Today was a day walk from the hotel to [del]Lac D’Emosson[/del] Finhault and back again. Just under 15km, 18275 steps.

Day 0 is for practice and acclimatisation, get a feel current conditions and learn lessons that are easier to manage without full packs and glaciers.

We had a much more civilised start with an 8am breakfast, walking just before 9. The sun was shining and the clear sky was picturesque through the trees. It was a steady walk alongside the railway into Vallorcine, an SNCF lad was watering the potted geraniums asked (in english) if we needed any help. Yep, not in England any more.

We carried on down the valley to the franco-swiss border, walking through a customs station was a new one for us. Passports weren’t required this time though. The collection of buildings at Le Chatelard Frontiere seemed targeted at a certain market, three petrol stations, all stocked with duty free quantities of cigarettes and chocolate.

The industrial base station for the barrage at Le Chatelard wasn’t much better for passing tourists. Our plans changed from hunting dinosaur foot prints at 2400m to a valley walk in the blink of a ‘How Much!?’ when we saw the ticket prices for the funicular. a ride up a huge incline plane would be fun, but not that fun. Didn’t seem to have stopped a coach load of trippers from Coventry though.

Next was a 250m, 50% climb up to Gietro. Punctated by many pauses for playing with the camera and one impromptu nosebleed from yours truly. Luckily it was swiftly brought undercontrol with some calming exercises and a pile of moss that Paul pulled from some passing rocks. Lots of alpine flowers, strawberries, crickets and butterflies in the sun baked glades.

We arrived in Finault just in time for lunch. Sadly the cafes were either heavily disguised or closed, so we drank deep from the station’s water trough (yay for that Swiss tradition!) and waited for a train to tkae us to a nearby lunch.

Our plans to get an ice cream from the funciculaire’s kiosk were foiled by its attendant making a break for it just as we arrived, so we wound up munching on some expensive biscuits near the border.

A great first day out, with a number of learning points. Stock up on tissues, don’t leave the cereal bars in the hotel, take it very easy uphill and avoid the heat of the day. So, walking before 8 then? Oh well, it beats climbing 900m valleys in 30 degrees.

The Belle Vue hotel lived up to its good reviews, good sized comfortable rooms, good and clean bathrooms shared between 4, cold beer, great cheap food (mmm, polenta), welcoming hotelier and free wifi. Win.

i can’t promise free wifi on the rest of the trip, so these posts will have to come in batches.

tomorrow: col de la forclaz, by one of half a dozen routes depending on the weather and how bothered we feel in the morning. Probably via Col de Balme, but the telepherique in Vallorcine is highly tempting..

This was the scene at a most surprising hour of a Saturday morning a month ago, when I was having second thoughts about agreeing to come along to Berry’s first outing at a One Day Event. Despite having heard about Eventing for a few years, and been along to a couple of international scale events at places like Bramham and Burghley, this promised to be an interesting day out. To set the scene for the viewers at home, it goes a little something like this: You take a horse and a rider, take them both along to a formally organised Event where, along with dozens of others, they compete in the three disciplines of Dressage, Show Jumping and Cross Country. The ultimate challenge, as it were, for the skill, fitness and partnership of the horse and rider.

Thankfully it turned out to be a nice sunny day for it, without much wind so my Tilley Hat stayed put.

The logistics involved in attending something like this seemed quite involved, but aren’t much to write home amount, unless you enjoy 6am starts or spending an hour or two towing a horse trailer around the countryside, or making sure that you’ve got all the saddles and other paraphenalia ready to grab at the right time. We knew we were getting to the right place when we joined a steady stream of other horse transport heading in the same direction.

There were a series of large fields set up as parking, which was the first indication of the scale of how many people compete in these events. People were arriving every which way, deploying trailers and horses and generally setting up camp. Jokes about women drivers would have fallen on very deaf ears, the riders were mostly young and female and they generally did the driving, be it a car and trailer, brand new 3.5t campervan style apparatus or full on 10 tonne HGVs. Our arrival was more akin to the coal powered truck from ‘One of our dinosaurs is missing’ but there were a few big and shiny 40′ affairs that were much closer to the high tech transport in ‘Universal Soldier’.

