Harbour Island honeymoon: happy memories five years on

We've just been celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary and, while practically freezing here in London, it's provided an opportunity to bask in the memory of our honeymoon, partially spent on tiny, exquisite Harbour Island.

Located in the Bahamas' remote Out Islands (the furthest away from Nassau), Harbour Island (or Briland as it's called locally) has a great sense of history and was the original capital and one of the first Bahamian islands to be colonised. Many of the buildings are more than 200 years old and our hotel, The Landing, was no exception, housed in buildings dating back to 1820. For us, the inaccessibility was part of the appeal; we flew from Miami to Harbour Island's neighbour North Eleuthera and took a small boat across the water to Dunmore Town.

Consequently, Harbour Island is not exactly overrun with tourists, tending to attract a restricted number of loyal, regular visitors who come to dive or to simply unwind. There is a handful of small hotels and the larger Pink Sands resort hotel. While we were there the marina was expanding, but the island has a number of high profile residents who I'm sure would block any major developments that would compromise the island's bijou charms or spoil the magnificent, almost luminescent beach that runs the full length of the island. Harbour island is so tiny – half a mile wide and three miles long – that one of the best ways of getting around is by golf buggy.

We spent an idyllic week at the plantation-style Landing hotel that had just seven rooms during our stay, but has expanded into another historic building, offering another five rooms and a cottage. Owners Tracy Barry and Toby Tyler put the emphasis on spacious, elegant comfort, rather than the predictable so-called luxuries found in bland chain hotels such as phones, mini-bars, tv's etc. Ralph Lauren model, India Hicks had a helping hand in designing the hotel and lives on the island. Her Island Living range of toiletries for Crabtree & Evelyn is inspired by Harbour Island.

The Landing also boasts one of the best restaurants, not to mention wine cellars, in the Caribbean. Ken Gomes, their long-standing chef, creates well-judged dishes well suited to the hot climate, drawing strongly on his Asian-Australian background. Previously, in Sydney, he worked closely with Bill Granger and breakfasts at The Landing are a particular speciality. Fish and seafood are also extremely good. Toby Tyler's lovingly selected wine collection, stored in an underground cellar – well worth visiting if you get the chance; some seriously good rums and cocktails can be enjoyed in the buzzy hotel bar. The Landing now also has a swimming pool in the lush garden, something Toby was only able to describe to us on our visit.

Harbour Island isn't just for fine-dining high rollers. There are several more modest options for visitors including Queen Conch for tasty spicy conch salad and beer (below). Arthur's Bakery is a good lunch or breakfast spot in the heart of Dunmore Town, on your way to the beach.

The Rock House is also recommended for dinner, but much more glitzy and Miami-like. This boutique hotel even has swanky cabañas around the pool. It has quite a different vibe to The Landing with its understated New England style.

Staying on Harbour Island comes at quite an expense, but for a special holiday (especially a honeymoon) in a relaxing, characterful setting, it takes some beating. We will never forget it – and yearn to return, daughter in tow.

http://www.harbourislandlanding.com/ 
http://www.myharbourisland.com/
http://www.rockhousebahamas.com/

Poems on the Underground & Museum of London Docklands

As the half-term holiday comes to an end, this is the briefest mention of a couple of memorable experiences we had during the week. One is all the more moving because of the other.

On Thursday my daughter and I were on the tube on our way to meet an old friend of mine for lunch. Across the carriage from where we sat was a poem I found particularly beautiful (click on the image below to enlarge it and read it properly). 

The poem was especially moving as earlier in the week we had been to the Museum of London Docklands. This is located in one of the few old warehouse buildings alongside Canary Wharf and it is a great place to take kids (and the journey can obviously include the Docklands Light Railway). It was surprisingly calm, feeling a bit undiscovered compared with other museums in London and is extremely children-friendly; it has many interactive exhibits and a large play area for the small ones to let off steam.

Entry is free of charge and there is also quite a stylish grown-up restaurant/bar which, presumably, gets overrun with cocktail-swilling office workers in the evenings. A large proportion of my family hails from the East End so, personally, I found the museum fascinating and look forward to returning with my parents. I also loved the exhibits concerning cooperage and bottling of all the drinks that came into the Port of London. A great place – really distinctive and fascinating.

Museum of London Docklands
No. 1 Warehouse

West India Quay

London E14 4AL

020 7001 9844

www.museumoflondon.org.uk/docklands

Fortnum & Mason 1707 wine bar

Down in the basement of Fortnum's in Piccadilly is a (not surprisingly) rather smart wine bar. I decided to try it out while recently catching up with a girlfriend. It was a Thursday evening and we arranged to meet in the store for a quick browse before heading downstairs for a drop of wine and something to eat. Fortnum's has a real charm – glamorous, daintily proportioned and stocked with countless luxuries and delicious treats. I am particularly fond of the wine department – budget permitting.

