by Tom Lewis
A few years ago, I lived and worked in Vienna - present-day Austria's capital and the historic imperial city of various empires (Austrian, Holy Roman and Austro-Hungarian). It's a beautiful place and at the time was undergoing something of a quiet, steady revolution, and transforming itself from a sleepy, time-warped, patrician capital into a vibrant and sophisticated city.It was the type of place where amongst the imposing Gothic cathedrals and sprawling Imperial palaces of old Vienna, you would find sophisticated wine bars and fusion restaurants of new Vienna; a great place to try Austrian wines which have improved dramatically since the anti-freeze scandal of 1980s.Austria is in almost every sense wedged between Germany and Italy - it has a Germanic thoroughness, precision and obsession...
by Tom Lewis
A while ago, I went wine-buying in the Mosel Valley and was very impressed with a clutch of wines I bought there, so I was keen to visit the Wines of Germany stand at the recent Fine Wine Fair in Chelsea in London.Generally, for Germanic whites I tend to look either to Austria (for historic reasons - I used to live there) or Alsace, so whilst the grape varieties of Germany are familiar to me, I am less aware of the nuances and regional variations.Riesling is the white grape most associated with Germany - it originated in the Rhine region and is considered highly "terroir-expressive", that is highly influenced by and expressive of where it is grown.To me, Riesling is the great white grape variety - when made well (and dry) it is crisp, thrilling, slatey and minerally with honeyed undertones...
by Tom Lewis
It was an evening of firsts for me - I have had quite a bit of Mosel wine before, firstly on a driving and wine-buying holiday and more recently a tasting at the London Fine Wine Fair. However, I had never previously tried sparkling Riesling or German Cab, or had a German Pinot Noir that I really liked.The Cambridge Food and Wine Society is on something of a run of having producers come and present their wines, as GianPaolo Paglia presented his wines from Poggio Argentiera earlier this year.Hans-Peter Scholtes of Weingut Scholtes comes from a wine-making family going back 300 years and runs a genuinely family business making a range of wines from 6ha of vineyards in Minheim in the Mosel.The Mosel valley is a bucolic stretch of meandering river with steep terraces on either side; the river ...
by Tom Lewis
TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson once said "When you go out for a meal you never say - I know, let's go for a German !"Like much of Clarkson's northern, schoolboy humour, there is a good degree of truth in what he says. Germanic food (as found in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic and Belgium) is typically heavy, stodgy and designed to be washed down with beer.But as is also the case with Clarkson, it's too much of an oversimplification to stand up to any degree of proper scrutiny.Whilst you may think of Spanish hams and Italian cheeses as classic wine-bar food, Austria's alpine regions have just as much to offer.Kipferl claims to be London's only Austrian delicatessen, and I've certainly not seen any others. Owner Christian Malnig moved to London from the rolling hills of the Therm...
by Tom Lewis
In one of those strange twists of fate, I was asked the other day if I wouldn't mind going at short notice to a five-course Project Hope Ball at the newly-refurbished Savoy Hotel in London to help out the company. Ever one to do my bit, I agreed and dug out my dinner suit, even if it meant schlepping back to Cambridge on the last, slow train.Project Hope (Health Opportunities for People Everywhere) is an international healthcare organisation founded in the United States in 1958 with branches now also in Germany and the UK. The purpose of the Ball was to launch The Thoughtful Path: Munsieville, which Project Hope intends to act as a ground-breaking intiative by engaging entire communities in changing the way AIDS orphans are cared for in Munsieville, a township near Johannesburg.The Savoy i...
by Tom Lewis
A few weeks ago, I went to a chocolate Master Class tasting presentation by Raffaella Baruzzo at the London Fine Wine Fair and came away with a much greater appreciation of what makes one chocolate superior to another - see the original article here.I got in touch with Raffaella shortly afterwards and she very kindly sent me some more of her delicious chocolates to review. However, we quickly realised that, with small children around, it would take some degree of organisation to be able to sample a selection of chocolates in peace without one or more younger members of the family interfering and scoffing the lot.However, one evening recently, we finally managed to get them sitting quietly in another room and, with one ear listening out for the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs, set...
by Tom Lewis
A few days ago, I emailed some comments to Jancis Robinson about one of her articles on cold calling (unsolicited sales calls) which she added to her article.I have no formal legal training or qualifications, but my day job as a company director in the UK requires me to know a little about these sorts of things - and also inevitably to deal with them; so I thought it might be worthwhile expanding on the advice I gave on Jancis' site.The first thing to say is that cold calling is generally illegal in the UK - unless the caller has received your permission to call you.The basis of this is two principles in the UK's Data Protection Act 1998 which state that the person being contacted must have consented to their personal data being collected and held for the specified purpose if the contactin...
by Tom Lewis
Many years ago, I lived in Vienna and even after moving back to the UK, continued to travel there on business.Our office was located in a mainly residential part of the city and there were not too many good restaurants in the area; however, there was one and it seemed to do very good business out of us as, frequently, there would be groups of colleagues huddled in four or five different corners of the restaurant.Austrian food does not quite have the same cachet as, say, French or Italian. Typically, it is a mixture of the cuisines of the various neighbouring states which formerly made up the Austrian empire, all of them hearty to say the least - Hungarian goulash, Czech dumplings and lots of meat.However, as I am finding with traditional British food these days, there is always someone who...
by Tom Lewis
For a while, I was a regular visitor to Romania on business. I can't say it's my favourite place in Eastern Europe but Bucharest was once described as the Paris of the East with tree-lined boulevards and even has its own Arc de Triomphe before the baby-faced megalomaniac dictator Ceausescu swept aside huge swathes of the city to replace them with vast squares and the white elephant that is the House of the People, the world's largest civilian building.If you can judge a people by how they drive, then there is definitely something eastern, chaotic and idiosyncratic about the denizens of Bucharest. Shortly after one visit there, I went on to Istanbul and found it far more European in feel than Bucharest.However, my enforced stay in Romania was good for one thing at least - I learnt that Roma...
by Tom Lewis
This latest wine (a Villebois Sauvignon Blanc from Touraine) from a mixed case of Naked Wines is an intriguing mixture of the Old World and the New. Sealed under screwcap, and with the winery and varietal name featuring prominently on a simple, eye-catching, green-and-cream label, it feels modern, fresh and unfussy in a very New-World sort of way.Eschewing heritage for shelf-appeal, we only learn that it's from France in general and AOC Touraine in particular from the bottom of a back label which gives far more column inches to a tasting note than to provenance.And who can blame them ? The less-prestigeous parts of France (with less of a heritage to lose) have been casting off their Old-World image and steadily re-branding themselves as the new New World for some time now.The irony is that...
