Uncork Wine Stores, Nicosia, Cyprus

This shop is a delight at every turn. The door handles are bottle shape. 

The name on the receipt has the U in the shape of a wine glass and a K with the shape of a corkscrew. 

We bought a Muscat wine, and a pourer.

Last Meal At the Harrow At Little Bedwyn Restaurant Which is closing

The Harrow sent us an email that they were closing and we booked straight away. We have been there several times. It is very expensive so, for us, saved for a special occasion.

 Usually an anniversary or birthday. We have two birthdays in one month, and a birthday and wedding anniversary in adjacent months.

Lost the Michelin star.

We had the six course tasting menu.

Starter
Bread with hummus.

Liquified beetroot in tiny shot glass, with ginger adding bite at the bottom of the glass. Irish blue cheese on top.

Cod, or was it snapper, a big flakey fish, in mushroom sauce.

Raw venison.

Mock egg with mango centre and beaten meringue style white outside in an egg cup with salted biscuit.

Dessert of fruits including kumquat and a red fruit, raspberry or strawberry, a variety of colours like a bunch of flowers.

Coffee in cups with flat handle.

Two chocolates although only one of us ordered coffee.

We had hoped the chef would take over the business. But it seems he wants to fulfil his dream of gardening. Wait and see if another restaurant takes over the property, which has a restaurant, an underground wine cellar, a clientele.

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
Author of
Quick Quotations.
How To Get Out of the mess you're in.
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Black Pepper Restaurant, Hatch End, Pinner, Amaretto Ice Cream and Beames-de-Venise Wine, for a Happy Meeting - And Moving Seats!

Problem
Where can you have a room to yourselves for a happy meeting with a congratulations speech? How do you get to sit near the VIP? How can you not get stuck with somebody who is boring all evening, and meet lots of people?

Answer
Black Pepper Restaurant in Hatch End.

Story
We spent the jolliest evening there in a room at the back. One of the ladies who organised the event brought along a banner saying Congratulations and a balloon.

We were congratulation a member who had become distinguished Toastmaster (DTM) which only goes to about one per cent of members of Toastmasters International Worldwide and involves a project turning around a filling organisation which is losing members, morale or money or all three. (In his case he blew new life into a flagging football club.)

Black Pepper Menu
Black Pepper has a menu with several choices for a set price three course meal. Whilst we waited for everybody to assemble I ordered a Prosecco.

The starter I chose was smoked salmon. Good.

My main course was duck with orange and saute potatoes and spinach. I have to say I was not thrilled with the main course. The duck seemed a bit dry. The orange sauce was tasty, but somehow the meal did not have freshness nor zing.

My companion chose rare for the lamb, then shellfish and had three glasses of wine and got an upset stomach. I'm allergic to shellfish and this is the third time he has been ill after a restaurant meal but I have been fine. I would suggest ordering meat medium rare rather than rare. Is it really worth risking food poisoning? I read that some restaurants won't serve meat rare but insist on it being cooked through.

I sat in the waiting room of the nearby local doctors' Medical Practice for a routine annual blood test and watched their loop of health videos. One of the health messages was to make sure meat is cooked through (especially on a BBQ when have the outside cooked or even blackened does not mean that the centre is cooked). The cancer websites warn you not to eat blackened food. But, back to the food and customer choices, everybody seemed happy with their food and evening at Black Pepper. Just a little blip.

However, the earlier disappointment with the duck was completely eclipsed by the delightful dessert. My dessert with amazing amaretto ice cream was wonderful. Flavourful. Worth going here just for the dessert.

The menu lists chocolate brownie with amaretto ice cream. Very rich. The friend sitting on my right found the combination of ice cream and chocolate brownie too sugary and rich and offered me a taste of both. So I got a double helping of the amaretto ice cream.

I asked for my apple pie to be accompanied by the amaretto ice cream instead of vanilla. I rarely manage to taste vanilla in so called vanilla ice cream. The amaretto is wonderful. But it's better with the apple. The large slice of apple is in a heavily sugared cake also. (Not quite as fresh tasting as the apple strudel from B & K. B & K is great for take away food and small groups, such as 4-6. But Black pepper, with its bar in the front, for a grander more glamorous event and group of 24-30 people in the back room.)

Drinks
At the end of the meal with dessert I ordered Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise, (that's the appellation, the name of the drink. I think there's another Beaumes-de-Venise with another grape, not Muscat. Muscat is my favourite, just the right sweetness for me, sweet enough. (From the town of Beaumes (cave) de Venise in France.