It was clearly a day out for all the family, either because it was fun or because the rider wasn’t old enough to drive yet or because competing ran in the family, people seemed generally chatty, provided they weren’t late for their start time or trying to quickly change both their uniform and their horse’s tack within the same 10 minutes.

This was an Unaffiliated affair, but it still had all the elements of a proper event, from the commentators box with vintage sports car parked outside, to the butty wagon making sure everybody had a steady supply of bacon and cheap tea. Even though it’s as far from the UEFA cup final as a sunday league country final, it still had people travelling from all over the place.

I can’t quite decide whether I like the idea of Dressage or not. On one hand it’s a contrived torture test that requires the rider to memorise a series of choreographed sequences of movements that come from a book of other very similar series of movements. I would really not like to have to quantitatively judge a class of 30-odd horses all trying to do the same thing, it’s bad enough trying to keep some contrast between 6 interviews over a day. On the other hand, it’s a precise and measurable test of a horse’s deportment and a rider’s control that presumably makes for very good training.

Dressage

Show jumping’s ok though, each round is over in less than a minute and is more fun to watch because there’s the measurable success of how many poles the horse knocks down on his way past as well as the course builder and the clock to beat. It’s generally in a small area and is where the spectators generally gathered, often to the annoyance of the professional photographer for the day. This was a good opportunity to test out my new camera, it doesn’t (yet) have a terribly long lens, but its rapid fire mode means you can take series of photos like this:

Finally, if you haven’t been eliminated yet, there’s the cross country course. This is similar to show jumping but the jumps are solid (so you’re landing in an undignified heap if you hit them rather than just getting four faults) and it’s over a much longer distance so your horse and rider have got to be much fitter. There’s also a wider variety of jumps to contend with, including the dreaded water. This is what everybody wants to do because it’s fun, dangerous and looks cool on TV. It’s also the expensive bit, which is why most of the obstacles are named after their sponsors. The commentator must feel like a bingo caller with things like “and there sets off Number 37, with Jane Smith riding A Rather Contrived Horse Name the Third”, “getting good clearance over Toadally Clean Log Roll at One” and “looked twice at the Harwood Organic Vegetables Hazel Brush at Six”.

Berry going Cross Country

When I was walking back to the parking area after Berry had finished (it made me grin when Berry’s name, number and rider was announced over the PA system, Ma Poneh!) there was a perfectly calm announcement “Be aware, loose horse at Four”. Next thing I knew there was a dozen people in yellow jackets sprinting in that direction, followed by two kids on a quad bike and then a roar of a busy V8 as the St John’s 4 wheel drive ambulance crested a rise with all four wheels off the ground. All was fine as it happens, but it was still dramatic.

We didn’t win any cups that day but it was a very promising first Event and was fun to match and to see what all the work is for. I’m still not convinced that it was worth the 9 hours of gubbins, but it’s better than a similar amount of messing about for a 60 second trip round a show jumping course.

Map

Graph

Yesterday was a glorious day to be out walking in the Dales in one of the areas I know best. I don’t tend to get out to Ribblesdale very often because it’s about 2 hours drive away and there are other equally nice areas of the Dales to explore closer to home.

The route starts in the National Park carpark in Clapham. At the time of writing, it costs £3.50 per car per day, which I think is a fair donation to the Park. Whilst the group assembled, we had an impromptu lesson in how to turn a tree into a hedge, by bending the branches horizontal, growing out the newly vertical shoots and then bending those down again, repeating until you’ve got the shape you’re after. Apparentely it works with most trees, not just ash and willow, although cherry is too brittle to get away with it.

