Thursday 19 April 2012

Brasserie Blanc in Berkhamsted

I joined a good friend and colleague for lunch at Brasserie Blanc. I was very  impressed with both the food the ambiance and the service and so was my friend. We decided to go for the set menu not because we are mean but because we thought that the portions would not be too big for the middle of the day.

I was looking forward to this as I had recently watched Raymond Blanc's television programmes where he went back to his roots in France. My wife is French and after many years and many trips to France I feel that I might have some roots there too. In France, it is still very easy to find a good restaurant that  will be able to serve you high quality food a reasonable price. This is not so in Britain. Yes, it is possible to find really fine cuisine but you have to pay very high prices. At a lower price level it is difficult to find superb food. At 8.95  pounds for a three course meal I was hoping to get the best quality food at a fair price.

For starters my friend had a beetroot salad and although I do not particularly like beetroot it looked very palatable.

I opted for the spring vegetable soup, alright this is not very adventurous, but is was quite chilly outside for April and I needed something to warm me up.

My colleague chose Dorade or Seabream for his main course. To me it looked as if it had been cooked perfectly.

I chose the  Confit de Porc or Lincolnshire Pork preserved and cooked in pork fat. Despite umpteen trips to France, I have never eaten this dish before. Maybe my wife, family and French friends are a bit conservative about food for I have only ever been cooked Confit de Canard by them. Conservative or not I have never seen Confit de Porc on a restaurant menu in France but sometimes I have eaten Confit de Poulet. Adventurous or not I was looking forward to my main course. The Pork was perfectly cooked and seasoned; it was not at all greasy. It was served with flageolet beans cooked with bacon. Flageolet beans are a particular favourite of mine and my wife and her sisters really cook them well. Usually, we only eat them with Lamb - so much for adventure.

We washed this down with a bottle of 2010 Château Haut Roudier red Bordeaux. This wine would never win any prize but it was good enough for the set menu and our pocket. The full wine list is quite impressive for a Brasserie, but 150 pounds for a bottle of Château Palmer 2003 was probably too extravagant to go with the set menu. It is my opinion that all of the top wines on the list were too young to drink now. One of the more affordable wines on the list was Château Martinat, Côtes de Bourg red, and I would certainly have ordered a bottle if it had been available. Château Martinat is  a fabulous wine which gives its more expensive Bordeaux cousins a run for their money. I recommend this wine highly. This wine is a perfect selection for a Brasserie and you will not be disappointed with either the quality of the wine or its price. It is more likely to be ready for drinking as it matures earlier than more expensive red Bordeaux.


Before the dessert we shared a cheese plate. There were four varieties of cheese three French and a Shropshire blue. Despite all my trips to France, I have difficulty remembering the names of all the cheeses. We had a type of Tomme, a St Nectaire and a cream cheese whose name still escapes me. They were all excellent. The waitress reminded us, quite rightly, that the Shropshire Blue was the strongest cheese and should be eaten last. I only took her advice on the first round. 


We then followed with the dessert  - French style. I chose the crème brûlée which I thought was good but I am not certain that it was cooked on the premises. My friend chose the Chocolate and Banana Mousse; he was disappointed with this. It looked to me more like a heavier English style chocolate pudding. It was not very light - perhaps it was cooked on the premises and the chef got it wrong. All in all, the food was excellent and very good value for money. Such good value for money that we decided to celebrate with a Calvados and an Armagnac. My friend had the Calvados.

The ambiance of the restaurant was excellent and it had the feel of a friendly French Brasserie, but it was not too informal.


Likewise the waitresses and waiters were friendly but not too familiar. I hate being called "guys" and for me this is taking a liberty. It is for the customer to decide the level of formality not the waiting staff. I hate it even more when my wife is with me - we are not guys. How would the waitress like it if  I said come over here and serve me guy? I think I might be asked to leave. In France the waiters and waitresses are trained to show respect. The waiter does not call us "Gars" and we do not insult him by calling him Garçon. "Salut Gars" is for when you are going out for a drink with the lads and is not for the Restaurant or Brasserie. So three cheers for Raymand Blanc again - "Guys" should be left for the school playground or BBC breakfast shows. I am glad I have got that off my chest.

In France, Italy and Spain, waiting is seen as a respectable trade, or profession even, and the waiters are trained properly. It is good to see Raymond Blanc introducing this way of service to a Brasserie in Britain. One of the waitresses was following a more senior colleague around to learn the trade.

