Fabulous weather for early May. So on Sunday, when I had some people over to help choose new world white wines for the Independent's ten best column, it was great to be able to sit in the garden and drink and eat the afternoon away. I was deeply grateful to my sisters' partner Phil, who was an invaluable assistant not only because of his good palate and knowledge of wines, but also because he helped me sort out the garden beforehand. It looked like a bit of a bombsite, because I'd chosen last week to try and fit in a bit of reconstruction of borders and so forth, which I hadn't quite managed to complete on time. I'm not really one for planting flowers, but I find it enormously therapeutic to spend a couple of hours on a warm evening, the birds still singing, doing a bit of light landscaping.
Anway, back to the wines. The full ten best will be published in the Independent soon - you can see some of my earlier ten best columns on wine and other drinks here: http://independent.net-genie.co.uk/Food_Drink/ - but a few random thoughts, which I don't get space for in the 25 or so words I'm allotted each bottle in the column. Firstly, I was slightly gobsmacked that, among all the wines I was sent by a cross section of supermarkets and online wine companies that there were so few Australian chardonnay's, which for years' has been seen as the atypical New World wine style. I think that, among several dozen bottles, there was only one Aussie chardonnay, a couple from Chile and one from New Zealand. Maybe the wine trade realises the public's taste for big, oaky chardonnays from down under is waning and it is trying to divert us onto other, possibly more subtle grapes. My girlfriend Cathy, from Melbourne, unashamedly adores her big chardonnay's, so was a bit disappointed not to have more to try. By contrast, there were dozens of sauvignon blancs to sample, mostly from the Marlborough area of New Zealand, almost all of which were excellent, although some had this slightly sulphorous, almost bitter finish to them, which is not to everyone's taste. And they all tended to taste very similar. The whites which varied most from bottle to bottle and divided opinion were those made with the Viognier grape, which can be a far too perfumed for me unless it is part of a blend, and so I was really surprised to find two terrific examples, which will probably feature in the final ten. Similarly divisive are those from the Reisling grape, which are, I think, mainly just too light weight and floral to drink with food. They do make an excellent aperitif, however. The best comment of the day though came from my friend Louise, who pronounced that the lavender scented bouquet of one particular reisling was 'just like the kind of perfume you'd expect the Queen Mother to have worn...'