Layering

The walk starts very gently, steadily gaining height through the woods alongside Clapham beck. You can pause at the shop at the Ingleborough show cave for a last ice cream before the path breaks out into the moorland at the top of Trow Gill. My new camera was earning its keep both along the lake and during the easy scramble up through the Gill and into the rolling hills of Clapham Bottoms. The sky was hazy, but clear enough to see the summits of the hills around, so often the peaks of Pen-y-Ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough are shrouded from view by the cloud.

Trow Gill

This area is sheltered from the wind and the baking sun was certainly making its presence felt on a few of us, fleeces, gloves and jumpers were being stowed at every turn. This area is very popular with climbers, both above and below ground, I wouldn’t have fancied carrying full caving gear along in that heat.

Gaping Gill

We weren’t along whilst pausing for lunch in the natural hollow by Gaping Gill, watching the steam rising out of the depths to the sound of the water trickling past.

The wind returned strongly once we left the shelter and started up the ascent to Little Ingleborough, the going was well paved underfoot and our merry band spread out into the tortoises and the hares. Some consider the views from Little Ingleborough to be superior than from Ingleborough itself because it doesn’t have the same plateau limiting the horizons. The rocky area lends itself well to making shelters from the prevailing winds, which we were plenty happy to make use of whilst the rest of the group wandered up the hardest of the day’s climbing.

The last leg along the ridge to Ingleborough’s plateau was easy going under foot, cold, but with some big long views across the fells to distract us from the elements. It was as popular as ever, with walkers going every which way, from Duke of Edinburgh training groups to Three Peakers passing through. There was a queue of people getting their photos taken at the trig point, although jaws dropped in amazement all round as two of our Walking Club got engaged there! For the second Saturday in a row, my camera’s rapid fire mode was handy.

Whernside and Ribblehead Viaduct

The lack of clouds were nice when we left the plateau heading south of Simon Fell back towards Horton-in-Ribblesdale, it’s all too easy to miss the various paths from the top. Although ‘accidents’ do happen and the Hill Inn at Chapel Le Dale is one of the few places I know that serves Riggwelter on tap.

The area’s geology comes to the surface at the Sulber limestone pavement, although we followed a surprisingly well marked track around to its West. Be careful if you stray across the open moorland to try to cut the corner off, there are bogs, peat mosses and plenty of pot holes to take you by surprise.

Ingleborough

The walk finishes along one of the more tedious sections I can think of, the very appropriately named Long Lane. An number of cyclists bounced past us down its long, straight and rocky descent back to Clapham.

We weren’t in much of a hurry, so took a good six and a half hours to walk the 17km or so. I’ll upload the photos to my website properly at some other point, for now though you can get a few from the slideshow I’ve uploaded to Everytrail:

Route

The route starts at the good car park at Yorkshire Water’s Grimwith Reservoir, plenty of spaces on the hard standing and recently built toilets, I’m guessing it gets quite a lot of visitors in the summer months. We then proceeded anti clockwise around the Reservoir and then down the track to the B6265.

view over Wharfedale

Along the road for half a kilometre or so until a left turn onto a footpath at Bank Top, the path goes across the field and downhill, watch for the yellow painted post in the middle of the field to avoid wandering too much of the farm and worrying the sheep.

Grimwith Reservoir

This path skirts the back of Hebden village and in short order deposits you at the reasonably well known suspension bridge, the stepping stones are also perfectly servicable if it’s too bouncy for your personal tastes, which a little Jack Russell demonstrated for us at a fast run.

Hebden Suspension Bridge

You’re now on the Dales Way running down the banks of the Wharfe so it’s very flat going, the poured concrete path being wheelchair accessible, although I’m not so sure about going up the slopes to overlook Loup Scar, which is apparently famous for being where a local murderer disposed of a body.

Loup Scar

The Dales Way gets remarkably busy later on in the year, you often find yourself walking elbow to elbow with strangers, which isn’t everybody’s cup of tea and buns. The village of Burnsall is very well kept and has some big stone buildings and a bridge that are quite photogenic when the sun is bright, even at this time of the year the village was full of cars parked all over the place. The pubs were very busy.