More details on the Beaumes-de-Venise wine from the website:
grapedeal.com / May 2106

Moving seats
In addition to having the room to decorate ourselves, and a chance to make congratulatory speeches, the organisers ran my favourite system of seating. After each course you move around (every fourth person changes seats, starting with the person fourth to the right of the standing organiser, who says, "You move (Michael or whoever) and so on clockwise around the table or horseshoe. That way the VIP gets to meet more fans, more fans get to meet the VIP, nobody monopolises the conversation, everybody meets several people, more fun, more new people met, and more business gets done arranging other social or business events.

It also means that husbands and wives who have seen each other all day get a chance to meet new people. You have more to discuss with each other when you get home afterwards.

Tips
1 You can buy banners and balloons in the party shop across the road from Black Pepper in Hatch End if you forget and decided you need anything at the last minute for a celebration. Another party shop is in Stanmore.
2 Look up reviews of the menu in advance to choose your choices.
3 Switch seats two or three times in a large group event.

Black Pepper Restaurant
461 Uxbridge Road
Hatch End
HA5 4JS
Tel: (+44) (0)208 421 4349

Blackpepperrestaurant.co.uk

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer. Please like my posts, follow and share.

Travelling the world and learning languages from bottle labels

Take a look at these bottle labels. Can you translate French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian bottle labels? It's easier than you might think.

Sometimes you get just the legal requirements, country, region, vineyard, importer, age. Look at this in more detail.

The name of the country
Is it old world or new world. Old world will often impress older people who are often set in their preferences and many like wines from France, especially the patriotic French! Within France you have the region, such as Champagne. Growers from one town or city or village are proud of their name and often band together to set the standards.Each country has its own translation of are of origin stated, for example, in French, German, Italian, often abbreviated to three initial letters. Once you know that Champagne is a place name, you know that in English the word should start with a capital letter because it is a proper noun, meaning the name of a place or person, an individual. In German they use capital letters for all nouns so there is no such distinction.

But to provide more variety of taste, in a bad year or even a good year, they may blend two grapes, or more. Some drinkers like Syrah. Some people like old world wines, French. I go for Italian Prosecco (which was originally only a place name but now also a grape variety) and Asti (which is a Italian place name). I like Zinfandel grapes and sweet muscat grapes.

A favourite game or test of the wines, as well as the audience at a tasting, is to guess the original of the first wine (blind tasting, wine label hidden). Sometimes you blind taste the first two wines. In a contest of wines, blind tasting is done of all the wines buy a panel of experts and a medal is awarded to the best.

France the region maker, the ingredients - in wine a variety of grapes, sulphites - which is usual as a preservative.

The wine label at the start of this post has the picture of a bird, a 'Whistler' in Spanish. I spent an evening chatting to new friends and took a picture without taking time to read the bottle label.

Now I have analysed it and found it most interesting. How little one remembers. Looking away, I seem to remember the bird facing left. But looking at the label again, I see that it is facing right. That doesn't matter, just shows how memory can play tricks. I remember it as a fascinating bird. I was obviously excited just by the fact that it's a picture of a bird on a bottle label. Looking at it closely, it has no colour, no distinctive features, it is not an exotic bird like a parrot. Yet it had the effect of summoning up a very positive reaction in me as a drinker, and would do the same to a buyer. That's marketing for you.

Champagne and Champagne Methos
I had this all wrong. You start by making wine. The huge 'barrels' but they are not barrels but vats. Nowadays worldwide vats are not only wood but more often steel or even concrete eggs. My wine expert says wine is not first in an enormous French oak barrel but you add flavour last. As in other countries, wine is then left to mature longer in a bottle, with a cap on the bottle. Wine is matured two years minimum in bottles for Champagne; after the yeast is added to create bubbles.

Later bottles are turned to release the yeast to the top, ice is added so that then the ice plug of yeast pops out. To replace the air gap left in the bottle after the ice plug has gone you must add some more wine. The dose of sugar, in French called the dosage varies, from the driest, nature (nature or natural) or brut (think brutal, untamed) through sec to doux (think it's soft or sweet or delicate).

Cork
The cork is placed in the bottle. A wire cage to stop the cork popping off under pressure from the bubbles.

