Wine course results...

Well, the moment I had been dreading... would I have passed the wine course exam? I got the results recently, and nobody was more flabbergasted to see that I had got a Distinction in both the written and the tasting exam! What a result - definitely down to the help I had got from both Colm (my brother and business partner) and from the course tutor Mary Gaynor. And maybe a little bit down to the many years of wine drinking coming into their own at last!

Wine course in Kilkenny

A couple of weeks ago, I braved the unusually snowy weather in Ireland to travel to Thomastown Kilkenny for a week-long course with The Wine Academy. This was the Advanced Certificate course, one of the WSET accredited courses, and it was delivered by Mary Gaynor, who runs the Wine Academy.

Well, I have to say that my bravery was amply rewarded, despite the freezing cold weather, which had me running into the Kilkenny Design Centre on the second morning to purchase some wooly socks!

We had a great week of it, learned a massive amount (although I am not sure if I remembered enough of it to pass the exam on the Friday afternoon - time will tell!), and were highly entertained into the bargain. Mary's hospitality was wonderful, her teaching talents and wide knowledge of the wine industry were only to be admired and each day flew by! Thomastown is one of those Kilkenny towns which will be transformed when it is bypassed, and even now it has a lot of charm despite all the large vehicles rumbling through on their way from Kilkenny City to Waterford City or Wexford. Mary can be contacted at www.thewineacademy.ie

Exciting moves and market days ahead...

After much thought and deliberation for the last few months, we are on the move to new premises and are planning to include a weekly indoor food market in our new location on Saturdays. The building is in Glasnevin in Dublin, and has about 6000 sq ft of available warehousing, as well as ample office and storage space, a stainless steel kitchen and space for our wine tastings and much more. It'll be full steam ahead in the coming weeks to prepare the space, meet all the Environmental Health requirements and be up and running by mid-summer. This is all part of our decision to join forces with Champagnes Unlimited, and grow our business jointly, with emphasis on good value wines in this time of economic recession, cookery demonstrations on how to use the produce from the market, and to have our own stall at the market. We will be able to have wine tastings and courses on the premises, although we will still be available for incompany tasting evenings.

Current plans are for a mainly fresh food produce market, lots of veggies, meat, fish etc with an emphasis on quality and good value as well. Of course we'll also have some produce for people to be able to treat themselves, but always with a healthy emphasis! So, I'm off to Borough Market in London this weekend to look at it with fresh eyes - not as a consumer of the food there, but to see how they have it set up from an operational perspective. Not much point in not aiming for the best we can be, and they are a good example in this part of the world... Barcelona would be even better, but maybe too ambitious... for now... So, if you would like to explore having a stall at our market, and your food produce is good quality and affordable, then get in touch with us at info@thetastingroom.ie or if you would just like to hear more about our plans...

Lamb meat-balls with tomato, roast peppers and herby dip

I was experimenting with flavours last week, for once trying to prepare a dish that would match a wine, rather than the other way around. The wine in question was a St Emilion Grand Cru, one of the wines that we are working with our wine importing partners to market and showcase. I decided that lamb would work well, with a tomato and herb-based dip to go with some lamb meatballs. Due to the higher fat content in lamb, I thought it would work better to reheat than beef meatballs, and I wanted to play with the tastes in the dip to match. I roasted some red and yellow peppers in the oven - 20 minutes max, and then didnt even try and remove the skin afterwards. In the meantime, I chopped up a large clove of garlic, and softened it in some warm olive oil. I then hunted in the garden for some herbs and found some thyme, oregano and mint - mostly mint! I added this to the olive oil and garlic mix. I then blitzed the peppers and herb mix in the food processor and put them back onto the heat once they were fairly well blitzed. I then added about 200ml of tomato passata and about a glass of red wine and a generous squeeze of lemon juice (you have to taste it at this stage to know how much lemon juice to add, as it all depends on the sweetness of the peppers and the style of red wine. Finally, I seasoned it fairly generously with salt and black pepper. For the lamb meatballs: Cook off finely chopped onion (about half a small onion for a kilo of lamb mince and garlic - and some chilli if you are so inclined!. Then when that has cooled, add into lamb mince, salt and pepper - you can then form either small meatballs or larger kofti shaped ones - or even burger size if you want... Fry them in olive oil until browned and then finish off in the oven - 5 minutes for the smaller ones, up to 10 if you have burger size. As this dish went down so well, I will have to do it again, paying more attention to the quantities, and publish it on the website as a proper recipe... And it worked really well with the St Emilion - great dish for a supper party as it reheats wonderfully well...