Burnsall Church

We couldn’t stop to try the beers though, we wouldn’t have started again, because we had the second half of the walk to do before dusk set in and our cars were locked in for the night. The path is still easy to folllow down the bottom of the hill from Appletreewick, after which it’s time to leave the Wharfe behind and turn North East towards Skyreholme.

The Wharfe

Wharfe

Follow the road up nearly as far as Parcevall Hall, where the tea rooms were still shut for Winter and take the footpath headed North towards Trollers Gill.

towards trollers gill

This pretty canyon is where you regain much of the height lost earlier in the way, but you don’t notice it because you’re carefully choosing your steps between all the rocks and stones.

trollers gill

trollers gill

At the top, we paused for a poetry recital from our group’s resident historian, even the wind died down to listen to his oration. Some passersby paused to bemusedly listen, who just shook their heads at our explaination that we were so well equipped we’d even packed the poetry about the valley we’d just walked through.

towards Simons Seat

From there it was a reasonably straight and thankless half hour back across the moors past Fancarl Crag to the carpark, although turning round there was a good view back across the valley to Simon’s Seat. This looked very close by, even though it was 4km away and 100m higher up and the valley between would disappoint anybody hoping to climb it easily.

A good day’s exercise, weighing it at a little over 12 miles. Chopping off the lap of the water to start with would cut it down to a wholly managable 8ish miles.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was a good format that included bits of stand up style banter, audience interaction, a few video snippets of their more embarrasing years and, of course, two live cooking segments. As Dave Myers said, it didn’t have to make sense, they were just living the dream and people seemed to like watching them.

I don’t want to spoil it all, but there were a great many of little details that added to the overall comedy. I wondered how they’d make their entrance, on their bikes of course!

The show started at their beginning, they weaved a tale of baby photos into their careers and how they met, including Si’s tendancies to injure himself at every possible opportunity. Their tour has been going for a while now and they’re clearly very comfortable with the material, including some good comic timing that didn’t help my laughing muscles the next morning ( Si: “What happened was”).

They often made mention of their appearances on Saturday Kitchen, one of the TV shows that my PVR watches on my behalf each week, and how doing that live was the most awake they’d ever been. So much so they pulled two unfortunate ‘volunteers’ out of the audience to sit on stage and be fed at their side table, very cringeworthy.

Judging by the number of recipes in the show’s programme, I suspect they rotated through the various meals as the mood took them. The programme was a mixed bag of glossy photos of the two messing about in front of the camera, a series of well written recipes and a few show notes. A recipe for Caldo Verde stood out as including “First take a small glass of port. Drink it, so that you’re in the right mood. Next take..”.

The first one they cooked was a prawn curry with coconut with Kerala Parathas. I’d not met this style of bread before and I made a note to try them at home when I next had a curry because they looked like a fun change to rice, naan or chapati.

As with many live cooking demonstrations, it’s hard to see the details of what they were doing from the back of the auditorium, so they wheeled out a cameraman. NEC Good Food Show quality it was not, with the camera man getting his cable tied up in the set and generally breaking things, but you could still just about follow it (give or take some Jamie Oliver style speed panning) and it added to the overall entertainment.

Dave Myers is probably the undisputed lord of the inappropriate simile, some better than we got in Red Dwarf. Funny stuff from the winner of celebrity mastermind, but I would question likening shavings of parmesan to a chiropadist’s floor..

If they haven’t got to your neck of the woods yet then I’d thoroughly recommend you tried to get tickets to go, tis a good night out. Especially with a G&T in the interval.

Bodgers Workshop at Bolton Abbey

One new addition between the Pavilion and the Strid were a few carpenters demonstrating traditional woodworking techniques in the appropriately named Bodgers Workshop. They had some good approximations of Stags made out of a few logs and appropriate branches and had a few foot powered tools, including a lathe.