Label
The label tells the company years later, and the seller, and the drinker, what is in the bottle. The year is specified because weather affects the quality. In a bad year you might have fewer grapes, or nasty grapes so you throw a lot away in order to preserve the quality of the wine for yourself and for your reputation. If you are unlucky, the glut of grapes mean prices go down. but usually a good year means the wine is so good that people want it, buy it, drink it. In time this leads to less quantity of the best wine from the good years meaning scarcity.

TRANSLATIONS
appellation - Franch for name (from apel for name)
Cava - Spanish white wine, similar to Champagne and Prosecco
controllée - French for controlled
Champagne - place in France - where wine must still be made by the traditional Champagne method in the bottle.
cremant - creamy - with bubbles but not allowed to be called Champagne because it is from another region and/or city or village in France
Prosecco - Italian place name and grape name - usually sweeter than Champagne

Whistler Label Analysed
My first thought on see the bird was how cute. Then I read in Wikipedia that it eats insects. Not so cute. Although not as bad as lions killing people and gazelles, eating plants must surely be less cruel than eating insects. Think again.

The bird is not just pretty. It is an important part of the production progress. You see the word organic on the label. What does this mean? The vineyard does not use pesticides. Instead they let the bird eat the insects.
http://iblamethewine.com/silbador-2013-organic-cabernet-sauvignon-chile

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
type in Angela Lansbury, author or travel writer or poet. Fortunately there are only four people with my name. Most people I look up on Facebook and google and linkedIn have twenty namesakes worldwide. As for people called Patel, Cohen and Levy, Singh - several million of those.
Follow me on Facebook and like my pages here and there and everywhere including linking to me on LinkedIn, Watching me on YouTube.

The Best Sweet Riesling From Corney & Barrow

I love sweet wines. I like muscat grapes, dessert wines, cocktails such as vodka and orange and Baileys. I enjoy Prosecco and cava and Champagne as an aperitif. Most reds are strong and dry and bore me, so I am always looking for a medium sweet, a sweet, a sparkling a pink wine.

I was in heaven when I went to a wine tasting hosted by Corney and Barrow. First the venue is a delight, and easy to find. It's a hidden gem. We walked from crowded Liverpool Street station, which has McDonalds, a Caffe Nero with no toilet, and a large Wetherspoons pub (later you can read my previous post on the station). From the busy street outside we disappeared into a pedestrian alley, into a tree lined square with a view of the Gherkin, then through lanterns bordering the stairs with heaters overhead which looked like torches, reminiscent of a Roman stage set.

In the secluded, elegant candle-lit darkness was the Corney and Barrow Restaurant. Beyond that the private room with four wines. At the start was a table of Rieslings from 2015, only a year ago, the new wines, and already Corney and Barrow are running out of their allocation.

I'd had Riesling before. I have studied about 20 hours and then a day at WSET (Wine and Spirit Eduction Trust) taking the level one exam which is roughly equivalent to an NVQ (vocational qualification for people serving wines in shops or restaurants). My husband has taken levels two and three and is studying for the diploma which consists of about nine exams taken over two years or longer. So I am forever hearing, "You can smell the petrol in Riesling".

In the Sixties and Seventies, like the rest of the British wining and dining world, I was into sweet wines and drank Mateus Rose, Black Tower, and had no idea of any regions nor any grapes.

Later, it must be the case that most of the Rieslings I have tasted in my short knowledgeable era of wine tasting have come from Alsace. I have now, thanks to Corney and Barrow, discovered the Rieslings from the Mosel region. I am told that the Mosel region consists of blue slate banks on three rivers, and the region was known by the names of the three rivers and areas, until somebody decided to simplify the name to make it more memorable. So now the region and the wine growing area are called simply Mosel.

I must have tried a dozen wines, started with the driest ending with the sweetest, and every one of them was delicious. Just to see whether I was simply in a good mood, I went over to the other three sets of wines, dry reds. Did I like all of them? No. Not one of them.

I was most interested to hear about wines grown on the side of Mount Etna. Fascinating.

However, if I had to choose a wine to drink or buy it would now be a Riesling from the Mosel.
Corner and Barrow have several restaurants and attached bars with extensive wine lists. You can also buy wine from them. They have offices in London, other parts of England, Edinburgh, Hong Kong and Singapore. You can also find them on Facebook, twitter and Instagram.
www.candbscene.co.uk is their blog.
www.corneyandbarrow.com
More about the restaurant and bar in my next post.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

More on Muscat Grapes

One of the joys of travelling is trying new foods.
 Even travelling to the next high street or the centre of your home city takes you to new grocery shops which sell locally grown or imported and exotic fruit.

