Once again that time of the year has come around when I start making visits to various wine fairs.
First up was the annual fair for the Loire Valley wines, held as usual in Angers on the 5th, 6th & 7th February.
This year I took a friend along for the ride who happens to be a rather good chef. The reason for doing this was to improve my understanding of what good chefs are looking for when they select wines for their menus.
Small wine merchants like me tend to have certain styles of wines which we stock, it's much easier to sell wines that we admire!
Anyway after two days of strenuous tasting we both came to the conclusion that the 2005 white wines had really benefited from the year in the bottle, still showing lots of fruit, good acidity and sufficient alcohol giving some lovely well balanced wines.
The 2006 whites we tasted, were mostly tank samples, the wines not being bottled until April or May. I do believe that 2006 will prove to be one of the best vintages in a very long time.
There was wonderful fruit maturity and ripeness, great acidity and because of the lovely long hot summer, with rain at just the right moments and more sunshine during the harvest, the alcohol levels were a little higher than in other years. Perfect!!
As for the red wines, the 2005 vintage is really showing well now and I know that there will be some new wines of this year on my list, which ones, I will keep you all in suspense until they arrive. I can truly say that if I were going to buy wines to lay down then I would seriously consider 2006 for both red and white. The 2003 vintage was the best year for the red wines in a long time but dire for the whites, where as I think that the 2006 vintage will be stunning for both.
My friend was equally impressed and was looking forward to seeing some of the wines that we tasted on his list.

Further inspired by Hugh Macleod's idea of selling by "market disruption" (see gapingvoid.com for his words of wisdom and wonderful pithy cartoons) the following will be published this weekend in the Guernsey Press as a further provocative, hopefully thought-provoking ad for Cavalier Wines.
This really is one of my pet hates. The phrase was originally coined by a very good friend of mine who has worked in the wine trade for longer than he cares to remember. What is it and where is to be found? It is alive and well at your local restaurant or hotel, the one you go to occasionally where they have not changed the winelist since your first visit...
Mind you, it is not entirely their fault. The so-called wine merchant is also to blame. The Wine List has become a sacred tablet, wrapped up in a fake leather wallet and filled with too many wines, half of which they haven't got. When it has the supplier's name emblazoned on it, it's a good bet they haven't changed it since the flood.
I have only ever been to a handful of restaurants in my long working life that proudly change the wine list on a regular basis because they are as interested in wine as they are in food. Don?t let's forget that most restaurants make more money on the wine than they do on the food.
I know so many restaurants where The List is a meaningless bunch of names and vintages that should have gone out with ark. How much better a list of 12 well chosen wines with a simple description and the actual vintages they have in stock! Oh, by the way any Rosé more than 18 months old shouldn't be there in the first place.

I am sure this is a sentiment that we can all agree on. My main concern at the moment is that we are being given less and less choice because of the power of the supermarkets and their use of large branded wines, especially those from the southern hemisphere.
OK, these winesare safe and won't make a fool of you, but to me they all taste much the same. They have good fruit, soft and easy tannins and not much else, except a very attractive price.
I think drinking wine should be an inviting experience, whereby the drinker feels that to try something different is fun and rewarding.
There are so many really exciting and wonderful wines that are made from obscure and long abused grapes just waiting to be discovered. Every year I go to France ,Italy and Spain and I am constantly amazed at the variety and extraordinary quality of these wines. Yes they will cost a little more, but oh what joy. Anyway, is not the spice of life it's untold variety?
Published in the Guernsey Press 8th July 2006.