Not Great with Wine, Better with Roses
I admire people who can smell wine and detect notes of all sorts. I admire even more those who can taste wine and detect even more notes of fruit, oak, blackcurrant , leather etc.
I know when I like a wine and when I don’t, and that is as far as it goes for me, luddite that I am. I think that if I spent more time on wine and gave it more attention I would discover more about it and perhaps my palette would improve. Are you born with a palette for wine or do you develop it? I have never known for sure but I’m sure you can develop something of a sense of what the wine is trying to say with its taste.
Roses I’m better with. I can smell all manner of varieties of rose and pick out the various scents that they emit.
These pictures were taken yesterday at the David Austin Rose Garden in Shropshire. We visit at least twice a year and in June the place is absolute heaven. Really. A step back in time to blue skies (if you go on a blue sky day), manicured lawns and a rich syrupy scent that hangs in the air as all the varieties of rose come together to vie for attention.
A walled garden is a fantasy of mine and I was so enthralled by BEING in one yesterday that I had to sit down and have a scone with jam.
Well, it wasn’t only that, there were various other conversations going on that made my adrenaline begin to pump furiously, but if I could have stayed surrounded by those walls forever and not have gotten caught I would have……..until the weather changed from delicious to not so delicious and then I’d have wanted to go home with Robert but it was heaven for a couple of hours.
The four of us that made up our group sniffed, discussed and were wowed by the whole experience. I have learnt through bitter experience not to sniff a rose wholeheartedly until you have checked what is inside it. Whoever said that greenfly contain protein if you inadvertently ingest one can take a flying leap as they have clearly never sucked one up a nostril. But hard as I looked there were no greenfly at David Austin yesterday, or at least so few of them that I didn’t spot them.
When we were at the exit and had finished paying for our purchases I asked a lady who worked there how they tackle their greenfly. She said that she had Gertrude Jekyll or a Geoff Hamilton, I can’t remember, and that due to the warm weather we’d been having hers too were covered in caps of greenfly. Mine seem to have gone for jackets and boots as well as caps of greenfly but I didn’t want to moan at the nice lady. She prescribed a simple remedy of washing up water and pulling the buggers off by hand, which I will do with gusto.
I have a deep admiration and love for family run businesses. I am fascinated by the ones that work, David Austin, and by the ones that don’t, Bernie Madoff’s sons are probably wishing they hadn’t worked for daddy.
tyle=”font-size: 15px; font-family: ‘Times New Roman’; “>Walking round the gardens yesterday was living proof of a vision that had been fulfilled. One that gave people a chance to experience something that the garden has given us in all it’s glory.
Cheers, chaps!
So what did I buy?
Four fantastically big Alan Titchmarsh. Here one of them is. I carry a fondness for Alan Titchmarsh, the man, as I read his How to be a Gardener & The Kitchen Gardener and I discovered that everything he wrote in those books was wholly true and made sense. I have NO TIME for snobbery when someone is as good at their job as Alan and any critics of his really should look at his body of work and then scuttle off back under their rock.
Having said all that, I didn’t choose these roses for who they were named after. I chose them for the colour ( a lilac hue that is almost edible) and their scent (fresh, fresh, fresh). They will go in to the ground today and I look forward to trying to keep my greenfly off of them.
Note the word ‘trying’ in that last sentence.
See you tomorrow morning!
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