November lunch for 7 - including a vegetarian!

I was planning a lunch for a group of wine-tasters recently, when I realised that one of them is a vegetarian (I always check with people these days). This put a different perspective on lunch, as up to that point, I was planning a warming lamb casserole with Indian spices and flavours, which I had planned to prepare the day before. I know that a lot of vegetarians hate the idea that they are left with the 'side dishes' while everyone else scoffs down the dish that is the centre-piece of lunch, so I had to rethink my approach. It was made even more complicated by the fact that said vegetarian has also been diagnosed with wheat intolerance. So, I decided that a series of 'help yourself' dishes would work well - that way each dish would be interesting in itself, and the vegetarian luncher could simply not eat the meat dish. It worked out extremely well! I included the following:


Roasted squash (yes, more of the wonderful Crown Prince!), with lots of rocket, roasted pine nuts, little chunks of goats cheese, pink peppercorns and dressed with a mix of olive oil, lemon juice and cider vinegar. Because this dish is quite robust and filling, I reckoned that the vegetarian would get enough to eat! I hadnt reckoned on it going down as well as it did for the carnivores around the table, so it was just as well that I had hedged my bets with some 'meaty' aubergine as well! Everyone commented on how delicious the squash was - most people saying that they are sick of butternut squash at this stage, so something different and more interesting in taste was great. I forgot to take a photo of it, but I will the next time I make it and post the photo to my blog.


Tomato salad - I used the last of my home-grown toms, and the rest of them were bought at the market, so they tasted delicious! I added some red onion, some long red pepper slices and some basil, then drizzled some olive oil on top.


I made some tztaziki, and bought some really good hummus from Lilliput Stores in Stoneybatter, and I made some flatbreads with spelt flour. I also roasted some aubergine that morning.


Last, but not least, I roasted some lamb in the oven - fillet of lamb off the leg, which had marinated in garlic, mint, olive oil and thyme for a while beforehand. Unfortunately, while concentrating on making the flatbreads, I left the lamb in the oven for about ten minutes too long, so it was more done that I would have liked, but otherwise it was delicious!


We had a lovely meal out of all this - everyone just helped themselves to the various dishes and I dont think that anyone else realised that one of the guests was a vegetarian at all! And just about everything we ate was healthy - lots of organic vegetables, healthy fats, dips made from healthy ingredients (hummus with chickpeas and tztazaki from yoghurt, cucumber, garlic and mint), organic lamb, organic spelt flour, etc...


To drink with the food, we had a French Syrah Les Grands Augustins from Tardieu Laurent in the Vin de Pays d'Oc, which complemented the food beautifully!

Let me know if you would like any of these recipes, I would be delighted to send further details to you... The whole meal took about an hour and a half to prepare, so a great option for a relaxed Sunday lunch maybe followed with some more cheese and fruit to round it off...

Plans for the Autumn...

The plans for The Tasting Room for the next few months are coming together nicely. We will continue to run wine-tasting evenings for the corporate sector, and our 1-day wine courses. We are also planning to continue our cookery workshops, following on the success of our BBQ workshops which we ran over the summer (despite the awful rain!). One theme for the Autumn will be Asian cuisine, and the other will be quick-fix delicious mid-week suppers. As we limit our numbers to a maximum of ten, it means that everyone gets the chance to really get close to the action, and they get to taste everything that they see demonstrated. As they also get to hear about and taste wines that complement the food, it is a total experience. At our workshops, people get to ask any question they like, and if we dont have the answer there and then, we research it and tell people afterwards.

