In these stay at home lockdown days, by necessity, a lot of adjustments need to be made to one’s lifestyle. Some of these are easily achieved, others require a great deal of effort.
My wife and I have worked from home for over 5 years now, so that part was readily achieved.
One of the lockdown decisions I took was to underindulge – no wine and very moderate mealtimes. It would have been o so easy to eat too much and drink too much.
But as we are well into the lengthy Level 4 of Lockdown, I decided that a modest imbibe was needed to restore some emotional equilibrium, so I opened my second bottle of ‘Lockdown’ wine…..
The parts that are particularly challenging for me to accommodate are the lack of interaction with other people and regular visits to wine farms etc.
So, I reacted a little bizarrely, I treated the bottle as a welcomed visitor, took it in my arms and hugged it (thankfully, no social distancing needed from a bottle of wine!)
The wine was the Pinot Noir 2015 from the 282 Elgin Ridge range (the farm is 282 meters above sea level).
Never having tasted one of their wines before, nor visited the farm, I treated my tasting of it as a virtual visit. I opened the Elgin Ridge website, went to their Gallery, and opened a scenic image of the farm, and then poured myself a glass of their Pinot Noir.
On the nose and the palate, the 282 Pinot Noir exudes dark and some pleasing floral notes and in these ever-increasingly financially constrained times, I recommend pairing it with what ever is on your dinner table, I am sure the pairing gods will not look down on you with disapproval. We happily glugged the bottle dry at dinner last night.
May my next encounter with Elgin Ridge and its wines be on their home ground, cheers to that!
Julian Richfield's Savourite Things 