Orange Wine 2018 - Ninth Bottle (B4), 14th -15th October 2020

We drank the majority of this bottle with a Chinese Takeaway from G-Wu, and very fine Chinese food it was too. A chilled orange wine feels like the right one to have in these circumstances. The day itself was not my best day of holiday ever. In the morning we buried Kato (grave digging, even for a cat, is hard work) and in the afternoon I went for a rubbish walk round semi-industrial areas of Batley.

Thursday was better: it was the 25th anniversary of Claire and my first kiss, and we celebrated by walking the Malham Round. You can't beat a good bit of limestone pavement.

A good bit of limestone pavement

Rose Petal Wine - Third Bottle (C2), 28th August 2017

I left this bottle with Catherine in Leamington Spa. She cannot make the Wine Party this year, mostly on account of having acquired two Jack Russells - Betty & Arthur - so I wanted to give her something nice for having put us up on short notice. I have had a Facebook message this evening to say that it tastes like sherry, is not particularly yellow and does not taste of roses. I am surprised at the last of these comments.

It was lovely staying with Catherine - she is besotted by her dogs, and having met them, that is not surprising. We did have to take precautions from their French kisses though!

Strawberry Wine - First Bottle (6), 1st-3rd July 2012

Sunday was our fourteenth wedding anniversary. Written down, that sounds like an enormously long time. Certainly I find it hard to believe there was ever a time that I did not know Claire. Yet our first kiss, where I stuck my nose in her eye, feels like yesterday. Time is strange.

Fourteen years is worthy of celebration, and how better than a bottle of strawberry wine to a meal of Greek Baked Lamb (which was the first thing I ever cooked for Claire). Both food and wine were as excellent as ever, and we followed our meal by watching a remarkably silly episode of 'Midsomer Murders' - a DVD I had bought earlier in the day as an anniversary present. Who says romance is dead?