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2010 Wine in Context Awards

For many people, wine is about points. For me wine is absolutely not about points (even if I do score wines when tasting - points can certainly be useful when reported alongside a tasting note). No, wine is about pleasure, and the pleasure derived from wine is wrapped up in its context. Context can, I contend, turn an ordinary bottle into an unforgettable one. And vice versa, of course, as the context and the wine become wrapped up as one.

What might this context be? A fine dinner maybe, or a sunny afternoon in the garden? Perhaps even a picnic in the vineyard, a secret tryst, or a tasting with the winemaker himself? Or even something less joyous; a solitary glass, cradled too long, after receiving bad news perhaps? The context, whether it be comedic, cerebral, sombre or even tragic, can make a huge difference to how we perceive the wine, or indeed how well we can recall the tasting and even the individual characteristics of the wine in question.

With that in mind, please welcome the return of Wine in Context, my end-of-year review first introduced in 2009 to take a look at my favourite wine in context moments of the past twelve months. The focus here is not just on the wine but on the context, or rather on the synthesis of wine and context; it is this that is most important I think.

Perhaps even more significant, this year Wine in Context comes with awards. Just to keep my interest you understand, I won't be sending out any cheques, trophies or magnums of Cristal.

Starting today, my dinner awards for 2010 (14/12/10)

2010 Wine in Context Awards: The Dinners

A series of awards for best dinners and associated bottles of 2010.

A special award for the for best evening on an icy, slippery, bitterly wind-swept platform.

The first early start of the year put me on a slow train to meet Eric LeVine (pictured below), the man behind CellarTracker, before we went on together to the Ledbury in Notting Hill for a sumptuous lunch festooned with more bottles of Burgundy than you can shake a stick at. The agenda for our little pre-prandial tryst was straightforward; would it be possible to work together to bring my tasting notes from Winedoctor into the professional reviews section of Eric LeVine's CellarTracker site? I was very uncertain as to the answer; at the time the amount of work required seemed daunting and, to be honest, I did wonder if it might be an impossible task to complete. I had no idea how many tasting notes I had online, other than they numbered many thousands, and I had no clear idea of how I would lift all these notes coded in old-fashioned html (the language of the internet) and transport them into a spreadsheet or database as Eric required. Nevertheless, our meeting ended with the notion that I would at least try to see what could be done.

I can report I had no such doubts about lunch, though; completing this was certainly not an impossible task! The quality of chef Brett Graham's food at the Ledbury was magnificent, and the bottles that circled the table were in each case a fine testament to the generosity and conviviality of wine drinkers. Good company and good food is the archetypal experience for a wine in context moment of course. And, although this fine repast needed no further event to top it off, the mid-meal disclosure that Brett had just picked up a second Michelin star for the establishment did just that. The 1996 Dom Pérignon Rosé subsequently passed round was the perfect way to toast such an achievement (although you will find no mention of it in my report, as by this time my palate had been too thoroughly assaulted by a trio of sweet wines for me to be able to draw up even a vaguely sensible tasting note).

I was very sorry to have to leave so early in order to catch my train back to Scotland's capital city, while so many new acquaintances continued to feast and no doubt imbibe well into the evening. My feeling of dejection was only heightened by the realisation upon arriving at King's Cross station that East Coast rail had decided, using the inclement January weather as an excuse, to terminate my train at Newcastle, which as even the most geographically-challenged of us will know is a long walk from Edinburgh. And so an otherwise relaxing journey home was interrupted by a 40 minute wait on an icy, wind-swept platform in the north-east of England as I waited for a later train, one which - by some great powers known only to the gods of the railway - would be able to cope with the sub-Arctic conditions north of Newcastle. East Coast would call it, I think, a "cost reduction efficiency saving". I would call it inadequate (that's me being polite - I did initially type something more abusive).

I tried to warm my frost-bitten fingers by wrapping them around a coffee, bought from a platform vendor. That was all it was good for, as the taste of it was just as disappointing as the service from East Coast. Ahhh, how I wished I was back at the Ledbury.....

But what of my notes and CellarTracker? About six months on from my meeting with Eric we achieved our goal. I created a database into which I dragged every single tasting note and score from Winedoctor, no mean feat as the number of which I was so uncertain nudges 9000, not bad for a one-man, part-time show. Eric's team mapped the notes to the wines in his database, and all of a sudden nearly 9000 new opinions presented themselves for all to see, fully integrated in CellarTracker. The year has certainly not been without at least one achievement!

