Trying English wine and pairing wine with food...

On Friday I went back to the English Wine and Spirits Company in Devonshire Row (a 2 minute walk from Liverpool St station). It's a lovely little shop/small wine bar, that as the name suggests specialises in English wine and spirits. They sell wine by the glass and the bottle, and if you want to choose one of their wines to drink on the premises, that's fine, you just pay corkage on it.

English wine is becoming more and more popular, with our sparkling wine in particular winning numerous awards around the world. There is (according to the assistant) currently little red that isn't light or medium bodied, so I knew that wasn't going to float my boat at all.

Arriving a little earlier than my partner in crime for the evening, I asked the assistant what they had that I would fancy, giving her a steer on the kind of thing I like and that I wasn't in the mood for sparkling.

She came back with a taster of a lovely dry white wine from Devon. It was a Bacchus 2013 from Sharpham. It was lovely! Citrussy and fresh, it is a grape that has been made from 3 varieties, the only one I recognised being Riesling. As lovely as it was, it was £11 per glass which I thought was rather steep! With the exception of Champagne, I haven't ever paid that much money for a glass of wine.
So note to self - ask the price before agreeing on the wine! It would have been cheaper for us to drink a bottle than 2 glasses which was very frustrating!

After our rather expensive glasses of wine, we went round the corner to the Cinnamon Kitchen, sister restaurant to one of my favourite restaurants in London, The Cinnamon Club (at time of visiting closed for refurbishment).

With an 8 course tasting menu to delight us, and remembering what I learnt on my course about spicy food, I went with a very reasonably priced wine that unfortunately I can't remember the name of. Annoyingly when I went to look it up on the website to write this blog, they don't have their wine list up there! 

So you will just have to trust me that it was floral and off dry so very good with spicy food, and my dining companion was suitably impressed by my knowledge of what to pick.