Refrigerate or Ripen

The muscat grapes I bought were Muscat Beauty Seedless from Chile. They were sold to me by Waitrose supermarket. Checking the label I see that they tell you to wash before use and refrigerate after purchase. That depends if they are ripe enough already. Some fruits such as kiwis we bought were not ripe so we left them out in the kitchen to ripen.

Seedless Grapes

One of the joys of life is seedless grapes. If selective breeding in the greenhouse produces seedless grapes, I'm all for it. Less to dispose of when travelling. So how do seedless grapes breed? They are regenerated by grafting. If you plant a chardonnay seed you don't get a Chardonnay vine. Like children, they all come about different. But if you graft, or move the branches to take root, like a banyan tree, you get exactly the same fruit.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Muscat grapes and wines

Muscat, moscato - what does it all mean? For years I have known that a muskat wine is a sweet dessert wine, which appears on the dessert menu in restaurants. 

Today for the first time I had muscat grapes, which you can see on the right of the picture. The muscat grapes which you eat as dessert grapes are not the natural little grapes which are used to make wine. People eating grapes one by one want a big grape which is easy to peel and gives you a proper mouthful. Do you remember 'Peel me a grape' said by humorous American actress what's her name? If she had been eating tiny grapes they would have taken forever to peel. 

So muscat grapes grown for eating are bred and picked with the largest ones chosen for the desert table. If you grow ornamental vines in your garden (as we can in London, England), you have to choose between tiny grapes suitable for wine making only, or bigger grapes suitable for eating only, or maybe a rarer grape which is suitable for both.

Bear in mind that grapes for eating must be sweet or at least neutral in flavour. Grapes for wine making can be small and sour. If you picked them early in the season they would be sharp and sour, like unripe apples and most fruit. You wait until the end of the summer to harvest them, giving them all the summer in the sunshine to grow larger and slightly sweeter with a stronger flavour. 

The sweeter wines are made with grapes left so long that they are growing a mould. 

So far, so good, easy for anybody to understand. To complicate matter further, in each country the name muscat is given to a different grape, either different entirely from the start or developed differently by breeding over the years. That's why the country of origin and even the village, vineyard growing the grapes, and the winery turning the grapes into wine is important. 

In the picture you can see the glass of Beaune de Venise, my favourite muscat dessert wine. Beside it are the muscat grapes. However, I must tell you that compared to the delicious sweet wine, the grapes seemed disappointingly bland and flavourless. Maybe that's what makes a special wine. Or maybe that's why muskat is a grape rarely found in supermarkets. Or maybe the pairing of the two just doesn't work. It intensified the sweetness of the wine but also the blandness of the grape.

Similar effects were found when I tried to match blue cheese with Beaune de Venise. The effect of the sweet wine masked any flavour in the cheese. The wine seemed no longer deliciously sweet but ridiculously sweet, unnecessarily sweet, over sweet, cloying.

Now I know why you pair sweet wines with sweets or desserts. 

As you can see from the picture the spelling is m u s c at but the spell checker keeps changing it to 

m u s k e t .

Angela Lansbury, BA Hons, ACG, CL, travel writer and photographer, blogger, author and speaker.

Muscat - more mysteries

The Beaume to Venise muscat wine mentioned in a previous post has French dialect words on the label. The language is Occitan, probably from langue d'Oc - language and land of the Ocs.

I have pictures of another bottle of Muscat wine.

This one, usually, has the word muscat embossed in glass on the clear bottle which looks brown because of the brown colour wine inside the bottle.

Wines go brown as they age, like fruits such as apples.


Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, researcher, author, speaker.

Guess What These Place Names mean: Bury St Edmunds; Beaume de Venise, France.

I always try to check place names because it helps me to remember them, draws my attention to the spelling and points to places to visit, landmarks in the area. You might consider whether studying geography and history from books and the internet is a distraction from real life and work, a welcome entertainment, or a vital part of understanding the world.

Bury St Edmunds
Here are this week;s delightful discoveries. First I found in the Sunday Times (the British one, not one in Singapore) that the Place Bury St Edmund's is the burial place of Englands king Edmund, who was later made a saint, which brought the area huge amounts of medieval tourism.