Once we were sitting comfortably in the sedate bar, manned by smooth, helpful staff, we ordered a delicious and versatile sounding flight of Chardonnay. As we weren't planning to drink much we requested a second set of glasses, so the wines could be shared between us. They each had quite distinct personalities, yet were stylish expressions of the variety: F & M Chablis 1er Cru Butteaux Vieilles Vignes 2008 (produced for Fortnum's by Domaine Louis Michel), F & M Upper Yarra 2009 Mac Forbes and Pegasus Bay 2007 (showing a lot more evolution than the others). This is one of a number of excellent looking flights of 3 x 125ml, some of which include real gems. Prices start at £12.50 for a rosé flight, rising to £18 for the white Burgundy flight. Our flight cost £16.50. Another tempting option is to select a bottle from the shop and pay £10 corkage, but the wine list does include an impressive selection by the bottle, carafe or glass.

We enjoyed some tapas-like dishes from the 'dégustation' menu. The various types of cured salmon (soya and ginger: especially good), cheese served with fig and almond wheel and a velouté of coco bean and white truffle (the empty cup in the picture!) were all top-notch, although the San Daniele ham could have been more finely sliced. These are priced individually or for a selection of four (£16). We concluded our meal with some Niepoort 10 year old tawny (£8 for 50cl).

If you're in the West End and fancy a smart bit of lunch or a stylish post-shopping or pre-theatre supper, 1707 would be difficult to beat – particularly in the run up to Christmas when the shop will be at its most twinkly. Highly recommended.

(Fortnum and Mason was founded in 1707.)

Fortnum & Mason
181 Piccadilly
London W1A 1ER
Tel 0845 6025694
www.fortnumandmason.co.uk

If a wine were a person, who would it be and vice versa?

I recently contributed to a book in which I had to describe my most memorable wine of 2010 and the brief included suggesting a celebrity or personality to best represent the wine. This turned out to be the most difficult part of the exercise.

This has always struck me as a useful bit of shorthand to express a wine's character and style but, in practice, it's much more tricky than you'd expect. I remember the first time I heard a wine described in this way. It was a ripe, voluptuous, rather unsubtle Californian Chardonnay that was compared to Dolly Parton. Ingenious, I thought, and far more expressive than a string of pretentious-sounding adjectives that didn't mean much to most people.

When I came to make my recent comparison, it was incredibly challenging. The main problem was that the wine in question is not the most immediately appealing wine, but unfolds with layer upon layer of haunting complexity, leaving you deeply satisfied. I ended up with a shortlist of possible candidates that included actors, writers, musicians and a certain Portuguese football manager. They are all desirable men (I am a heterosexual woman – happily married, mind) and generally quite mature (reflecting the character of the wine) and none of them set out to please in a mainstream, superficial way. Some of them are quite edgy, even having psychological problems. I'm sure this all reveals too much about me and my personal tastes!

The flip side of this is the idea of coming up with a wine that represents a particular person. We're big Arsenal fans so, for example, let's take Arsène Wenger. He is mature, cerebral and uncompromising and physically quite streamlined. I can imagine a top-notch Grand Cru Chablis with bottle age and discrete oak.

On a populist level there is, of course, George Clooney. Beautifully packaged and enjoyable in so many ways, he brings to mind great quality Champagne. Krug Grande Cuvée would fit the bill perfectly – insanely glamorous, but with surprising depth and complexity. Better than Nespresso any day.

Postscript (February 2011)
The book has now been published and fellow contributors include Steven Spurrier, Simon Woods, Tom Cannavan and Richard Hemming. I won't tell you here what was my most memorable bottle of 2010 – you need to buy the book to find out for yourself but, as a teaser, the celebrity I compared it to was Alan Rickman...

Every Wine Tells A Story: a collection of the Most Memorable Bottles of 2010 to Warm the Wine Lover's Soul, as told by 29 International Wine Experts by Tara Devon O'Leary.

http://www.everywinetellsastory.com/
http://www.facebook.com/everywinetellsastory

A gorgeous, eloquent glimpse of the past

I recently read Brideshead Revisited for the first time. I adore the Granada Television serial from 1981 and (now it's available on DVD) you can see what a large proportion of Evelyn Waugh's deliciously detailed observations were included in the 11 episodes. However, certain little nuggets slipped through the net. An example is this passage from the fourth chapter of the novel (in book one, Et in Arcadia Ego) when narrator, Charles Ryder, visits Sebastian Flyte at Brideshead during the long summer break at the end of their first year at Oxford.

"One day we went down to the cellars with Wilcox and saw the empty bays which had once held a vast store of wine; one transept only was used now; there the bins were well stocked some of them with vintages fifty years old.