We distracted our waitress with some chat about food  and the locality but during this time she was looking around to see how busy the restaurant was and she probably would have had the good sense to move on politely if required. She was obviously a very intelligent employee; so Raymond is getting the employee selection right.

My friend and I have have travelled all over the world and sometimes we have met up on the same project. We have eaten out at so many different restaurants and  in so many countries that we can instantly recognise a good one. We find ourselves indentifying four our five good restaurants in a new town or city and then visiting them more regularly. What is the secret of their success? It is great food, the ambiance and the service which needs to be friendly but not too familiar. The waiting staff in my opinion should command respect not by being obsequious but by being knowledgeable about the food, the wine and life in general and to be professional. Of course, there also needs to be attention to detail. Our wine waiter recognised that we were two people who knew how to handle ourselves in a restaurant, so he asked us if we were happy to pour the wine ourselves. This is the sort of attention to detail that impresses me.

Our comments good and bad were taken into account with good grace by the manager and her staff. Of course, our comments were mostly good.

Brasserie Blanc, obviously has got all the ingredients right to make dining pleasurable. Raymond Blanc has had the vision to ensure that that everything is as it should be. He is to be congratulated and I hope all his other premises show the same professionalism as the Berkhamsted Brasserie. It is really showing a competitive edge and hopefully it will raise the standards of dining in Britain higher.


We shall be going back with our wives. Our bill was 80 pounds for two including the tip. I am expecting to spend more per head next time.












Villa Garduccci 2010 Montepulciano D'Abruzzo

This wine is from the Abruzzi region of Italy and is made from, you have guessed it, the Montepulcino grape and sometimes a little bit of Sangiovese is allowed into the mix. There are many high quality wines produced in the region. But this is not one of them. It does, however, show some regional character and my wife was able to identify it as an Italian wine even though I had covered the label. This is not bad for her taste buds and the wine. This dry red wine was well balanced with a strong taste of plums and cherries and on the label it said it was medium bodied and I am inclined to agree with whoever wrote that. We drank it with a tomato based stew which included lamb and smoked bacon and it went down quite well. This is good standard quality wine. I do not remember buying it and my research on the Internet did not reveal much about this wine. I guess that it is about six or seven pounds a bottle. Probably someone brought it around for a dinner party and I racked it. I certainly would not refuse another bottle. This is good everyday wine and when I see it on a supermarket shelf I shall buy a bottle if I am in a good mood.

Montepulciano D'Abruzzo should not be confused with  red Vino Nobile di Montepulciano which is produced in Tuscany in the environs of the town of Montepulciano but from the noble Sangiovese grape. This latter wine is another step up. And if anyone has the good sense to fetch it around for dinner, I shall open it and drink it with them. Tuscany is, of course, a wine lover's paradise and is certainly worth visiting if only for the wine.

The Montepulciano grape does not fare well as far north as Tuscany. Oh, the wine business is very complex.

Tuesday 17 April 2012

Château Latour and the futures market

News that Château Latour is withdrawing from the futures market where wine is sold "en primeur" to wine merchants before it has been bottled is creating much discussion between wine experts, wine scorers, journalists and wine writers. The "en primeur" market is mainly focused on Bordeaux in France. The top estates sell the the wine whilst it is still maturing in the barrel. The wine is usually bottled and sold on the open market around two years after the vintage. In each spring after the vintage the top estates organise tasting parties where wine connoisseurs, writers, journalists, merchants and pundits taste and assess the wines. Some famous pundits even score the wines at this time and some of them are even given marks out of a hundred.

This assemblage of wine experts helps to dictate the price of the wine before it is released. The wine futures market is of course similar to the futures market in any other commodity and it is subject to speculation. Large profits can be generated for wine merchants who can profit from speculation against movements both up and down in the price. The amateur wine investor would do well to keep away from this market as speculation is a zero sum game and for every winner there is a loser and you could be one of them - a loser that is.

It is not only wine merchants and speculators that profit from this market but the producers themselves who benefit from the inflated prices that speculation generates.