Beaume de Venise
The second delightful discovery was when I ordered a glass of sweet muscat wine, Beaune de Venise. I knew muscat was a grape. That muscat wine is always sweet. But what did the name Beaune de Venise mean? De is French for of. I sent my sleuth's looking. I have a family member who is studying wine for an exam on wines of the world, level 4, examined by the Wines and Spirits Education Trust.

(I am toddling along behind. I passed level one, equivalent to an NVQ and requiring alone about 20 hours study and answering multiple choice questions after each chapter in a large booklet, following by a day of lectures, tasting and a final multiple choice exam, about 30 questions.)

My sleuth found out all sorts of history, going back through blogs on wine, getting academic permissions to read university articles not available to the public, and encyclopaedias on wine and history, including Jewish history. We read about the Italian popes in Southern France. The Jews in the area. The taxes paid.

The motto is q u e ben be u r a ... d i e u  v e i r a

I translate that at first glance as: who(ever) drinks well will see god.

The summary of the story of the origin of the word: Beame - an old word for cave. V e n i se was from the Latin, meaning a P r o  V I N C E, of Rome.  In Roman times. The word Provence means province of Rome.

So Beaume de Venise is the cave of the province.

I shall also always remember not just the wine but the meaning of the word Provence, a region of France, near the Italian border.  I envisage the Italians marching over the border to their province and having a nice glass of sweet wine from Beaume de Venise, the cave of the province.

Sweet wine has less alcohol converted into sugar. I thought that if you are a Roman soldier you deserve a drink, but you don't want to drink spirits and water it down or get over intoxicated. Tomorrow you have work to do. But tonight you can have a glass of sweet wine with your dinner, Beaume de Venise.

However, looking at the label, I am shocked to see that it is 15%, which to me is very high alcohol. No wonder you normally get a small portion of sweet wine at the end of a meal with your dessert. I thought it was because you had already had enough to drink or because the wine was expensive and the restaurant wants to give you less and they can get away with it because you are already full.

Misleadingly, the French words Vin Doux n a t u r e l do not mean wine which is soft or sweet and natural, nothing added. On the contrary, it means fortified wine, wine with added alcohol bringing it up to 15%.

Most wine I drink which is sweet is only 13%, sometimes 12 and a half per cent. Oo-er! Good thing I wasn't driving home.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer, photographer, researcher, author, speaker.

Sweet dessert wines from Austria and Italy; and a melchior

Following on the information in one of my recent previous posts, here's more about two sweet wines. AUSTRIA
Ice wine goes with blue cheese and foie gras as well as desserts.
Called a see (sea) not a l a k e n (lake, win l a k will be masculine?) because it is so big, an inland sea.
From Austria. Neuzuidersee new ... lake; south of vienna, near the Hungarian border, in fact the border runs through the middle of the lake.

I just tried this. Sweet, marmalade aroma and taste, sticky texture (known by the technical term luscious).

If you photograph the bottle standing upright whilst you are using a smart phone you get this distorted effect.

I thought I had found a quick cure by laying the bottle down on the table. Then you can read the lower half of the label more clearly.

However, the previous upright shot brings different parts of the label to the foreground, emphasising the top.

As the label tells us, it is from (aus) Austria (Osterreich), Pradikatswein - wine with a certificate; bottled by Willi Opitz.

Eis is ice. Wein is wine.

GmbH is the German equivalent of limited company. Geshellshaft (company) met (with ) limited liability.

8,5% low alcohol because so much of the sugar is still sugar and not turned into alcohol.

0,375 l or litres is a half bottle.

More information from their website: www.williopitz.at

From the label you can now see that the maker is Willi  (like william) Opitz, and Austria is at.

This bottle was bought at Hedonism wine shop in central London after one of their tastings which are held throughout the year.

ITALY
Location where it is grown and made - Passito de Pantelleria (island of Pantelleria)
grape - Muscat blanc à petits grains -  muscat grape, white at/of little berries

If you go to Hedonism wine shop on two stories there is lots to look at as well as buy.
Have you ever seen a Melchior? It is a huge bottle, larger than a magnum (2 bottles,) or a Methuselah or a Nebuchadnezzar, or a Jereboam. The cork is huge.

You need a special corkscrew to open it. And, of course, a lot of friends to help you to drink it.

ANGELA LANSBURY, travel writer and photographer.

Sweet wines? Sparkling wines? Sweet and sparkling? What to choose.

Clairette de Die is a new wine for me. How about you? It's a sweet muscat with sparkle. More details below. I've listed the wines alphabetically by country, to make it easier for me to compile my list and see nothing's missing, and so you and I can find what we want quickly on re-reading later.

