They were made of strong stuff: Richmond GC’s members of 1940; a similarly Stoic code of practice is duly being written up for presentation at Jascots’ pre-Christmas briefing!
The Grandest of the Grand - Château Lafite
It’s not an entirely accurate indicator of ‘the state of the European Union’, but, the hundreds of empty ‘matelots’ on thebeaches of the Cote d’Azur is a contrast to the sardinesque 2006 & 7 season and driving into Antibes last night playing ‘spot the Supercar’ was a dire affair! Hundreds of socialistas in their Twingos, Meganes and Peugeot 105s but no roar of proper petrol-guzzling V8s, 12s or 16s in August in the richest sliver of the Med?….at least, not until a Lambo streaked in front of us and blasted down to the Vieil Port….there, that’s much more like it!
Maybe the playboy driver would do a Jack Daniels or two, but, it has been increasingly troubling me as to who is going to buy Lafite 1982 at £28,000 a case or Le Pin 2000 at a whopping £32,000, or, more particularly, your Grand Cru Classé 2009s in the years ahead?
Was it Lenin that said “when you live amongst the wolves, you’ve got to learn how to howl like the wolves!” and, other than the chap in the Lambo, no one round here is howling nearly loud enough to drink £1,500++ on a bottle Lafite 2009!
So we parked our pleby little hire car and went for a preprandial gawp around Antibes Port. Oh la la! The jolly boats looked fun and then the 20 to 40 metre day cruisers were fab….some sleek and sexy, others fat and comfortable and catching a glimpse of X Factor on Satellite TVs through smoked glass doors and these wealthy cruisers of the Med Ports almost felt like our kind of people albeit they came into port in $2M-$10M ships while we whimped in to town in a Renault Scenic diesel, but, you know what I mean.
Still not punters for your £2,000+ bottle of 2009 Chateau Fantastic, though. But, then THE most utterly amazing titanium triple master drew us into the fabled “Deep Sea Moorings” of Antibes Port. Bloody hell! At an estimated $1,000,000,,,,,per metre…..these ships are the most spectacular things afloat, there are literally Billions of Dollars of jaw-dropping gear parked up for us mere mortals to gawp at. Beautiful, vast and so fabulously expensive….Supercraft of another world all owned by the biggest, loudest and probably, the baddest wolves on earth!
Paul Allen's 'Octopus' in Antibes Harbour
And so, in 10 years time, if you haven’t already unloaded your Petrus, Lafite nor Cheval Blanc pop down to the waterside in Antibes and tap on the gang-planks of these floating palaces….your 2009 Lafite will be a nice little lunchtime tipple for the Wolfpack….nicely chilled with Beluga Caviar, perhaps?
Interesting…. perusing the supermarket shelves of ‘Casino’ in the Cote D’Azzle. shelf-upon-shelf of Roses from all over the South including Languedoc, Var, Provence, Bandol, Tavel and every Village and nook ‘n cranny in between line up appealingly and say ‘buy moi’ all together.
And so, despute having pleaded with Her Who Must Be Obeyed to let me send a few cases of Beaulieu over to the villa, it was part of our ‘holiday experience’ to purchase a dozen different Pinks with jolly labels, funny bottle-shapes and sporting lots of medals in search of something delish or our holiday would be ruined and we might as well be in Pembrokeshire….where I wanted to go anyway.
It’s day 4 now and ably assisted by chums staying nearby, we’ve worked our way through the tasters.
Interesting but…..predictable. The sub-€3 were pissy little pinks with no flavour nor character so we let the children drink them and they quite liked them.
Then there are hits ‘n misses between €3-5, but, beware of the Bronze Medalists because Bronze Medalists this year are orange in colour and have a good percentage of last year’s wine in them which didn’t taste any good either.
Beware also of the ‘faux medaille’! Them bottles with gongs with pretty girls’ faces on and gold writing that in a dimly lit local shop look like they are sporting global recognition. They are not and they taste piss-poor, too.
Then there are a handful of smarter, more sophistcated looking Roses at €6-€8 with classier labels probably with Chateau in the name and whose great grandparents didn’t have their heads cut off by Robespierre that are lovely albeit a good 50% more expensive than what they should be given that we are in France and Alistair Darling isn’t robbing you blind because you like a drink.
Then there’s Chateau Minutey and the utterly ludicrously priced Domaine Ott for the Russians with $3 billion cruisers moored in Antibes Harbour and this year’s pneumatic blond called Svetlana purring on the poop deck.
