Pete Turner writes Pete Turner has been playing as a semi-professional drinks writer for over 20 years. This all began with his website www.thedrinker.co.uk which started out life as a place for pub reviews and quickly broadened into drinks in general, the occasional restaurant review and then a focus on wine. Pete went on to study with WSET achieving his Diploma in 2009, he’s judged with IWC and IWSC and written bits and pieces for Loaded, The Telegraph and Imbibe among others. His drinks reviews on YouTube and Instagram (@drinkersite) are increasingly popular, leaving him to wonder when he’s going to get his finger out and have a proper go at making a living from all this nonsense.
A good view and something to drink
Early April and the first properly sunny day of the year. The sky is a perfect pale blue and the wind a light but fresh southerly and I’m determined to sit at the end of my garden with a glass of wine. From the surrounding gardens I can hear kids yelping on a trampoline and the reluctant ‘put-put’ of a lawnmower being coaxed back into action after its winter hibernation.
There’s a field at the bottom of my garden where I can sit and watch the sheep, the last few lambs are being born now and it’s one of life’s great pleasures seeing new life come into the world, slowly and uncertain, they take their first steps and in no time at all they soon latch on and are having their first meal.
The farmer who looks after this flock told me one day that these are a very low maintenance breed, they don’t need shearing, they lamb without assistance and on the whole are really self-sufficient, “all these girls need,” he said, “is a good view and something to drink”. And don’t we all?
Settling down to watch the action the air is cool I close my eyes and face the bright sun feeling the breeze rush over me. This air has travelled from the Atlantic, forced north, grazing Morocco, over southern Spain and Portugal, the Bay of Biscay, France and now to me here in the south of England, bright, fresh, clear and pleasingly sheepy.
The field is dotted with the ewes and their lambs, jackdaws collecting wool for their nests and the trees are slowly coming back into life, there’s the light haze of green as leaves begin to emerge from their buds and I have the delicate irritation of a hay fever prickle in my eyes. In the gardens to my left and right blossom is emerging in pinks and whites.
So I have the view but what about something to drink? I love this transitional time of year and I think it needs an equally ambiguous wine. I have a bottle of Hidalgo La Gitana Manzanilla straight from the fridge. I know the wine types go on about modern fridges being too cold for wine but in this instance they are wrong. I need it to be bracingly cold to match the freshness of the wind and enhance the austere salinity of the Manzanilla.
I love it that sherry can be everything from the very driest to the very sweetest drinks you will ever taste, and more than that I think it offers the best opportunity for people of modest means to sample world class wines at affordable prices. As a category it seems it’s always about to be ‘the next big thing’, and for now I’m glad it’s not. And for springtime, emerging slowly from harsh freeze of winter and then suddenly swept away by vibrant heat of summer, it’s the season of what’s about to be.
Manzanilla is perfect for this time of year, bracing and salty, made with grapes grown in intense heat, storing up all those years of sunshine in order to open out in my mouth and remind me that my summer is just around the corner. Next month it might be sauvignon blanc to match the blossoming of the elderflower, the month after a chilled Brouilly as midsummer approaches, and so on. But right now, in early spring it’s tangy, nutty Manzanilla, a wine which has followed that saline air from southern Spain and tumbled into my glass.
Here comes the sun.
The photo is the author’s own.
Published unedited and in accordance with the rules of the competition published here.