Château Latour are now only interested in releasing and selling their wine when it is ready for drinking which is usually at a minimum of ten years after bottling. Their reason from withdrawing from the futures market is to help consumers buy their wine when it is ready for drinking. Wine that has an assured provenance because it has been stored in the Château's own cellars. Château Latour can afford to do this as their owner is a billionaire. It is a moot point whether the other Châteaux involved in the "en primeur" market will follow suit. Naturally, wine merchants and wine speculators are unhappy about the prospect of the futures market dying out.

What difference will this make to the less wealthy lovers of wine? None whatsoever: Château Latour will remain a brand name that will be in very high demand and instead of wine investors keeping the prices high the nouveau riche will perform the same function. The prices will remain stratospheric. And a new set of people will make the profits and losses. The less wealthy will still not be able to appreciate how good top flight investment wine can taste after it has matured in a cellar for much more than ten years.

There is one saving grace, as shown in my previous blog there are very many good wines which are of almost the same quality as the top flight investment wines and in some cases even better. Château Larose Perganson is one of them and you can cellar it for a decade or more. There are still many delights in the wine world and finding them is part of that delight. We, the less wealthy, are at least not excluded by price from this market.

Supermarket wine

Graham Mitchell a former director of "The El Vino" wine company has made some controversial remarks regarding supermarket wine costing 4 or 5 pounds. He claims that most of it is incredibly dull. I am inclined to agree with him. As he points out most of the cost of a 5 pound bottle of wine is taken up by tax, transportation, bottling, labelling, marketing and profit. When you buy a 5 pound bottle you end up getting less than a pound's worth of wine. All other things being equal when you buy a 10 pound bottle you are getting about 6 pounds of wine after deductions are made for tax etc.

Graham Mitchell therefore recommends that you pay around 10 pounds to get a decent bottle of wine. I agree with this sentiment. For a long time in these pages I have advocated spending a little more on your wine in the search for quality. The wine buyer should still beware though as there are still plenty of bottles wine being sold that are not worth ten pounds. There are also some very good wines at around 7 to 8 pounds a bottle. We should not deride wine at 5 pounds a bottle, as most of it is perfectly acceptable but it can hardly be expected to show regional character when it has been mass produced. In general, a reputable supermarket is not going to offer its customers poor wine at 5 or even 4 pounds a bottle.

When I was studying wine, six years ago, one of my lecturers was a former economist turned winemaker. He averred during one his lectures that no bottle of wine cost more than 6 pounds to produce and that included the top cru investment wines. Top investment wines are so expensive because of the "opportunity cost" which you would have to pay the grower and producer to buy their land and their brand name. So, making a little allowance for inflation, let us say that the cost of producing a top wine is now 8 pounds per bottle and if you add on 4 pounds for the tax, transportation etc. then a top wine should be priced at 12 pounds. It is at this price point where you should be getting something rather special for your money. After this price point you are starting to pay for the name and renown of the wine. My lecturer was not a Master of Wine but his views are imprinted in my mind. Wine like everything else should provide value for money.

I am reluctant to spend more than about 12 or 13 pounds for a bottle of wine and I expect to drink something exceptional when I do. One example of an exceptional wine is Château Larose Perganson, this is a fine example of a Medoc wine which really shows regional character. And which in my view is a top quality wine that rivals any others that I have drunk at much higher prices. You can still buy bottles of the 2002 vintage for around 23 pounds a bottle but, even so, at this price you are starting to pay for the good name of the producer.

Another favourite wine of mine is Torres Mas La Plana red from Catalonia; this wine is also one of the finest I have ever drunk and bottles of this wine are available for around 27 pounds. It is much cheaper in Spain. In my view red wine does not come finer than this and it is almost pointless to pay stratospheric prices to drink wine that is no better. Buy a few bottles and lay them down in a cool dark place and then enjoy them in ten to fifteen years time when you will have to pay more for the vintage.

Graham Mitchell has raised a really good point about wine. We have to be realistic and we have to have a down to earth view of both the marketing and the value for money of our wine. Most 5 pound bottles of wine are just every day drinking varieties which are not the exceptional wines that the label would have us believe.

Equally, at the other end of the scale a 250 pound bottle of wine is not worth the price difference when compared to a lesser known wine of equal quality. You are paying for the brand name and the rarity value. Much of this rarity value is created by investors. Luckily, top wines like Château Larose Perganson are still available at almost reasonable prices.