Next year, I think I’ll forget this part of the ‘holiday experience’ and drive down with a box of Mon Rose de Montrose and a box of Beaulieu in the boot so we don’t have to go through this expensive and stupid ordeal again.
Or, maybe I’ll just go to Wales and drink Hot Chocolate laced with Famous Grouse in the rain.
Our hearts go out to this poor chap. Naturally we would move heaven and earth if we weren’t so busy planning our upcoming Private Client Tasting on Oct 20th at Gray’s Inn from 5.30pm. We were particularly heartened that he chose to comment on Jack’s latest blog in his time of need:
“I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia penis enlargement penis enlargement and being forced to post spam comments on blogs and forum! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. penis enlargement penis enlargement They’re coming back now. vimax vimax Please send help! nitip penis enlargement penis enlargement“
Our first exposure to this domaine’s 2009 was back in February, when we tasted it in the embryonic form of its three separate components. That was enough to get us tingling with anticipation, but we have had to wait until now to see the final result. It’s thrillingly intense, beautifully-balanced and achingly refined – any white wine drinker is going to love this. And if you still have any doubts, click here to see what Jack has to say about it.
We’re going to bring over the first half of our allocation in September, and it’s bound to sell fast. But if you would like to secure some for yourself now, we are offering a special pre-shipment price of £9.95, a saving of £1 per bottle.
Ran an International Wine Challenge for 115 lawyers of a very prestigious bank this last week and right up near the top of The Gherkin overlooking the whole of east London including the immensely impressive Olympic Village which looks to be coming on very nicely indeed.
It was a scorchio day and our lovely Prosecco Spumante served up ice cold got the early evening bash off to the perfect start. Three Choirs Winchcombe Downs then commenced proceedings….light, fruity, fragrant and a perfect summer cooler followed closely by our Von Buhl Dry Riesling which was just heaven on this lovely jolly evening. Gosh, that’s a smashing wine with its floral bouquet, really zippy, fruit-bursting and super-refreshing impact, the luscious, floral flavours with the hint of sea-salt and strong mineral tones that are so characteristic on the VB wines. Perfectly balanced, exquisite and so clean and crisp, this was my No.1 wine of the night.
There were 12 big teams and they really knew their stuff but what joy that 10 of the 12 teams, around 100 ‘players’ put down Meursault Premier Cru Les Charmes 2006 by uber-producer, Coche Dury at £25 for what was actually Limoux ‘Autan’ 2008 by Toques & Clocher at £9.95! This is exactly what the inaugural vintage did when we launched the fabulous 2002 and it was always mistaken for Chassagne-Montrachet!
The reds started with Castle Rock Cabernet from Napa which horribly confused the increasingly hapless bunch with the majority mistaking it for Château Potensac (!) before the more obvious Leylines Shiraz 2007 boosted the scores of all and sundry and brought hoots of joy from the ‘players’ and big smiles from the Jascots team as only ONE team popped down £8.95 and everyone else £12, £17 or £22. Bertie Stehelin’s Gigondas 2005 in Magnums rounded off the evening with its opaque colour, massive tones of sweet spice and crushed redcurrants, tar and earthy richness and the lowest bid was a very funny £37.18 per Magnum, then there was a swathe of bids at £80 to £150 per Magnum and a suggestion that this gem was actually Chateau La Mondotte 1990 at £400 a go! Not bad for a £32 Magnum of Giggy, eh?!?!
A good evening’s work deserved a drink so Team Jascots retired to “Devonshire Terrace” for beers and cigars and our James just couldn’t resist what could only be described as a tart’s pink tipple called a “Devonshiretini”! That raised the biggest laugh of the whole night!
Other than a handful of particularly busy and enthusiastic vintners, of which I’d like to think Jascots is one, the wine trade is a fairly gentle industry in which the good people ease through the days, unburdened by the pace and scale of other industries and professions of our great City. I remember one particular occasion, walking up St James’ street at nine o’clock after two morning meetings in the West End and thinking to myself that it must be the privilege of 200+ years in business that two of Her Majesty’s vintners still had not opened their doors for action while our little HQ had been buzzing for an hour and the warehouse for three! Hmmmm.