The Strid

P and H produced some excellent banana cake at our half way point by Barden Bridge, a recipe I intend to approximate soon, and the remaining miles just raced past, though I remain uncertain whether we were propelled by conversation or the banana cake. Still, about 7km in about 2 hours was a good morning’s stroll by one of my favourite rivers.

The Wharfe

What better way to continue proceedings than afternoon tea at Bettys Cafe in Ilkley, which to my shame I didn’t know even existed. The queue for tables was surprisingly short, shorter still because we kept just popping back to the shop counter at the front to get just another two Fat Rascals or an accidental Stem Ginger Cake. Yorkshire’s little corner of Switzerland delivered as great an experience as ever, the breakfast Rosti was a popular choice, although the Macaroni looked very comforting and the triple decker club sandwich was impressively presented. A pot of their own tearoom blend tea was a lighter and most agreeable accompaniment to the meal and went well with the sweet onion chutney I had (expertly dolloped by our waitress) with lunch.

The afternoon was spent with a bit more 6 nations on the tv and discussing cameras and a few details of P’s epic cross-Switzerland walk he’s planning later on this summer, so it’s looking like my holidays are pretty well sewn up for this year.

Getting to Robin Hood’s Bay was quite fun, for no apparent reason I decided to go over the tops of the Moors instead of going round the boring way on the main roads. Dodging piles of snow notwithstanding, it was very very attractive to look at. This is the Hole of Horcum:

Hole of Horcum, without snow

Hole of Horcum, with snow

In the years since I first started walking this stretch of the Cleveland Way with the Outdoor Society when it was one of the first Big Two walks of the academic year, the route has changed little on average, but plenty up close and detailed. The cliffs have slowly but surely given way to the weather and elements battering in from the North Sea. I would surely be getting my feet wet if I tried to walk the original cliff top path.

The height graph, though it really should have stayed flatter than that

It still a fantastic route as an opener to the year, with no navigation required and little climbing, it lets you take refreshment from the onshore winds whilst stretching out all the post holiday excesses.

The weather today was that typically British drizzle that was a test of how waterproof your equipment is, but the clouds went away as we emerged from the cafe in Whitby opposite the Co-op and wandered back towards the cars in Robin Hood’s Bay. The lights from the village projected through the dusk well, guiding us down the old railway line.

Interestingly, the waterproof jacket I got 13 years ago (eek) still does a grand job of keeping the world out, although the reasonably good “mountain” gloves I picked up in Aviemore rather more recently were about as waterproof as a sponge. Excuse to go shopping perhaps?

Here’s the full walk, along with photos:

Robin Hood’s Bay and Whitby

I happened by chance upon the news that they were visiting York at the start of a week long booking signing tour for Mums Know Best, so being a fan of their work, off I went. I thought that three quarters of an hour would have been plenty early enough to secure a book and a place in the queue. Ha. Still, a quick trot up the road to WH Smiths saved the day (and ten pounds off the cover price too, bargain) and into the queue I went.

It was just pandemonium in Waterstones for a few hours, there were a handful of people who came in to try to actually buy a book but with a huge queue snaking all over the shop, there wasn’t much to be done. The employees did a very good job of handling the event, I’m sure they’d done it all before, with a few marking the queue, another couple making sure that chairs were available for those who couldn’t really stand to queue for that long, as well as the two on hand to wield camera etc and the ones apologising for selling out of all of the Hairy Bikers’ books ages ago. You’d think that a shop of all things would have realised that they’d be selling books with the authors coming to sign them.

Hairy Bikers Arriving

It was about 10 past twelve and I had joined the queue in the childrens section near the back of the shop and suddenly Si and Dave materialised, clutching takeaways coffees with a small crowd of surprised shoppers trailing along in their wake. I swear they didn’t even blink at the crowd awaiting them in the shop, going straight into posing for photographs, bantering with the crowd and wishing they hadn’t ridden 11 thousand miles on their bikes for their UK tour series. I wish I’d had my camera closer to hand, the expressions were priceless on many people’s faces as they went from Dozing in the Queue, through WTF to OMG. Still, they were rescued within half a minute or so by a couple of managers and whisked away upstairs to prepare.

