The Happier the Hotelier, the Happier the Guest
From the category archives:
Rubik’s Clubwich
Thought we needed a smile after the seriousness of creativity from Chaos.
Came across this blog Insane Wiches, Insane Sandwich Fun, from which I’ll share a few good ones. He (or she?) is on Twitter as well: @insanewich, but not very communicative.
Dadwich
And finally this very clever
Wino Sandwich
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A 2007 Pouilly Fuissé of Olivier Merlin
Last night I was invited for a session with several wine producers who had us taste some of their wines in a short wine tasting session followed by a dinner with some of their best wines. It was organized by Dutch wine trader De Gouden Ton in Restaurant Mero, one of my favorite restaurants in The Hague. Mero is able to prepare excellent sea food and offer a no nonsense high standard level of hospitality that only few restaurants in The Netherlands are able to offer.
The first gem that caught my attention was a wonderful 2007 Poully Fuissé from Olivier Merlin.
More to follow.
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First we put all trophies on the table
Then we started to taste a left over Pouilly Fumé “Sur La Roche” from Claire Forest. Her dad makes the “Sous la roche”
Background
“A Sparkling Twitter Wine tasting?” You will ask me.
This is the petite histoire: A Dutch wine journalist @Cuno van ‘t Hof, a Dutch importer of Italian wines (mostly sparkling Italian wine and thus aptly named @Spumante and a Dutch hotelier (@Happyhotelier off course) had a discussion whereby the importer dared the journalist that his sparkling wines easily could match Champage. During the discussion they made an appointment to have a sparkling wine tasting session in Haagsche Suites while also some members of Happy Hotelier’s tasting club “Haagsch Wijnproefgenootschap” would join the party. Unfortunately Cuno had to skip the session.
Here you see @Spumante post his first tweet: Let the Tasting Begin!.
One of the outstanding Proseccos @Spumante brought for us was the Motus Vitae. This was a real classy Prosecco! Unfortunately this picture is a bit unsharpened.
Our Tasting member Georg brought this amazing Janz, all the way from Tasmania.
This all Pinot Noir Spumante Rosé Opfre @Spumante brought us was one of my favorites.
I could surprise the party with my own import Cremant de Burgundy Baron de Montfalcon from Andre Ziltener (this reminds me I still have to write a review of his hotel in Chambolle Mussigny)
Mike brought this excellent 2002 Milesime Champagne Rosé from Nicolas Feuillatte
There was more we tasted and more to taste. This was how the company looked when we still had to taste 2 more sparkling wines, but we decided to take one for the road:
With this 1997 Chateauneuf Du Pape Tiara d’Avignon we terminated the tasting session. It was a wonderful session. Thanks all and especially kudos to @Spumante. I hope he came home safely.
More photos of the tasting here at my Flickr set of the session
Update: And here is @Spumantes own post about the tasting session:
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In my post Happy Hotelier is now a WSet Level 2 Intermediate Wine Connoisseur I promised to blog more about wine. However I have decided to reserve many posts about wine and wine tasting I have in my sleeve for publication in the newly to be established blog of Haagsche Suites itself, as most of the tasting takes place there.
From the persons who took the WSet Intermediate Course last spring together with me, we have formed a little wine tasting group to gain more experience in wine tasting. Last Tuesday we started our series of monthly wine tastings for this year.
In the meantime various of us, including me had been following the Wset Advanced Course. I couldn’t take part in the exams and most likely I won’t take part in the exams of the Advanced Course anymore. Partly this is due to time constrictions, but also to my disappointment with the level of teaching in the Advanced Course. As passionate as the teachers of the Intermediate Course were, so dispassionate the teachers of this Advanced Course were. Many of the group that participated in this course didn’t pass the two part exam. The first part of the exam is theory and the second part is blind tasting one wine: You have to determine the grape variety or varieties and possibly the origin of the wine. Granted. Such exam should not be too easy, but the high percentage of failures, particularly for the theory part of the exams demonstrates to me that there is a huge disparity in the level of teaching and that what is expected from you at the exams. That combined with the fact that the teachers of the Advanced Course I followed belong to the top Dutch wine connoisseurs.
Anyway we had invited Richard to take part in this tasting session and he surprised us at the end of the session with an unlabeled bottle of what was to be a 1918 Vosne Romanée.