Just in case you are wondering, if you prefer dry wines, why anybody needs to know about sweet wines, here's why:
1 If you like dry wines, you want to avoid the sweet ones.
2 If you are a host, you may need to suggest sweet wines to your companion.
3 You traditionally have a sparkling wine for a toast, or aperitif. Champagne is mostly dry.
4 You might want a sweet or sparkling wine before or after the meal.
You might prefer half bottles to go with different foods, including a sweet wine with cheese or sweet dessert.

My favourites are:

AUSTRALIA
http://winefolly.com/review/types-dessert-wine/

AUSTRIA
Wine marked W e l s c h r e s i l i n g - from W e l s c h or west side the Neu new lieder (sea).

FRANCE
Clairette de Die
Might be the traditional C l a i r e t t e grape but it is permitted to use muscat. My latest find is the C l a r i e t t e de Die which is 100% muscat, white sparkling, with a distinctive sweet and sour lime flavour. (If you see the word Claudette, blame spell checker which snakes up - I wrote s n e a k s after you have checked the copy.)

See sauternes - a region in the soutane most part of Bordeaux.

Alsace

GERMANY
Gewurtztraminer gewürzt means spicy or tasty.
Auslese - late picked. (Any fruit whether apple or grape or other starts green and late in the year changes to a darker red or brown or mottled or plum colour and grows sweeter.

HUNGARY
T o k a j i - without the final letter i you are describing the region. With the final letter i you are describing the wine from that region.
The main grape is f u r m i n t . A second grape is Harslevelu. H a r s (not hard - that's spell checker interfering) means linden or lime. Level is leaf. the final U = ed. Leafed.
The grape is not lime but grape and apple flavour.
Tokay can be sweet or dry.
Sweet tokay with botrytis (noble rot) is called a s z u.

ITALY
Prosecco
Popular sparkling white.
G l e r a (Gloria is spellchecker's nonsense) grape is the new name.
Originally both the region and wine were named the same which caused confusion. Janice Robinson in her tomes on wine uses the old name.

PORTUGAL
Mateus Rose. Pink wine.Very light sparkle.

SPAIN
Cava sparkling dry.
Sweet sherry from J e r ez pronounced h e r e z .

USA
Ice wine.
Zinfandel. This grape comes up white, rose, or red.
Grenache.

New Zealand
Ice wine.

I have previous posts on sweet wine. Follow me on Facebook, here on blogger, link to me on linkedIn, browse my books on Amazon and Lulu.com
Angela Lansbury - for the best fun travel: art and attractions, wine and dine, people and places, facts, factories and fun.
Also see my blog on English spelling.

Moscato Wine From Austrlalia - if there visit the vineyard

What's Moscato? Is it the musket grape, my favourite, a guarantee of a great sweet dessert wine to go with my pudding and coffee? The wine looks pink and it tastes deliciously sweet - very more-ish. I'm watching my wine intake, because it's lunch time, I might drive later, and I would like to stay awake the rest of the day and, besides that, I am on a diet. All wine contains calories and sweet wine even more so. The words Innocent Bystander are embossed on the glass of the half bottle. Yes, it's a half bottle. On the back label it says375ml. That's half a bottle. Next to that information, before that, is the news that it's only 5.5% vol (alcohol). That's more than some beer but less than most wine.

In small letters above the word Moscato the label on the front of my bottle says Victoria 2013.

This wine is made from Gordo and Black Muskat 'from the old vine Muscat vineyards situated along Victoria's Murray River' says the label on the back.

Having decided I like the wine, my next question is, can I visit the vineyard for tea and tasting, or lunch and tasting and shopping for souvenirs?

Yes. According to the website, they serve food, organise wine tastings, and sell tee-shirts for men and women. If you are outside Australia you can get on their mailing list for news. If you are in Australia and have made a purchase you can get even more offers. 

If you want to visit the vineyard, it's north east of Melbourne. More about Healesville and Melbourne Cemetery in my next post.

Innocent Bystander
336 Maroondah Hwy
Healesville
Victoria 3777
Australia
www.innocentbystander.com.au

Imported (to the UK) by

Liberty Wines

London SW4 6LY

UK

www.libertywines.co.uk

Angela Lansbury is a travel writer and author. See books of comic poetry and quotations in Lulu.com.
Angela Lansbury B A Hons, a former English teacher and tutor, also gives talks and workshops, speech-training and speeches.