Our girl learns to appreciate her wine a little more…

Posted on 05/03/10

I can only think of one reason to be in the cultural desert that is Chelsea Harbour on a bitter Thursday night – tasting eight different glasses of wine at Jimmy Smith’s West London Wine School. We booked a surly minicab driver who came well equipped with expletives and a cast-iron certainty that every other road user was an imbecile. After a scarily rapid journey, said driver then had the gracelessness to drop us off at a barrier near Imperial Wharf (who knew – a new station?) claiming, ‘Only black cabs are allowed down this road’. The near brush with death and the biting cold as we stomped towards our destination certainly put my quaffing companion, life coach Karen Laryea  and I, in serious need of a drink.

Thankfully Jimmy was the perfect host. We arrived to find a long table laden with a couple of hundred glasses and around 20 or so other tasters patiently waiting for us stragglers. Though it’s in an unlikely setting (the Wine Cellars at the Big Yellow Storage Company), the atmosphere proved surprisingly convivial. Jimmy, an oenophile of 10 years standing, explained we were going to be comparing new world wines with the old guard of France’s Loire Valley. To my delight this included sauvignon blanc, more than the odd glass of which has been known to pass my lips. Wines from Chile and Australia alerted our taste buds to a wealth of fresh tastes and with Jimmy as a guide, we began to recognise hints of lime, grapefruit and green apple flavours.

By the fifth glass I was, I have to confess, feeling a little buzzed. The group as a whole had also livened, piping up more freely with suggestions of comparative smells and tastes where previously shyness and fear of getting it wrong had left Jimmy the only voice in the room. ‘Honey!’ piped up one after a slurp; ‘Chocolate!’ said another, throwing back another glug, while Jimmy nodded in agreement. He’d saved the best until last. A grape I’d never heard of (cabernet franc) from South Africa and a taste that was out of this world. We left better educated than we’d arrived and vowed to do it again, only next time not by minicab.

The Wine Cellars, Big Yellow Storage, 71 Townmead Road, SW6; www.westlondonwineschool.com; 020 8144 2444