An interesting meeting today with a passionate wine blogger and portugese wine enthusiast made me think - we don't drink enough varied and different wines - to this end I've ordered up 4 new Portugese wines and look forward to their arrival with a watering mouth! More to come once they arrive!

So - as ever wine was consume this weekend, more of this in a later post! I got me thinking though that my enjoyment of wine is not strickly governed by the wine itself, in fact there are three other factors that can really determine my overall enjoyment of any wine. The first is my mood, if I'm tired, ill or just "off colour" then this has an effect. Secondly wine is a social animal, it demands attention, stimulates conversation and this all means that wine isn't for flying solo, you need company, in short wine needs groups of people to be a success. Finally there is food, the marriage of wine and food enhances the experience, Italian style wines with Italian food, French blends with French cuisine. The sum of the two is definitely greater than the two apart. I was fortunate therefore that this weekend these factors all seemed to come together on a high!

On drinking a bottle of the very pleasant 1996 vintage of Chateau Cissac with our good friends John and Lala last night I could not help but making a mental note to have a rant at the 2009 Bordeaux En Premeur campaign still being run by many of our most excellent wine merchants. My big issue comes down to value for money, the top end wines have now become so sought after that they are commanding stellar prices and ones which make the prospect of trying them in future years as unlikely as intergalactic flight for most mortals.

I cannot help wondering how many "vintages of the century" we will see over the next ten years as production methods mean most producers never really make bad wine, the real winners appear to be the Chateau themselves who clearly have invested a lot in doing this but the merchants who clearly like the prospect of making their margins on the £12,000 case of Chateau Lafite Rothschild versus selling lesser Chateau at below £100 per case, easy money I'd say. And yet these wines sell, now more so as a token of wealth or a commodity than something simply to drink!

Oh, and by the way, the 1996 Cissac was drinking beautifully, and it cost well under £100 a case when I bought it back in 1997!

Last night Jane and I were in the fortunate position to be able to open a few bottles to try with our good friends John and Lala, I had ordered some wine for domestic consumption from The Wine Society. We started by opening a 2004 Gigondas from Clos des Cazaux (£13.95 a bottle). Although I was looking forward to this on the nose it was immediately noticable that the wine was suffering from TCA 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, the smell of damp basement or "foostieness" is unmistakeable. This is the first in a long time I have had a wine let me down, particularly in this price band. So we moved on! The Society's Exhibition Gigondas, 2005 (£13.95 a bottle) was this was a full bodied, chunky wine with bags of fruit on both the nose and the palate and just a hint of pepper as well. Yummy, but it would have certainly benefited from the recomended decanting period of a couple of hours - I can only dream about the added complexity we missed as a result. We finished off with Temporada Malbec 2009 (£4.95) which turned out to be a cracking little wine, fruity, smooth and extremely drinkable, a real value for money drink. By the end of all this excitement I was exhausted and, like the rubbish host I am, proceeded to fall asleep on the sofa before our guests left - has the onset of middle age set in?

Last night I found myself in the company in the shape of my good friend John. We found ourselves discuusing how to build traffic to the Carrick Wines web site over an excellent dinner of new potatoes, carrots and a Findlaters Salmon Pie. This was accompanied with by a bottle of Chateau Beaumont 1999 another good friend of mine, fully ready to drink with a leathery, dark fruity nose and soft, velvety and delicate with hints of cedar and blackcurrant on the palate.

The evening flew in as did our enjoyment of the wine, we decided to finish our evening with another glass or two and it worked very well even on it's own. I came away inspired to do more to communicate with our potential customer base and with the certainty that I'll be revisting both good friends in the near future!