage the customer to try their wines (the customer paying UK duty and delivery of £15.85 for 6 bottles). The custumer gets 33% of their spend with that winemaker refunded if they agree to support them by pre-paying £5 a month towards their next case.”
The idea is to bring wine from the smaller lesser known growers and get it into the hands of (hopefully) eager British wine drinkers. The ‘Facebook’ part is done via friendly profiles of each grower (Bruwer Raats and his lovely Chenin Blanc [CT] is a favourite) and a ‘Wall’ which allows drinkers to post their comments, feedback and communicate with the grower.
There are a couple of novel features, the main one being their “Wine Angels“. This is a strategy by Naked Wines to build a relationship between the buyer and the maker, in the hope you will obviously continue to buy more of their wine, plus give them a more stable and predictable revenue stream. It’s an interesting idea, and I’ve already snapped up a mixed case in their January sale which includes some more of the delicious Chenin Blanc [CT] from Bruwer Raats.
All in all, it’s an interesting new venture and I look forward to seeing the quality of the wines in my mixed case.
Wine Tasting
After realising I have built up rather a large collection of wine, as dealt with here, I decided to host a rather informal wine-tasting evening in the flat on Saturday 13th December. Despite being the day after the rather late-night departmental Christmas party, people were feeling pretty chirpy and in the mood to sample the 12 wines I’d selected.
Sim, a law school friend and fellow trainee, was an absolute star and prepared canapes, including sausage rolls, bruschetta and spinach and ricotta snacks…
Here’s the wine list with some comments (usually the ‘blurb’ amended by me) on each one:
New 50mm lens
Inspired by various posts on the interweb about 50mm lenses (including this one), my parents (with some helpful suggestions) bought me a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens to use with my Canon 450D body. I haven’t experimented too much with it yet but two things have struck me about having such a fast lens and a wide (1.8) aperture:
- Firstly I can take photos with remarkable detail in very little light; pushing the ISO up to 1600 results in very little noise.
- Secondly, I can take some great nightime shots without the use of a tripod using faster shutter speeds with the larger aperture.
As VothPhoto writes:
There is a difference of approximately 3.5 stops between f/1.8, the typical maximum aperture for an entry-level 50mm lens, and f/5.6, the typical maximum aperture at the portrait end of a “consumer” zoom. This is a huge difference in practice. Lighting that would require a difficult shutter speed of 1/8 second at f/5.6 would permit easy hand-held photography at 1/90 at f/1.8.
I’m looking forward to experimenting some more and also trying some portrait photography.
Is this a good vintage?
The Wine Curmudgeon: Wine terms: Vintage – Newly discovered Wine Curmudgeon makes a couple of very good points about buying wine based on vintage; for a large proportion of the wine you buy, the vintage simply doesn’t matter…large producers try to ensure their wine is consistent across vintages, so the question to ask is whether it is a good producer. WC sums it up:
“When does vintage matter? Generally, the more expensive the wine, the more important vintage is. It’s irrelevant in a $10 wine, may matter a bit in a $25 wine, and comes into play in wine that costs $50 or more. And how many of us drink $50 wine regularly?”
Just whose Hallelujah is it anyway?
BBC NEWS | Magazine | Just whose hallelujah is it anyway?
Interesting article on the origins of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah…did you know he wrote over 80 verses? I’m not a fan of Alexandra Burke’s version with the gospel choir…although she does have a great voice. My favourite versions have to be Jeff Buckley’s and Imogen Heap’s, plus possibly Rufus Wainwright’s and Ryan Adam’s!
Wine Bailout
Dude, Where’s My 401K? – A genius idea, pay your $39 a bottle and on the purchase date the price is pegged to the Dow Jones Industrial Average…price never rises about £39 a bottle but could fall…”The wine will be bottled in August 2009. If the Dow goes down, you get an economic stimulus check of $2 per bottle for every 100 point drop. If it goes up, then your 401K is looking good and the maximum of $39 is a steal for similar wines we produce that command $75+ at retail. Bull
or bear, you can’t lose.” From Vinography on Twitter.
CellarTracker & my wine
I’ve recently started spending a lot more time buying, sorting and researching wine. This is partly in preparation for the ‘party season’ but also I’ve caught ‘the bug’; I’ve been to a number of wine tastings recently (Virgin Wines, Bibendum, The Wine Show) and have ended up buying various mixed cases of my favourites.
I’ve reached the point where I have circa 120 bottles; some for drinking now, some to be kept for special occasions and about 20 which could do with about 2-6 years of cellaring. My physical organisation and storage of these wines is fairly haphazard, the wines for laying down sit in a wine rack in a cool room in the flat, whites for immediate drinking are in the fridge, bottles sealed with a cork are in various cool cupboards in makeshift racks, while the rest are still in their cases until I find more rack space.
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