Best Bottle: Domaine Ponsot Chambolle-Musigny Premier Cru Charmes 1988

The most entertaining taxi-ride of the year.

It was February 2010 and I was visiting Langlois-Chateau, by invitation of François-Régis de Fougeroux (pictured below) and Bollinger-girl (far better than a Bond-girl!) Elizabeth Ferguson. The tour and tasting of vins clairs was fascinating, a subsequent dinner delightful, the wines impressive, the sparkling wines most certainly (I particularly enjoyed the 2002 Quadrille, enough for me to pick up a few bottles when I returned to Langlois-Chateau during the summer) although I was also quite taken by the still wines. But the evening remains memorable for our journey home, as I declared in my account of my visit, the dinner and tasting back in June.

We had been collected by taxi, and were headed from the riverside offices of Langlois-Chateau towards our hotel in Angers. As the taxi lurched around yet another rond-point I wiped away a little condensation from the inner surface of the window to my right and stared through my little porthole. I know the roads quite well around Saumur, and fairly well around Angers, but right now I had no idea where I was. I knew we were currently en route from the first of these two towns to the second, but in the dark of the night, and with the late hour weighing heavy on my eyes, I had switched off and thus lost track of our position. Visible through my little grey-framed circle was an inky darkness, punctuated with the occasional light in the distance, in each case the orange hue reflected in the lightly rippled waters of the Loire beneath. So we were travelling along the left bank, heading west. But beyond that I was lost.

My two back-seat travelling companions were, however, most certainly not lost, and upon realising that the taxi driver whisking us back to our hotel was taking a rather circuitous route so that he could drop off his friend in the front seat before us - and charge a higher fare in the process of course - they began to object loudly. It was not long before a fairly heated spat developed; I suspect the driver had not expected two of these three weary Brits to be firstly, fluent in French (and not just any French, but specifically French arguing), and secondly, ready to put up a fight. Unfortunately the proffered resistance did not have a positive effect; and as the squabble ensued the driving style deteriorated, degenerating into a sequence of sharp cornering, hard acceleration and even harder braking. The British contingent saw sense and declared a self-imposed cessation of hostilities; a stony silence ensued, punctuated only by the occasional subdued muttering of expletives.

Thankfully we reached our hotel in one piece. Needless to say there was no tip for the driver on this occasion. I had a tip for myself though; time to improve my knowledge of French expletives and work on my fluency in the art of arguing in the same language! More on my linguistic ability (or lack of) below, in my 2010 James Suckling Award.

Best Bottle: Langlois-Chateau Crémant de Loire Quadrille 2002

An award for the best bottle from the most hastily-arranged lunch date.

It's Tuesday evening, and I am one of a group of journalists and wine press at the Grand Théâtre in Bordeaux enjoying the hospitality of the Commanderie du Bontemps who are hosting their annual celebration of the vintage, the Soirée Ban du Millésime. By chance we cross paths with Véronique Sanders of Haut-Bailly, and it should be only natural that we express our excited anticipation at visiting the next day, for lunch, and to retaste the 2009 barrel sample of course.

Lunch? When, tomorrow? Err...organised by who?

Oops. Communication breakdown. A message lost in translation, or lost in the ether perhaps? It is fortunate indeed that we did cross paths, otherwise I suspect that we might have found nobody home when we rolled up the next day for a tasting and lunch. As it was, all credit to Véronique, although she had other engagements on our arrival we were met by winemaker Gabriel Vialard and we tasted our way through a number of vintages, starting with recent years (including a second look at the 2009) and then moving on to some exalted maturing vintages over lunch, specifically 2005, 2000 and 1996. As I wrote last year, of my drinking Bollinger's Vieilles Vignes Françaises in the very house where Lily Bollinger once lived, what better way to enjoy a wine than on the property, just yards from the cellars where the wine has rested since it was bottled, just yards from the vines themselves (pictured below), with a fine lunch, in the company of the winemaker? Is there a better context for wine?

So the lunch and the wines were superb. Nevertheless there was a downside to the day, although I suspect it will mean little to those who have not gone through the trying rigmarole of seeking an out-of-area secondary school placement. A text received mid-lunch told me that my eldest son had been refused a place at the his school of choice, when other children living further away had been accepted. This was more than enough to put a dampener on the day. It was April 1st, but as it turned out this text was no joke. So began a long saga which slowly began to take over my life, as I trudged through an appeals process the outcome of which was - in my opinion - a foregone conclusion. The process included a hearing in which I represented myself; at this time I felt very grateful for my own education, and all the attention I have paid to presentation skills and all the intellectual debate and disagreement to which I have been exposed over the years. How I would have coped in such a situation without this experience is beyond me. The decision made by the committee was the expected inevitable refusal, as I was informed by the solicitor who wrote to me on their behalf...now that's what I call heavy-handed.

