Oooh la la!

Sorry chaps, dear readers, everyone, but yesterday I had a really great afternoon, having been invited to a wonderful lunch by my kind and generous friend YT. Lots of fine wine and a great digestif defined a very fine lunch, fully orchestrated by our friend, the multi-talented chef Michalis Dounetas at his Wood Restaurant.

Wood is primarily a meat restaurant and this was a red wine afternoon, mainly. The food was personally prepared or stewarded by the chef and was pretty impressive, with every course being spot-on and perfectly matched with the wines, all of them; this is, after all, one of YT's great talents. In any case the wine was so amazing that it would have been able to combine with anything, and even more so with the great productions of the Wood kitchen, unfussy, intelligent and bursting with flavour.

All the eleven attendees were wine people of some sort, from the professional (yes, loyal reader, I still belong there, just!) to the amateur but keen wine lover end of the spectrum, and all were friends with YT; most of us were also friends, primarily through our shared love of wine. The bonhomie was palpable, the enthusiasm also, as wine after wine was presented, tasted, combined with food, dispatched and dissected

Before you get the idea that this was just a group of guys getting pissed on a Saturday afternoon, just with a better quality of wine, you could not be more wrong. Sure, by the end of the afternoon I had had plenty to drink and eat, as had all present, but we were not rowdy, not loud and abusive, not combative. Wine lovers are not die that and we were all respectful of the good food, the great wines, the kindness of our host and, of course, each other; it was a wonderful, relaxed but extremely pleasurable afternoon.
The food, of which only two photos are included, was up to the task of accompanying this truly outstanding collection of southern French red wines. It was also shamelessly meat-centred, as is the restaurant itself, which prides itself on the sourcing of its ingredients. We ate:
Carpaccio of Greek beef, slightly spicy, with marinated vegetables - superb.
Mushroom risotto, lamb, graviera (greek cheese) foam - saltier than I would like but full of flavour and excellent with the trio of wines selected.
Ragout of Greek black pig with a celeriac puree - for me the dish of the day, outstanding, subtle layers of flavour and refinement out of essentially a simple country dish.
Filet of beef in a pepper sauce - simple, tasty, elegant and not over-peppered, spot-on.
Duet of chocolate mousse - palate cleansing and pleasant, if for my taste lacking intensity, excellent with an espresso or two...
But this lunch was all about the wine and the amazing intensity and variety of flavours in southern French reds... so naturally we started with a white wine, Vin de Voile 1997 from R&B Plageoles, Gaillac, which was delicately nutty, complex and long, not unlike a light version of an amontillado sherry.
Each of us had three glasses for three different red wines, so we could taste and compare almost as we saw fit. Of course ideally we would have had six different glasses, but in a busy restaurant this is not realistic, with our simple rotation system working very well. KL (Master of Wine) set the running order and off we went in pursuit of greatness. And there was lots of it around, in no particular order:
Chateauneuf-du-Pape 1998, Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe 1998 from a magnum - rather ethereal, majestic ripe and complex nose, lots of ripe red fruit, palate full and complex, long but a bit hard on the finish.
Domaine de Trevallon 1990, from further south (Baux de Provence), older, a stunning still-young wine, big and chunky (hello cabernet sauvignon!) with a hint of bitterness, clean and intriguing, for me the best in standing up to the lamb.
Cornas-Reynard 1999, Domaine Thierry Allemand from a magnum, one of the top wines of this area, round and rich, ripe and ready, surprisingly without hard edges.
Hermitage 1995 Domaine J.L. Chave, explosive nose full of red fruit, apples, violets, a big wine of complexity, ripeness and style, balanced and classy. A definite wow!
Mas de Daumas Gassac Cuvee Emile Peynaud 2001, this jewel of a wine from the Languedoc either was going through an awkward phase or suffered in a line-up with more juicy, more exuberant Rhone wines, this being 100% Cabernet Sauvignon. A very fine wine indeed unfairly treated?
Cote-Rotie 1999, Domaine Burgaud - Oooops, have mislaid my note on this, sorry! From refresher discussions I believe it was rich and untypical, with a pronounced minerality.

For our finish, we were fortunate enough to have a rare find, an old distillate from a domaine long consigned to history, vieux marc du Beaujolais 1949 from Domaine du Pinay et du Vivier. This had an old-fashioned rustic/refined character with a massively alcoholic nose, aggressively chunky and powerful palate, long and intriguing - woof!

To say the occasion was remarkable is a simple statement of fact, hugely enjoyable a wretched understatement. For all of us there it was also an education.

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Missing the point?

This was written about ten days ago, so interpret paragraph four accordingly, please!

Sitting with tears in my eyes I listen to a few stories of individuals whose lives have been turned upside down by the continuing saga of Brexit; this off the BBC website on my computer, while thousands of miles away from Britain. Am I just a sentimental, soppy old man or what? For whom the tears?