'There's been nothing added since his Lordship went abroad,' said Wilcox. 'A lot of the old wine wants drinking up. We ought to have laid down the eighteens and twenties. I've had several letters about it from the wine merchants, but her Ladyship says to ask Lord Brideshead, and he says to ask the lawyers. That's how we get low. There's enough here for ten years at the rate it's going, but how shall we be then?'

Wilcox welcomed our interest; we had bottles brought up from every bin, and it was during those tranquil evenings with Sebastian that I first made a serious acquaintance with wine and sowed the seed of a rich harvest which was to be my stay in many barren years. We would sit, he and I, in the Painted Parlour with three bottles open on the table and three glasses before each of us; Sebastian had found a book on wine-tasting, and we followed its instructions in detail. We warmed the glass slightly at a candle, filled it a third high, swirled the wine round, nursed it in our hands, held it to the light, breathed it, sipped it, filled our mouths with it, and rolled it over the tongue, ringing it on the palate like a coin on a counter, tilted our heads back and let it trickle down the throat. Then we talked of it and nibbled Bath Oliver biscuits, and passed on to another wine; then back to the first then on to another, until all three were in circulation and the order of the glasses got confused, and we fell out over which was which, and passed the glasses to and fro between us until there were six glasses, some of them with mixed wines in them which we had filled from the wrong bottle, till we were obliged to start again with three clean glasses each, and the bottles were empty and our praise of them wilder and more exotic.
'...It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle.'
'Like a leprechaun.'
'Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.'
'Like a flute by still water.'
'...And this is a wise old wine.'
'A prophet in a cave.'
'...And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.'
'Like a swan.'
'Like the last unicorn.'

And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks.
'Ought we to be drunk every night?' Sebastian asked one morning.
'Yes, I think so.'
'I think so too.'"

Another example is when Charles Ryder's growing enthusiasm for wine is revealed in the first chapter of book two (Brideshead Deserted). While living in Paris, Ryder is taken out for dinner by Rex Mottram, Sebastian Flyte's future brother-in-law.

"I was there twenty minutes before Rex. If I had to spend an evening with him, it should, at any rate, be in my own way. I remember the dinner well – soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in a white-wine sauce, a caneton à la presse, a lemon soufflé. At the last minute, fearing that the whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviar aux blinis. And for wine I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then in its prime, and, with the duck, a Clos de Bèze of 1904."

A little later Ryder observes:

"I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James's Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime, the same words of hope."

28°-50° Wine Workshop and Kitchen

Late last year on this blog I waxed on at great length about a spectacular evening my husband and I enjoyed at Texture to celebrate our wedding anniversary. To my joy, a few months ago I was intrigued to hear that the team behind it was opening another restaurant, focusing even more so on wine. It sounded so exciting.

Last week I finally got the chance to experience this new venture (just off Fleet Street – see above) when I met two old wine trade friends for lunch. We had studied for the Master of Wine together (some rather more successfully than others!) and were particularly keen to take a close look at the wine list. As we had a lot of catching up to do and not a great deal of time, we played it safe by restricting our choices. We started off with Tyrrell's Vat 1 Hunter Semillon 2002 which was a mouthwateringly pithy match for the decadently rich duck rillettes. At £5 for a 75ml glass, this is a bargain for such a complex rarity.

For something to accompany our main course – we were all tempted by the onglet steak – we turned to the 'Collectors List' and the Hermitage 2000 from Domaine du Colombier, another bargain at £45. This wasn't a great year in the Northern Rhône and the wine was, perhaps, just beginning to dry out, but it had enough verve and sleek structure to work beautifully with the steak. Alternatively, we could have had Château Phélan-Ségur 1999 for £59 or Grivot's Clos de Vougeot 1999 for £85. It's a treat to enjoy mature, complex wines in a restaurant at such comparatively affordable prices.

Co-owner, Xavier Rousset has developed relationships with several individual wine collectors and is able to sell mature bottles on their behalf at 28°-50° at reduced margins. It works well all round – we get to taste otherwise unavailable wines and they make space in their cellars for newer vintages. Furthermore, even for the standard wine list, Rousset's margins are small. According to Nicholas Lander in a recent piece in the Financial Times, Rousset works on an overall gross profit of 35 percent which is half the industry norm. At time when alcohol sales are falling, this could be an effective business model. 

I can't wait to return and taste more of the treasures on offer and explore the menu more thoroughly. At the risk of being a bit over-the-top, 28°-50° is a great gift to wine lovers. (If you're wondering what the cryptic-sounding name refers to, it describes the latitudes between which grapevines grow most successfully.)

28°-50° Wine Workshop and Kitchen

140 Fetter Lane,

London EC4A 1BT

Tel 020 7242 8877

http://www.2850.co.uk