Vosne Romanée is a small village in Gold Coast of French Burgundy, between Clos Vougeot and Nuits Saint George. Year and region were established with reasonable certainty by way of cellar records. The bottle came from a Wine auction.
The first photo shows Richard with the bottle. Very carefully he uncorks the bottle. The cork is still intact. We all breathlessly watch. You see the coffee filter ready for decanting. It turns out decanting is not necessary.
The wine was clear with some rim and had hardly any depot. Its color was red to orange brown.
It didn’t smell like a wine that was beyond drinking at all. It had some ripe cherry, a bit metallic tones. some mentioned chocolate. A complex nose.
It tasted like it smelled. Ripe cherry, a bit metallic, medium alcohol (we believe between 11 and 12 pct) and ripe tannins still there.
A complex wine and amazing that after 100 years it was so very drinkable.
I will enhance these preliminary tasting notes as soon as I get a copy from Lodewijk, who promised to take full notes.
The other red wines we tasted that evening were 4 German red Spätburgunder which is German for the French Pinot Noir grape.
It was a very good experience in the sense that you could smell and taste the same tones of those much younger wines in such old variant.
A real Wow tasting experience. Thanks Richard!
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Without fluids man is doomed to die. Why not treat our basic necessity with the respect it deserves? Fort Knox is a luxurious wine rack reserved for a single bottle, a gilded cage for the most precious bubbly.
A unique design, as each object is numbered by hand. The hammered-in digits adorn the golden halter like a beautiful scar, playfully flirting with the logo’s engraved letters. Its simple structure, bearing resemblance to the basic wooden archetype, is just a trick to fool the over-stimulated mind.
Fort Knox doesn’t need to scream for attention with ornamental curls and provocative patterns; its decadence and weight show off just by being there – or by an attempt to lift the five hefty kilos for that matter. Beauty is ensconced in the perfect finish, precise inscription and frugal make-up. It’s the peach at each banquet, the pièce de resistance at every table, the icing on the metaphorical cake. Eat as much cake you like, since gold will never lose its value.
Fort Knox (2008) | Sietze Kalkwijk
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Recently a friend of us moved to Thailand and gave me this bottle of 1975 Chateau Saint Jean Reserva Mont-Ferrant wine saying “Maybe this is something for you as a wine lover”. The bottle itself is a bit crooked and its form is “patented”.
I decided to taste it with my little “Taste the Globe” club of wine lovers and wine experts to be. After decanting, it appeared to be drinkable. I have to dig up my tasting notes yet. But in the meantime I would like to have some clues as to from where this wine originates. Anybody?
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Via Yanko Design I came across this new design idea for wineglasses from Sherwood Forlee.
I have been staring at these photos and
wondering whether I would like to have some.
Then it hit me: If the stem is heavy enough and the rubber band strong enough to hold the filled cups it will prevent a lot of wine spillage on your precious table linen. In addition less broken glasses.
So, the one in the know, the guy who has to look after cleanliness of our table linen and of our wine glasses (ie me) has spoken:-)
About Sherwood Forlee:
He is a designer with no design or art education. Instead, he studied fluid dynamics and partial differential equations, and then barely managed to graduate. But graduate he did, and with a high-falutin’ sounding title to boot: “Mechanical and Aerospace Engineer”. Despite this, Sherwood calls himself a designer because it sounds hip and no one likes hanging around a nerd at a party.
Following graduation, Sherwood went to work as a product design engineer. After cutting his teeth at a few firms, Sherwood decided to see more of the world and set out on adventures that would lead him to Tokyo (where he was accosted by the yakuza for trying to sell homemade T-shirts on their territory), the Azores (where inclement weather stranded him for a few days without food in the wild), Zurich (where he was forced to climb a perilous mountain with two massive rental bikes atop his shoulders), and many other places. Today, Sherwood enjoys a more peaceful life in New York City working once again as a product designer.
Still reading? Well then, a little more on Sherwood. He was born in Hong Kong and lived there for about a year. Afterwards, he moved with the rest of his family to Zimbabwe, Africa. It was here in Africa with his wildlife artist father (who, by the way, escaped from Communist China to Hong Kong by means of swimming the shark-infested waters that separate the two) that Sherwood cultivated his passion for adventure, the arts, and travel. Fond memories include throwing stones at bull elephants to make them charge so that his father could get a few good photos to work with before speeding off on a dilapidated motorbike. Nowadays, Sherwood has a bit more regard for his well-being and prefers doing back flips onto hard concrete over being chased by scary animals.