Posing for photographs

I missed the local newspaper stopping by, but they did a quick write up and video.

They’d been signing for nearly an hour by the time I got to the centre of the action but they were still going strong and seemed most happy to answer my question about when could we see more of their work on DVD. Apparently getting DVDs prepared is a royal pain in the posterior for them, whereas books are easy, so we’ll have to make do without for now. Oh well. Apparently their recipe fairs for Mums Know Best were at Bolton Abbey and they hinted that there might be more to come, so keep your eyes on the local press.

Centre of the circus

Annoyingly I’m out of the country when their stage show is coming back to these parts, so I’ll just have to go somewhere else to see it..

The books, oh yes. I’ve been after The Food Tour of Britain since I saw a few shows from the series, there were quite a few recipes that I wanted to try when the correct season came upon us. The amount of effort that’s gone into the graphic design and layout for this book reflects the success Si and Dave have seen since The Hairy Bikers Cookbook.

The chatter has been reduced to just a paragraph’s introduction or backstory behind each recipe, so it’s much more a professional reference recipe book than a more casual reader you can dip in and out of.

I can’t tell you what the new book’s like because the whole city sold out of it before I could find one to open, so you’ll have to make do with the online preview.

Promenade on the South Harbour

We arrived shortly after dark, about half past 4 and drove around until we found a likely looking car park just next to the RNLI boathouse. Amazingly for this time of a Sunday evening, one of the shellfish kiosks was still open, selling pints of prawns, dressed crabs and so forth. Great stuff.

Walking along the beach was quite bracing, but was still quite jolly with the lights from the barrage of amusement arcades reaching as far as the surf.

2p for a plastic cardboard cutout mobile phone

The tupenny shove machines have certainly gone up in the world since I were a lad, with everything from cuddly toys to cardboard mobile telephones balanced on the edge of some very sturdily stacked two pences.

The gardens were well lit and provided a scenic distraction from the steep walk up the side of the cliffs towards the town, the paths had steps and ramps for all constitutions.

Gardens

Tea was provided by a handy Weatherspoons, with some well kept and entirely refreshing Ruddles Best thrown in as part of the meal cost, although at £1.35 a pint, well worth drinking anyway. I’m quite a fan of Ruddles County, but it’s not really a session ale, but their bitter was just as good, without the unpleasant aftertaste you sometimes get from cheaper brews.

Anyway, the point of visiting the seaside was to attend the recording of the last two episodes of the current series of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, some of the finest comedy our country has to offer. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, get thee hence to the iPlayer and do some revision.

This was the third time I’ve been able to see it live on stage and featured Jo Brand as a guest for the first time and Jack Dee in the Chair. He’s not a patch on Humph, but then it would be a waste to try to emulate him, Jack Dee’s certainly funny enough in his own right.

I wouldn’t want to break theatre etiquette by taking a photograph of the stage inside the auditorium and besides which, my pocket camera wouldn’t get a good enough image anyway. If I did, it would probably turn out looking like this:

See? Rubbish

The recording took about three hours, including a 20 minute interval so the performers could get a brew, which was incredible value for the five pounds the tickets cost. I wouldn’t fancy the job of editing that down into two 25 minute episodes.

Some of the funniest moments were those that would end up on the cutting room floor, Jo Brand tripping over on her first attempt at One Song To The Tune Of Another and taking a good 5 minutes before the rest of the panelists would let her recover her composure. Jeremy Hardy getting Jack Dee to crack up and one very brave woman in the audience getting carried away and singing out the answer to the ‘guess what the audience is trying to hum’ round. You’d never see the deadpan expressions from Barry and Jeremy as they calmly produced ribbons of jinglebells to join in with.

Jon Naismith did as good a job Producing it as always, he does the audience warmup himself (with the same jokes he’s been using for years – so much that Barry Cryer helped out with a metajoke: “you used the joke about the condom? You’re only supposed to use it once!”.

