Last night Henry Matson and I put on our black ties and headed for The Grosvenor House in Park Lane for the annual IWC Wine Awards. As I don't actually own a black tie, this involved borrowing Tom Hudson's bow tie which only took about 15 minutes of origami-like folding and manipulating to get into a vaguely recognisable shape.
It was an impressive affair with a huge turn-out of around 1000 people from the world of wine. Merchants, agents, producers, writers etc etc. "TV's Oz Clarke" as James May calls him, was sitting on the next table. This massive event was expertly organised as usual and hosted by Wine Writer/Opera Singer Charles Metcalfe and Tim Atkin MW, the wine correspondent of The Observer.
Having won "En Primeur Merchant of the Year" for the last 3 years we were not expecting to win that one again. Some people seem to think that Farr Vintners didn't taste 2008 Bordeaux but we most certainly did. Our hassling of the Bordelais on pricing seems to have been noticed more than our tasting notes this year. It's a good year but not a great one in our view and we fail to understand some of the wildly enthusiastic notes of Baltimore's Big Bob. Sure enough we were "highly commended" in this category and even received a nice little award but the winners this year were our friends at Berry Brothers. Well done to them.
The award that we really wanted was "Bordeaux Merchant of the Year" but this is always one that's fiercely fought over. We had won it 7 times out of the last 9 years so were hopeful rather than over-confident that the judges would look kindly on us once again. Well, the good news is that they did and we won! 8 years out of 10 - that's got to be a record. Even better news is that I managed to walk down the stairs clutching the prize without dropping it.
After securing our victory, Henry and I were able to relax with a couple of magnums of 1989 and 1990 Bordeaux that we had sneaked in through the back door while the rest of the room enjoyed their Patagonian Muller-Thurgau of the year bronze medal winner.
Later on, I slipped away into the rainy London night leaving the ever eager Henry chatting up the lovely Julie from Oddbins.
As we had such good news last night, we thought that this would be a perfect time to start a new Farr Vintners blog on our web site. Not content with being #1 for Bordeaux, we'd now like to be "Innovative" too. We hope to make this a regular feature with members of the FV team letting you know what they've been up to, great wines they have tasted and restaurants that we can recommend. Next up, I'll be reporting on a restaurant that has 85 vintages of Comte Lafon on the wine list (most at prices lower than the market)