Monday 16 April 2012

McGuigan Estate Shiraz 2010 Red

McGuigan's Estate wines have won prizes. I am afraid that McGuigan Estate Shiraz 2010 Red, they also make a Rosé, will not be winning any prizes from me. This wine is bog standard Shiraz from the New World and shows no regional character whatsoever. It is produced from red grapes from various parcels of vines throughout South Australia. It tastes as if it could come from anywhere warm. I have even tried wines from the South of France, which were produced from the Syrah grape, and which taste very much the same. Syrah in France equals Shiraz in the New World.

This is not bad wine but it is of standard quality. It is very fruity and tastes of the plum and blackcurrant indicated on the label. It also has a spicy taste reminiscent of the Syrah or Shiraz grape. The wine is reasonably well balanced with medium plus tannins and well integrated acidity. It is full bodied but is not particularly strong in alcohol which at 13.5 % alcohol by volume is a good thing as the wine does not taste hot. The wine also has an oak flavour, so it must have been close to some sort of wood. The problem with the wine is that it is a bit jammy tasting and half a bottle with some home made Chinese food was about as much as I could take. But the spice went down quite well with the food. Two evenings later we finished off the other half of the bottle with some home made Cornish pasties which were also spicy. If the wine is unremarkable it is at least versatile. If I am given another bottle I would be quite happy to drink it again with some strong food.

I have seen this wine advertised on websites between 5 and 10 pounds a bottle. In these straitened times 5 pounds seems about right.


Friday 13 April 2012

2008 Irancy Domaine Heimbourger

This excellent wine is produced in the village of Saint-Cyr-les Colons which is situated 6 kilometres from Irancy in the Yonne department in the North of Burgundy. Domaine Heimbourger Irancy red has been awarded Appellation Irancy Contrôlee status and the wine reflects the the character of the region. It is very light coloured and could be mistaken for a rosé wine. It is elegant with a cherry flavour typical of Irancy and it also has a mineral flavour. Irancy is one of my favourite red wines as it reflects strong regional character.

The people of the area are down to earth and unpretentious and this is reflected in the quality of the wine which is tremendous value for money.
I can't remember where we bought this wine and how much it cost but I doubt that it was more than 10 euros a bottle. On the basis of price versus quality it is a winner. We drank it with roast chicken but it will go down equally as well with game. Irancy is difficult wine to obtain in the UK , luckily we pay many visits to the Yonne to see family. I recommend a trip there to all wine lovers of red, and white wine and Chablis is not far.


Thursday 5 April 2012

2010 Quincy Chai de Maison Blanche - but watch out for the Cliffs

We recently made a trip to Normandy to stay at " La Vieille Ferme" in Mesnil-Val-Plage. It was a very comfortable hotel with a very good restaurant that specialises in sea food. The service was very friendly. On our first night for "amuse-gueule" the restaurant served up a small portion of magret de canard cru mariné: this is marinaded raw duck - in English. It was excellent. The only other time I had tried raw fowl was in Japan but it was not so good. We ordered a bottle of 2010 Quincy Chai de Maison Blanche Cave Romane de Brinay to go with our seafood dishes. The wine was excellent with a strong tangy taste of green fruits and citrus. The wine had a dryness and freshness which cleared the palate and even went down quite well with the marinated duck.

Amongst our shell fish we ate Amandes de Mer which are clams that can be eaten raw. I have never eaten these before and they were as delicious as the oysters and they even had a slight taste of almonds but was that the power suggestion? These clams live in the Atlantic waters around the UK but we never eat them. We call them the "dog-cockle" how romantic and adventurous can you get? The clams can also be cooked but I guess that like mussels they would get rubbery if you over cooked them. The restaurant cooked them perfectly.

If you like seafood and a comfortable quiet hotel then " La Vieille Ferme" and Mesnil-Val-Plage are worth visiting and recommended. But if you are British, American or German be careful walking along the cliffs you might end up in the drink.





Brooklyn Lager

I went up to the West End of London the other day to treat myself to a salt beef sandwich in the Brass Rail bar. They had one of my favourite beers: Brooklyn Lager. This beer is more strong than the continental lagers which I am used to and it has a deep amber colour. It has a nutty, hoppy taste and a floral nose. The taste is distinctive just like an estate bottled wine. It was the perfect complement to a beef sandwich. The decor of the Brass Rail bar is slightly reminiscent of New York and for a few brief moments I felt like I was making a visit, but the sandwich was too small. A great beer from a great city.