Last Friday night, the Farr Vintners Sales and Purchasing teams enjoyed a great night out at Medlar Restaurant in Chelsea. It was a very special evening for us as the dinner was organised to mark the retirement of Jonathan Stephens after 22 years at Farr Vintners.
At the end of October 2011, we held a spectacular tasting at Farr Vintners of all 25 years of Château Angélus made by proprietor/winemaker Hubert de Bouard since he took over the family property, aged 28, in 1985. All the vintages were served in magnums, which we had shipped directly from the cellars of the Château for this event. It was hosted by Hubert himself and attended by such wine luminaries as Jancis Robinson MW, Tim Atkin MW, Sebastian Payne MW, Stephen Brook, Steven Spurrier (Decanter Magazine), Neal Martin (eRobertParker.com), Anthony Rose (The Independent), Michael Schuster (the World of Fine Wine) and Joss (not Josh) Fowler of vinolent.net (well worth a look)!
On November 15th 2011 nearly 400 private customers of Farr Vintners packed the Vintners Hall in the City of London to taste over 80 fine wines from our increasingly broad portfolio.
What a couple of weeks it has been in Hong Kong! With Christmas racing towards us, November is a busy month anyway, but in Hong Kong it’s Wine and Dine Month. We have Burgundy week, West Kowloon Wine Festival, The Hong Kong Wine Fair and “Wine Futures”. The city has been flooded with winemakers, château and domaine owners and their representatives, as well as critics. E-mail boxes have been overflowing with tempting wine dinner and tasting invitations.
The late Edmund Penning-Rowsell (b1913, d 2002) was a fascinating man. A communist, yet the owner of a great cellar of fine wine. He is regarded as having been one of Britain’s leading wine writers and a great expert on the wines of Bordeaux. He was chairman of The Wine Society from 1964 to 1987 . He was the wine columnist for the Financial Times for 23 years and also wrote regularly for Marxism Today. His books include the seminal “The Wines of Bordeaux” which was first published in 1969.