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Cleaning up and publishing some old drafts:
As some readers may know: I am a fan of Philippe Starck, not in the last place because he, like yours truly, is from the very good Bordeaux wine vintage year of 1949:-). Didn’t I promise yoo to pay more attention to Wine?
Lately you don’t seem to see the usual stream of new ideas and new inventions coming from him.
Probably this is because he teamed up with UK property tycoon John Hitchcox and others and formed Yoo. Yoo is mostly about development of residential property, but is also engaged in new Hotel developments.
Granmercy By Starck is one example. Back via the back door in cooperation with his old buddy Ian Schraeger? Oops, Tamara of Mr and Mrs Smith had a Lunch with John Hitchcox who stated there is no connection with this Granmercy and Ian Schrager’s Granmercy.
‘We want to offer democratic, high-fashion living.’ – PHILIPPE STARCK
Well this post is also meant as a rant. Those apartments don’t come cheap. In addition, like many designers, Mr Starck likes Flash for his sites. I don’t like Flash, not in the last place because it prevents poor Bloggers like myself to pinch nice photo’s from a site. (Even if you know how to do it, it is cumbersome) Therefore this silly picture…..
Last upgrade August 5, 2008
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Hot from the block: This certificate proves that I know a little bit about wine and spirits. I found I had to study a bit more in order to be able to serve our guests at Haagsche Suites better.
It also goes together with my aim to cover the categories “Food”, “Wine” and “Wining and Dining” more seriously here, rather than setting up a separate blog.
I found that it the Wset course is a decent course. It was given by a very enthusiast couple, Henriëtte Bastiaans and Jeroen Bronkhorst of Wijn studio NL who used to run a restaurant around the corner and who gave the course in a wine shop, Haags Wijnhuis, also around another corner here. So it was very practical: after the courses and wine tasting I could easily crawl back home.
About Wset
Wset stands for Wine and Spirit Education Trust Limited.
The Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) was founded in 1969 to provide high quality education and training in wines and spirits. Since then, WSET has grown into the foremost international body in the field of wines and spirits education, with a suite of sought-after qualifications. We now even have a membership body – the Institute of Wines & Spirits – for those who have passed the WSET Diploma, our top qualification.
About Level 2 Intermediate
This qualification offers broad coverage of all product categories in the field of alcoholic drinks together with basic wine tasting technique.
Overview
This qualification is accredited at Level 2 in the UK National Qualifications Framework. It is also approved as a Technical Certificate for the Advanced Level Hospitality Modern Apprenticeship.Qualification objective:
Provide vocational training in the broad range of alcoholic beverages to underpin job skills and competencies in the customer service and sales functions of the hospitality, retail and wholesale industries.
Who it is aimed at:
• People employed in the drinks and hospitality industries with little previous knowledge of alcoholic beverages.
• Wine enthusiasts who wish to acquire in-depth knowledge of wines and spirits and want to obtain an internationally recognised wine qualification.Entry Requirements:
Students and candidates who are under the legal minimum age for the retail purchase of alcoholic beverages in the country where the examination is being held will NOT be allowed to sample any alcoholic beverages as part of their course, but this is NOT a barrier for successfully completing the qualification. (Entry requirements may vary according to Approved Programme Provider)How to gain the qualification:
You must successfully complete a multiple choice paper of 50 questions.
More at Qualifications
Heading for the Advanced Course by Frank Smulders (site is currently and I hope temporarily not working).
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I have now translated posts from the Dutch language Weekendhotel Weblog that I co author June, 2004 up to June, 2006 and will continue translating, but so much is happening that I have to continue posting in real time and slow down the translating.
No better restart than with this Spanish »Luxury Collection Hotel Marques De Riscal in Elciego, 110 km south east of Bilbao.
It is located in the middle of a vineyard. Frank O. Gehry is said taking the commission only after having tasted a superb 1929 (his year of birth) Marques De Riscal in the cave of the oldest and probably most prestigious winery of the Rioja appellation about eight years ago. The opening done by The King of Spain, it features 43 suites at an US $88 mio investment. It includes a wine therapy spa, an exhibition area, wine tasting rooms and a restaurant.
Thanks to: USA Today
You can see a video at YouTube (now under bid from Google at US $ 1,65 bio) here.
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