The whole sorry mess that remains unresolved three and a half years after David Cameron's ill-thought out and badly executed referendum is a blight on many ordinary people's lives, has created huge uncertainty and generated a lot, a LOT, of nastiness and negativity aimed left, right and centre at whoever appears to be a legitimate target.

Politicians deal in concepts and grand ideas, deep-sounding and calculated to move their audience in the utterer's desired direction. They either don't think of the results on real folks, the living, breathing people that populate our planet or - much worse but equally probable - they don't care so long as they achieve their target. Emotional manipulation is their stock-in-trade, no thought given to those hurt.

Boris Johnson has received his reward for his treacherous behaviour over Brexit and has become Prime Minister of the UK on the basis of what, exactly? His performance as Foreign Secretary was hardly distinguished, his demeanour is shifty and unstatesmanlike, his private behaviour poor - were it not for the fact that his main opponent in the forthcoming election (Jeremy Corbyn) is an old-style communist who dreams of returning the UK to the 1970s, even publicly stating that life was good then, BoJo would have been laughed at and given a drubbing.

Worst of all, Mr. Johnson and his ilk care not at all for the people whose lives they are playing with: not just the EU throng working hard in the UK to keep things like agriculture and the NHS afloat, but all the Brits living elsewhere in Europe, soon to be disenfranchised from their environment, lame duck victims of political games. This is not just about slogans like 'taking back control', nebulous and untruthful, it is about people, individuals, you and me and all the others.

I have a friend who dreams of returning Athens to its ancient city state condition, demolishing the monstrosities of the modern world and strolling around the unspoilt environment of two and a half thousand years ago, subject to the ancient Greek ideals. Of course he knows this is a pipe dream, that time does not flow backwards, that life flows ever onwards, and smiles when tackled, but preserves his dream of the ideal world in his mind. Still, going around the Athens of today he uses the modern tools available to him now.

For reasons that I cannot quite understand we are bringing back nationalistic, jingoistic behaviour and  a mode of thinking and behaving that we thought had been discarded after WWII. The victims then were countless individuals sacrificed on the altar of perverse ideology, of systems, of central control, of horror; this is not a scenario the world should be considering revisiting for any reason at all. Look to the individuals, hear their stories, make their lives better and the whole benefits, we all gain in the long term.

Duh!

Greek bureaucracy - an unstoppable force?

The Greek economy is struggling to emerge from a decade-long crisis that has left the country financially destitute, its private sector in tatters, especially after the previous government proved ideologically unable to support most private endeavour. A new government, supposedly eager to modernise and develop things to enable the private sector to survive, even thrive, and hence contribute properly to the rebuilding of the Greek economy, is making all sorts of encouraging noises.

And, let's be fair, certain things have changed for the better even in the midst of the crisis: private companies, for example, are no longer required to publish annual accounts in several newspapers, national, financial and local, thus wasting several thousand euros in a fool's errand, there to support the press but providing very little for the benefit of either the companies or anyone seeking to learn more about them.

A few years ago and in order to simplify things for everyone concerned the government of the day - in fact the previous centre-right New Democracy government, deep in the economic meltdown for which they were partly responsible - created a centralised authority for all Greek limited companies of all variants to be registered, submit annual accounts and all changes to their composition and status; they based this - where else - in central Athens, co-housing it with the Athens Chamber of Commerce and making it a one-stop service for most company information and certification.

All of which sounds great if it wasn't for the fact that, in typical Greek fashion, this new organisation  also endorses a significant amount of bureaucracy, most of it - to my eyes anyway - totally without benefit and entirely unnecessary. For example, I had to pay a ten euro fee in order to be issued with a certificate of sorts. At the till the cashier printed a receipt on his printer in two copies, then proceeded to stamp and sign them before handing them over to me to present at a counter ten metres away... why? Also, before getting any sort of document ordered, one needs to fill in the relevant paper application form (many different forms exist, of course, depending on what is needed), sometimes rather complex, which then is stamped and processed. It is rare for any certificate or copy to be available on the spot, with a week being the normal waiting period as far as I could see. And I could go on...

Don't get me wrong, it feels and is more efficient than a normal Greek office manned by civil servants, with the staff unfailingly polite and quite helpful. Yet this - supposedly modern - business friendly centre is run using the old bureaucratic systems, with lots of bits of paper that need to be stamped, signed and then shuffled around, creating useless actions and lost time. It seems that even when we come up with a bright idea that cuts costs and makes the system more efficient we have to burden it with unproductive, needless paperwork.

Successive governments have prattled on about needing foreign investment and how they are aiming to attract it. I can tell them for free that unnecessary, silly, costly bureaucracy is not the way, no, really!