Haut Batailley - The 2009 is one of this season's best En Primeur buys at £282 ib
And here we are, a few years on in the thick of the Bordeaux 2009 ‘en Primeur Campaign’, the most eagerly awaited and exciting few months in the entire world of wine. Lots of the Cru Bourgeois and some minor Crus Classés have been released and last Wednesday the Château that we’ve been really anxious to go large on, it being our ‘best buy of 2009′, the wonderful, serenely silky, elegant and utterly bodacious Château Haut-Batailley, was released to the world at about 11.30am. Now, we’ve written and called up all our mates in Bordeaux and David Round MW has been stirring up his contacts and letting them know our desire to go large on our ‘fav’ of the big year.
A small player in Libourne was first out of the blocks and as the email alert popped up in the corner of my screen, I went from flash-to-bang and yelped with excitement.
I quickly opened the email and calculated the price while buzzing Mr. Round to immediately put him on Defcon 1. His response was to instantly speed dial five other negociants and get to them while they were preparing rather more fanciful pictorials in their emails and wasting valuable seconds and buy, buy, BUY before the cohorts and competitors heard the news. This is a fervently frenetic, fabulously exciting 15 minutes and every second counts….if you can get in there first, you can scoop the precious allocations. I immediately emailed Henri back telling him that his 15 cases were sold to Jascots and I’d take more…..much more while pressing his speed-dial number to get him on the phone only to be told that “Monsieur Henri ‘as gone out to lunch. Desolée!” and could I call back in a couple of hours? Then, his mobile switched to answer phone which put the blood pressure up by 3 bars and I sat there thinking ‘I can’t believe this’! A second later, up popped an ‘out of office’ notification with the immortal words “Out to lunch” rather than the confirmation of my reservation. Unbelievable!
All’s well that end’s well however and the allocations were secured; you can acquire your en Primeur Cases by calling us on 0208 965 2000 or emailing team@jascots.co.uk
- Veuve and all other Grandes Marques are available from Jascots
We’re flying along on ‘Euro Star’ through the utterly boring, featureless Pas de Calais like a landlocked Cruise Missile and I reflect on four great days in gay Paris…as it used to be called.
First things first we really enjoyed watching ‘Col & Kenny’ (Colin Fleming and a Scouser called something unlikely like Sputnik or Spartacus (Skupski – as it turns out)) destroy a Swiss/German couple at Roland Garros while my Scottish neighbours hurled partisan encouragement as if our duo were representing Britain in a winner- takes-all WWIII against the Fourth Reich!
Then tooling around Paris, queuing like morons to see The newly-hung Water-Lillies before getting bored and strolling along the Seine to experience the fabulous Eiffel Tour, immeasurably more impressive than our dainty, pay-for-itself wheel, and underneath and around which 4 million yellow & orange clad Perpignan rugby supporters had gathered a la medieval carnival with fires burning, jesters doing-their-nuts and air horns blasting prior to Le Big Match against Clermont-Ferrand.
It’s clear our luck was in as after a fantastic weekend we caught a taxi in no time, an impossibility in mafia-run Paris other than Sunday morning when all is blessedly quiet and peaceful, and arrived at the crumby Gare du Nord (not a patch on St Pancras) with time to burn and managed to sneak aboard the earlier Cruise Missile. With heads down and manufacturing a lie in my head along the lines of ‘changed booking on the internet’, we joined the grockles heading back to Blighty. I lifted my eyes up just in time to spot at €37 bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the duty-free shop! Now, at €1.not-a-lot against the Pound, that’s, what, call it £33 a bottle AND you can’t blame the Chancellor for this outrageous price as it doesn’t include his healthy cut! That’s almost as bonkers as the 2 bottles of Chilean Infuriator I spotted in Nicolas, Place de La Madeleine, for €34!
Now I think we’re knocking out Veuve at Jascots for about £28 and that includes enough tax to repay the National Debt, fund a General Hospital and 61/2 Community Police.
So, just to let you know, as we don’t really list ‘other peoples’ Champagnes, we can get what you want, when you want it and in all shapes, sizes, gift packaging etc and sell it to you at prices at or around the most competitive in the London Market. We might be a bit posher than the average shop, but, we don’t have any Royal Appointments to dizzy our heads into thinking that we can justify being more expensive and we have enough nouse to know that you’ll probably shop elsewhere if we’re one Eurocent more than the tightest price.
So, if it’s the Gee-Gees, the Cricket, Footy, Regatta or just a bash that requires a Grande Marque Champagne this summer as “simply nothing else will do, darling” call us on 020 8965-2000 and I think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised!