Wining and Dining

A friend of this page, Ken Muspratt of Grapes wine bar on the Marina, suggested that I should offer his wine recommendations to serve with my dishes. Let’s hope this becomes a regular feature. 

Personally, I started drinking wine during my student days back in Algiers. Once a thriving wine-producing country, after the French left in 1962, Algeria moved away from winemaking, as many of the vineyards were abandoned or turned into arable land. 

My student friends and I often gathered on campus on Saturday evenings to share a bottle or two of cheap supermarket wine and play cards into the early hours. Hangovers were blamed on the red plonk which we called “Lion’s blood”.

Later, in Sunderland I did what every student did. Buy the cheapest bottle of German or Spanish wine to drink before heading out to the local discos.

However, I learnt a lot more about wine when I started working in restaurants. There was a quaint wine shop in Shakespeare Street in Newcastle, just across the road from La Capanella where I started my catering career washing dishes. Just about every Saturday, I bought a bottle of wine recommended by the enthusiastic shop owner. As a result, I drank and learnt a lot about French and World wines. 

While working at the Coliseum in Peterlee in the early eighties, I once booked a party of wine connoisseurs who gave me a list of expensive wines to purchase for a tasting. Strict instructions were given as to the order in which those were to be served. I mistakenly poured a couple of them a glass of cheap sparkling wine instead of the expensive champagne they had ordered. I was astounded that they did not notice the mistake. Just goes to show that not everyone can be a wine expert.

When I opened Krimo’s in 1985, the list consisted of your run-of-the-mill wines such as the obligatory German Piesporter and Italian Chianti plus a couple of expensive ones which rarely got asked for. I once read that profit came only from cheaper wines whereas the dearer ones were just for show.

One of our young waitresses once served a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet, the most expensive wine the list, instead of a much cheaper one which a couple of diners had ordered. They enjoyed it without batting an eyelid. I still wonder whether they had realised the mistake but, as for Leanne, I make sure to laugh at her blunder every time we meet, even thirty years on.

In 2002, on a tour of France, we stopped at a village bearing the same name as that expensive wine. That reminded me of the joke about the American tourist who told his travel partner that the French often called their villages after the name of wines. 

Among the cellars we visited in Puligny-Montrachet, we were pleasantly surprised to discover one owned by a Leeds woman and her French husband. We couldn’t leave without buying a couple of bottles of that lovely but rather expensive wine which we kept for a special occasion a few years later. 

So, hopefully we will try and recommend a wine with every recipe but as the saying goes, “tastes and colours may not be argued upon”. So, please feel free to share your own wine choices with us.

But more than anything, please remember that life is too short to drink bad wine!