05 Friday Nov 2010
Borracha’s Vinquiz pairs your personality with a unique bottle of cult wine and delivers it to you with a personality profile, tasting notes and pairing suggestions.
I came across this quiz while doing some research for Victoria this morning, and as much as I wanted to end up with Botani I kept getting Pargua…
What did you get?
Take the Borracha Vinquiz.
08 Friday Oct 2010
Tags
[click to enlarge]
Last night Jessica and I went to a fabulous sherry tasting (cata de jerez) at La Azotea Vinos & Más, which was both fun and educational. I’ve never known much about Spanish sherries and so it was great that José Argudo from Bodegas Gonzalez Byass took us through the whole sherry-making process while we sampled ten – yes that’s right, ten!! – different sherries. From the palest driest mosto to sweet musky fino/oloroso blends, we sipped our way through it all, even sampling some lovely 30-year-old wines.
Afterwards Juan brought over a jamón from their La Azotea restaurant across the street and we all had a bit to eat, though not nearly enough for the amount of wine we’d had, so Jessica and I went off to the Alameda for a late night snack, ending up at Al Aljibe.
We had a great time catching up on all our news and I’m really glad that Jess is going to be in town for awhile and not out doing field work in Doñana so much. It’s nice having her “home” again.
[also posted on azahar’s sevilla blog]
25 Saturday Sep 2010
Tags
Coffee in bed, then ran out at 10.30am to meet Ben (friend of José’s) in deepest darkest Hackney, and afterwards whipped back down to St Pauls to meet Teutcher, who then asked me how I felt about fish… thought she was talking about lunch but she was in fact talking about fish eating ME. But lunch first. Off to Covent Garden to sample 32 Great Queen Street West, which was fabby, then off to Kensington to have feet nibbled upon by tiny fish. Loved it. And also the half-hour foot massage afterwards. And then – eep! – was getting late, so planned to meet up with Annie and T’s husband for a drink in Charing Cross before Annie & I headed out for dinner with twitter friends. Needless to say we arrived late after racing there on foot for a good half hour (buses were not making any sense by then). Met Rachel, José & Alessio in gastropub… had okay meal (the company was much better than the food) and around midnight Annie walked me to my bus stop and sent me safely on my way home. It was a day and then some. Click to enlarge the pics…
Today I leave for Bristol at 5pm…
24 Friday Sep 2010
Tags
What a day! Got up feeling a bit fuzzy after having stayed up way too late with Joe sampling his lovely Spanish wine collection… so at 9.30 this morning I found myself flying out the door with wet hair and in a state of semi-panic thinking I’d be late for the reason I came here in the first place. As it turned out I caught the bus straight away and just about made it on time (10-ish), and had quite an interesting day meeting other SimonSpeaks experts and learning more about the whole thing. When things finished just after 4pm I invited Florence Expert Nicky to come out with Madrid Expert Annie and me for a drink and a chat, which was quite fun. After that I went in search of an M&S to pick up some food as I had been promising Joe an “az carbonara” since the Hackney Gang was in Seville…
And so had a lovely comfy night at home with Clare & Joe.
A few pics above of stuff I saw and did.
20 Monday Sep 2010
Tags
Meet my stand-in … Mr Sevilla.
In the past few days I’ve received several requests for tapas tours with three of them asking about tours while I am in London – figures! I thought I would have to say no but then I thought to ask Nog if he would like to try doing a couple of tours. At first he wasn’t sure but we talked it over and I said I would help him organise everything and explained it wouldn’t be any different than when we’ve taken out visiting friends here. And so he’s going to do it! First we thought he would just have one tour taking a couple from London out on Saturday, but then last night I got a confirmation from six lawyers from Liverpool ( ! ) for Friday which should be fun. I’d actually love to be doing these tours myself, but at least now I don’t have to let anyone down and – also very importantly – we will make a bit of extra cash this month. Plus I think this will be good experience for Nog. He’s really turning into quite the Sevilla Expert himself, helping out with my SimonSeeks research, and of course he knows all the tapas bars (and tapas) as well as I do, having been with me since the inception of Sevilla Tapas. And he even sucks the brains out of giant prawns (see above) which is something I’ve never been able to do.
So wish Nog luck this weekend! I know that he’ll do a good job and I suspect he is also going to have a great time. I mean, what better work is there than meeting interesting people and taking them out for tapas and wine?
casa azahar 