Last week's Burgundy in London picture quiz showed five images captured on my trusty blackberry during the week beginning 10 Jan at some of the dozen tastings of Burgundy 2009 I attended. I asked Purple pagers to identify as closely as possible where I took each photograph and added two tiebreak questions on Friday.
The answers, a couple of them being examples of the livery halls that still exist in and around the City of London based on medieval trade guilds, are:
Picture 1: Glaziers' Hall at London Bridge, where Lay & Wheeler held their tasting – not surprising they were showing off their stained glass and this panel, from memory, urged us that cleanliness is next to godliness, not a bad adage for a winemaker.
Picture 2: This beautiful wallpaper is on the walls of the upper drawing room of Merchant Tailors' Hall, Threadneedle Street in the City of London. It is so valuable that apparently it was taken down and rusticated during the blitz to protect it from any damage wrought by German bombs. OW Loeb held their tasting here, while the ground floor was taken up by an oil traders' conference, as far as I could tell. My fellow writer Neal Martin sneaked off there for lunch, apparently, arguing that he had paid the oil industry quite enough over the years to be justified in helping himself to their buffet.
Picture 4: I took this picture in the cellars underneath Justerini & Brooks offices in St James's Street, where they showed the wines of Comte Liger-Belair to a select few press and customers, having held their crowded main tasting at 1 Great George Street across St James's Park the night before. In the late 1970s the London wine trade was substantially conducted in cellars like this beneath the pavements, but only a few such as this one, the cellar at the Stafford and those of Berry Bros across St James's Street remain. Anyone who followed me on Twitter could have seen this clearly identified image already during Burgundy week.
Picture 5: The final image seemed very difficult to guess as so few visual clues were available, but I did state specifically at the bottom of Burgundy 2009 – some post-tasting thoughts that it had been taken in the cellars beneath Lea & Sandeman's Fulham Road shop.
I then asked who was in pictures 1 and 3 as a tie break and the answers were, respectively, Madame Marinette Cathiard, wife of Sylvain, and my fellow wine writer Tim Atkin, who happened, he told me, to be reading Bleak House.
The question that proved most difficult, understandably perhaps, was the location of the wallpaper shown in picture 2, but Daren Balman of London SE1 answered every other question correctly so will receive a copy of Jasper Morris MW's new book on burgundy as his prize. Damon, I will not return from Sri Lanka until late Tuesday. Kindly remind me by email if you have not received your book by next week, and feel free to send a better mailing address than your home address at any point.
Many thanks to all who took part.