Even recording the pickups was hilarious, had to wait for the audience to quieten down after Jon Naismith asked Jack to say again “and here’s the mystery voice for the listeners at home and this time leave a gap so I can actually DO the mystery voice”. Which of course led to Jack miming “one, two, three, four, five” when he had to say it in the second show

I wouldn’t want to spoil anything from the shows, but one entry from the Uxbridge English Dictionary that bears repeating was “Canapes: a scot unable to spend”.

I’ve already got the PVR primed to record these two episodes the next two Mondays, it will be interesting to see what I can remember about the bits that are cut out.

Carols, dixieland style

The sound track was provided by a local dixieland jazz band playing christmas carols, I forgot to note the groups name, but I’m sure I recognised their trumpet player from the old Wednesday night jazz jam session in the Black Swan from a year or 10 ago.

Barley Hall

Barley Hall was doing it’s usual historic market, with stall keepers dressed in costume and happy to cater to all of your needs, provided they can be made from hand stitched leather, hand woven wool or properly blacksmithed.

One brand that’s really taken off this year is delicouslyorkshire who had taken over the top end of Parliament St with their usual made in Yorkshire market. My bag came out a good deal heavier than it went in..

I try to make a rule of not shopping round a supermarket when hungry, but that should also apply to markets. I stopped by Cross of York to see if they had any fish left for dinner tonight and was reminded of how good a skilled fishmonger can be, watching them fillet my choice of fish ready for the pan. So tonight will probably be pan fried butterflied-fillet of Trout on a bed of steamed kale with a sage risotto, followed by a baked apple because it’s cold and dark and I like that sort of thing

Baked goods aside, I didn’t really achive much Christmas shopping, I did pop into Borders to see what the effects of its administration were. The 20% sale coupled with the seasonal pile of customers led to an epic queue, so I’ll leave that shop until next time I’m in town.

Speaking of which, next weekend’s looking busy with a walking club trip to the famous Lion on Blakey Ridge, and the weekend after is my second favourite (after the fortnight’s worth of Food and Drink Festival) time in York, Festival of Angels.

York Wine Fair in the Guildhall

In order to allow as many as possible to experience it, the wine fair was split up into two sessions. We went in the afternoon slot, which turned out to be a good idea because it was very quiet and meant you could monopolise a lot of the suppliers’ time. Apparently they sold about 40 tickets for the afternoon and 140 for the evening.

I don’t know a huge amount about wine so this was a chance to get some of the basics covered. I generally know what I like, but I don’t know much about the gamut of aromas and flavours that wine producers have to play with. I can’t help but compare it to whisky in terms of the processes and market realities, although that’s perhaps a bit abstract to try to convey in conversation (sorry to Martin from Joseph Perrier for rambling off on that tangent!).

The first table I visited turned out to be easily the best of the day. It was a chap named John who has recently set up Find Wine(.co.uk) with a couple of his friends, an online wine selector with a fairly unique twist to it. The idea is to stop buying wine based upon regional style assumptions and what the supermarkets have on special offer that week (month|quarter) and instead to think about it in terms of styles and price points.

In a way it’s similar to what I learnt last week about whisky marketing, most bottles are marketed as a Glen Lovely McTartan 10,12,18 year old which is great if you happen to know what that tastes like, but what if you don’t? Find Wine’s big idea is for them to buy a few dozen cases of what they think tasted pretty good at the time, matched into one of their categories and then sell it on. When that’s all gone, they’ll replace it with something else that’s good at the moment. The opportunities offered by this agile approach are huge, but it only works if you trust them to make these judgments and also for them to maintain the effort required to keep turning it over.

I spoke to John for about 10 minutes or so and I gave up trying to keep up with the barrage of information from him, it was very clear that he knew exactly what he’s talking about in plenty of detail and his tasting notes on the samples of wine he had seemed pretty accurate to my insensitive palette. One of the stories involved which grapes were generally grown on one bank of a river somewhere and which were grown on another! I’m sure that a professional knowledge of terriors should encompass that much geography, but it was still fun. Oh and they said they liked whisky too so might be trying it again with that, which sounded interesting.