I won't go into every detail of what ensued, as this is a wine site not an education blog, but suffice to say I am now intimately familiar with the names of every one of my local councillors (and how disinterested they were in my complaint), the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 and the roles of all the staff in my council's education department right up to its rather progressive, blog-authoring director. And I'm also now on very good terms with a local solicitor who penned my summary application to notify the council of my intention to take them to court, my response to their ham-fisted mishandling of the issue (there are a lot of details to my case I'm leaving out here, by the way). And as I did so, all resistance melted away and my son was awarded a place. This is a very short paragraph, but it represents three months of grind (looking back it seemed like much, much longer). The eventual notification that my son had a place was an appropriate stimulus to open my penultimate bottle of 1990 Dom Ruinart. Every cloud has a silver lining, it seems.

What the council don't realise is that we are about to do it all over again this year......and this time, it's twins. Wish me luck.

Best Bottle: Château Haut-Bailly 1996

A special award for the most winemakers offended in one evening.

Unlike James I don't video myself telling winemakers what I think of their wines, for several different reasons. I'm not in the habit of reading out my excruciating blueberry-laden tasting notes on my visits, nor wielding my point scores over them. That doesn't mean I can't provoke a reaction though, even if it is rather unintentional.

Back to the Loire for this special award and to an annual dinner held alongside the Salon in Angers. As usual it was a bilingual gathering of vignerons, buyers, brokers and press, all coming together to enjoy a hearty nosh-up with bottle after bottle after bottle after bottle (and I'm not exaggerating here) of local and other wines. Some were English-speaking tables, others were more mixed, others were operating in purely French, and I was due to be seated on one of the former. That was until an entirely non-French speaker turned up unexpected, with nowhere to sit. Now I have more than a smattering of French, and that has been hard-won. It comes not from my schooldays (whatever I learnt there has been long forgotten), but is instead the product of 15 months of lessons in 2007-2008, a few French audio magazines, reading the full range of literature from Etienne Davodeau's Chute de Vélo (a bande-dessinée recommended to me by Richard Leroy - the wine connection here is that the artwork is all based on scenes around Leroy's hometown of Rablay-sur-Layon) to Guy de Maupassant's Bel-Ami (with its hilarious ending of orgasmic visions as Bel-Ami leaves the church with his new bride - just priceless) and the entire catalogue of films from Jean-Luc Godard (which I am still working my way through - I'm currently on La Chinoise, which seems somewhat timely considering the recent student demonstrations in London).

And so I did the decent thing and moved to a French-speaking table. It was great fun, although it pushed my linguistic ability to the limits, and in truth went far beyond several times, much to the annoyance of one Muscadet producer who sadly seemed a little short on humour, a characteristic I began to suspect when listening to the first of several lengthy and fairly bitter anti-Pépière diatribes. On espying the fact that his proffered wine was his own Muscadet from 1996, now nearly fourteen years old, I tried to break the ice with the quip that he had brought (rather than do this in French I will translate and paraphrase at the same time) "a young wine". He fixed me with a stony stare, one with more than a nuance of puzzlement, and replied in a deadpan voice "no, it is not young". Round one to the language barrier I think. Round two also went that way, as my hopelessly polite "I hope you can understand my rubbish French" was misconstrued as something along the lines of "don't you speak French, you idiot" I think. I'm sure there were rounds three and four too, but to be honest the memory has faded (bottles 15 and 16 may have had something to do with that), the company and otherwise jovial atmosphere easily overshadowing any such moments of linguistic obfuscation. It was a fine evening, ending with a sensation half of relaxed-pleasure, half of achievement, having survived something of a linguistic trial. Those lessons and all those Godard films were worth it then!

Although I think I might ask for a more linguistically mixed table next year.

Best Bottle: I'm not sure, all a bit hazy, probably the 17th or 18th. I'm sorry, my memory has failed me. Although I do vaguely remember that £3.29 Aldi wine called something like 'Blue Peacock's Bay' or maybe it was 'Bushman's Tucker' brought by another wine writer (no, I'm not joking) sitting on my table. What do I remember about it?

It was rubbish.

• Continue on to my 2010 Wine in Context Awards (part 2)