Some new services which we will be adding include wine-tasting evenings which will be ticket-based (we're finding it difficult to source suitable venues for this, which dont cost a fortune!) and a six-week wine course.

French wine trip - part 1 - Tuesday 22nd July 2008

This is being written sitting outside in the garden of the small house – La Maison Bleu – that we have rented for the week. It is in a very small French village in the Medoc – part of the Bordeaux wine region – where the sound of cock-a-doodle doos ring out through the countryside from about 5am – frequently accompanied by the sounds of the local church bells, and more infrequently by the sound of dogs barking. At this time of the day – about 5.30pm, the sounds have been replaced by the many wasps and bees busily forraging in the climbing plants around the garden.

We arrived here on Saturday evening, somewhat later than originally planned – take it from me, the ferry from Royan across to the north-end of the Medoc, is not for the impatient or the faint-hearted! Be warned – you could face a three hour delay with the queue for the ferry wending its way backwards through Royan, with almost nowhere to even buy some water. We took an early decision and retraced our steps back to Bordeaux and around by the estuary – somewhat reminiscent of arriving at Tarbert for the ferry across to Killimor only to discover that the ferry would be delayed by a couple of hours and then having to detour into Limerick – at rush hour on a Friday on a bank-holiday weekend.

The early part of our trip wasnt without incident of the boating variety either. We arrived at Rosslare in good time to board the Oscar Wilde for our 17 hour trip from Wexford to Cherbourg. We were due to arrive in France early in the day to give us loads of time to explore the wine shops around the port, buy a few wines to try out during our trip, and then return on the way home to purchase a few more bottles of the ones we had liked most. However, while as a plan this had great merit, the ferry had developed ‘technical problems’ which took some time to resolve (several hours in fact) and then we had lost our berthing spot in Cherbourg, so that we didnt arrive onshore until 8.30pm the following evening. We were onboard for over 27 hours – not a great start...

Fair dues to my travelling companions – my brave sister agreed to do the driving to our initial stop-off point – Alencon, where we arrived at about midnight. We had gathered provisions for a midnight feast in the Auchon in Cherbourg (a really impressive supermarket, open until 10pm), and let ourselves into our hotel. The Hotel des Ducs was almost like a self-service hotel – they gave us a number to key into the key-pad at the door of the hotel, our room keys awaited us and we took it from there! The rooms were very large and comfortable and the showers were great! We did see people the next morning – well, we saw two painters who were doing up the main stairwell, and eventually a pleasant woman who checked us out and took our money. Alencon is a nice little town, with pedestrianised town centre, some impressive old buildings and a great food market. I was really sorry that we werent staying somewhere where we had a kitchen to try out some of the local produce.

Our next two nights were spent in Chinon, in the Loire Valley, in a very small hotel, which was adequate but not impressive – a typical old-fashioned hotel where we had to climb three floors of stairs to reach small but adequate rooms – but I cant say the same for the shower facilities! However we were now getting down to the serious business of wine tasting, so accommodation etc became a secondary issue. En route to Chinon, we visited Domain Huet that afternoon, in the village of Vouvray, and their wines are superb. They use bio-dynamic methods and while it may be seen as an extreme measure to grow produce by the moon phases, the proof of the pudding is in the quality of the outcomes – and in most cases – the results are great. The following day we went to Chateau Bernard Baudry, within the Chinon area and were given over two hours by Mathieu Baudry, who runs the vinyard with his father Bernard. Again, the vines are grown by bio-dynamic methods and organic farming principles, and the quality of the wines was really great – Cabernet Franc grape at its best. Before leaving Chinon behind, we have to mention the 5* omelets we got at the Hotel Le Lion d’Or (another small 2* hotel in the town), where we were made extremely welcome by the proprietor and where we would certainly stay if we were back in that area again (they can be contacted at id3709@inter-hotel.com tres agreable!