The majority of the other suppliers had a theme, be it geographical or otherwise, one was Babich from New Zealand, another was representing Argentina, another was representing the Joseph Perrier Champagne house, and Sainsbury had a representative too to remind us of reality. Interestingly, the ones that weren’t involved in direct sales all had order forms from one of the local wine merchants that set up shop relatively recently, Field and Fawcett, so it wasn’t all ‘this is what you could have won’.

I got to spend a bit of time with the chap from Champagne, learning a bit about the different wines from them. I knew they were all blends, but hadn’t twigged that a lot of the biggest flavours came from red grapes, they just didn’t take the colours and tannins from the skins. Blanc de Blancs means it’s 100% chardonnay. Rose is simply that, but with a longer tail and a pink colour. For obvious reasons he wouldn’t tell me the blend they use in their Vintage bottlings, but a 75/25 mix of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay would be a good place to start. Only about 5% of a given year’s harvest reaches sufficient quality to stand up to the Vintage branding (he said 10% every second year), but commercial reality dictates that you follow your sales with supply which is their NV Yellow Label, so Vintage Champagne keeps its exclusivity. Like whisky, in order to keep to a house style with a variable input, there’s an awful lot of blending going on behind the scenes, between grapes, vinyards and between years. That’s another reason why the volume doesn’t have a single year on the label, because it isn’t from a single year’s harvest. That’s typically what ‘Reserve’ means on a label by the way.

A few of the wines that got asterisks next to them in my notes (apparently taking notes is remarkably uncommon. Is my memory that bad? or am I in the minority of trying to get some real data rather than just trying to drink more than £15’s worth of wine? bloody engineers, you can’t take them anywhere..). I wasn’t fast enough to get round the reds, so if you like white here we go:

Babich’s Sauvignon Blanc. It had an unusual and great smell of tropical fruit, lots of pinapple and mango with hints of the greener smells you get from S-B’s normally. The taste was what you’d expect from a classic S-B, a hit of dry and crisp.

Babich’s Unoaked Chardonnay. I normally can’t abide a taste of Chardonnay (even though it’s mostly what champagne’s made from). Apparently it’s the oak-aging that I can’t stand, because this New Zealand bottling was just wonderful. About 10% of the blend was fermented in Oak, the rest in Steel, so there’s just enough there to give it a body without overpowering the sublety of the grapes. The nose was subtle and fresh and whilst the sample was overchilled, it tasted great. Very green, light and summery, ripening oats or barley I’m told.

Sainsbury had a White Zinfandel based Rose from California (which meant it’s most likely a blend of white and red rather than the usual short maceration from red process). I’m not a fan of Rose, but I had a chemist in tow who is. It smelt slightly smokey, which I rather liked and had a light and sweet body to it.

There’s a Tarrango from Australian that had a gloriously fruity red who’s savoury body survives being lightly chilled and looks like a great replacement for the 2005 Bor Forras that I’ve been hoarding.

There were two wines from the Argentine Colchagua Valley that made it as far as my increasingly incomprehensible notes. A Vordello, the grape that’s normally used in Madiera but this time lightly presented as a fresh and summery wine that had a long acid finish. I also had a bit of a James May moment and discovered Viognier. This white has gone straight into my mental charts in the #2 slot, behind Alsatian Gewurtztraminer. It’s nose was light, apples and melons and pears, the flavour was crisp and dry like a white should be but the middle of its body is a remarkably strong and creamy hit of savoury. I reckon that wine would stand up to a curry. Lets find out..

I finished off with a slightly out of place 1993 Caol Ila that had been finished in Moscatel casks. It wasn’t jaw droppingly good but I’d still give it 8/10 on the Eddie Scale and wasn’t over priced at £35.

Seems that wine distribution and whisky often go hand in hand. Who knew?