As a result of too much hospitality in the bar at the Le Lion d’Or (armagnac and calvados on top of wine isnt to be recommended!) we were a bit behind schedule heading for Bordeaux, so with the ferry-delay etc, we didnt arrive to our little village at Veurtheuil until much later than anticipated. We were made very welcome by our host Alain, and soon headed over to the local creperie for a much needed bite of dinner. One of the best crepes you’ll ever eat, made with proper Breton buckwheat flour, and did it taste good after so many hours on the road along with what felt like hundreds of thousands of drivers all determined to make far-off destinations in as short a timeframe as possible, or die in the attempt. We think that a few of them might indeed had the latter outcome, as there was a serious accident en route which also delayed us. A sobering thought all round, but one which didnt deter many of the drivers to continue to drive recklessly...

By Sunday, we had been existing on food that was either bought already cooked, or that we ate at restaurants for several days, so some home cooking was definitely in order! A bout of shopping at a not very impressive supermarket did yield up some goodies – great fresh salad ingredients (why oh why can we not get tomatoes that taste of something anywhere in Ireland??), some freshly cooked prawns to go with the salad for lunch and then the makings of home-cooked chicken for that evening... all washed down with some of the wines we had brought with us from Chinon... a few nice cheeses rounded off the evening. France has so much great produce, it is a pity that many of its restaurants insist on putting so much on top of it by way of complicated dishes and tastes...

Tuesday saw the first of our Medoc wine visits – we spent a great morning at the Lynch-Bages Estate, being looked after by Charles – and followed this with a light but delicious lunch in the nearby Cafe Lavinal which is in the place at Bages – seemed almost like a film setting - it was so perfect! And in fairness to them, the food they served us was absolutely great – really fresh goats cheese/roasted tomatoes on the best rocket salad was the best of three lovely starters, and is definitely one to recreate at home – if I can find equally good ingredients.

Roll on Chateau Margaux tomorrow!

The Tasting Room heads to France

We are heading to France this week for lots of wine tasting - planning to spend about two weeks away in total. The Loire Valley and Bordeaux are the primary places we'll be visiting with lots of vineyard visits planned. So, watch this space for regular updates and photos - mostly post-event as we'll be too busy sampling and learning while there to try and track down too many Internet cafes.

Gruner Veltliner

At one of our wine tasting evenings recently, we introduced the group to the Gruner Veltliner grape, which surprisingly enough, nobody had heard of before and none of them had tasted it either. It went down extremely well with them all - in fact it was their favourite wine of the evening. The one that we tasted was by Huber, their Alte Setzen 2006, from Traisental in Northern Austria. This then led to a discussion about visiting Austria, where one of my favourite places is the Wachau, where they also grow a lot of Gruner. I promised one of the group to let her know some more about when to visit and what the travel options are like. My friend in Austria gave me the following as a general guide... I also asked her to tell me about when the best time is to visit the Heurigen - which are small wine bars selling their own produced wine and other products such as home cured hams and sausages, and they are great fun to visit...


The best time to visit the Wachau .......... you have to remember that this is a very popular and well known stretch, in particular as there is a cycle path which goes from germany to Klosterneuburg and goes right along the Wachau. So in summer there are masses of cyclists. On the other hand, summer is weatherwise really good. Late spring and early autumn are the times I personally would prefer as chances are that weatherwise it is good . There is no problem getting there by train. Am attaching a link to the wachau train which is a local train which stops all along the various towns/villages. Although it is in German it does show fotos as well as routes etc which might be of use. If they really do decide to go there and have any questions just let me know. This is the link http://www.wachauerbahn.at/index Accommodation is not a problem as they are geared towards cyclists stopping for a night. If they were interested, they could also rent bikes and cycle through the wachau which is also wonderful (or so I have been told by german tourists !). As regards the Heurigen ..... they are open all year round but of course the nicest time is when you can sit outside so again, late spring to early autumn are best. As they all open for stretches of time dependent on the amount of wine they have there is always someone open.

So, maybe somewhere different for a wine trip sometime in the future??!