Christmas dinner with a wine older than me....

... I finally opened it.

I had cooked an amazing fore-rib of roast beef that I knew would be perfect with a very special bottle of wine.

So I took the 1966 Lynch Bages from the wine rack and proceeded to prepare it, bringing it up to room temperature slowly, but when I started to open it the cork broke in half - bugger I thought, I've left it too long, or it wasn't stored correctly..... all the things race through your mind. Luckily I managed to get the rest of the cork out without issue. I had a quick sniff of the cork and the now open bottle. No it didn't smell of vinegar, nor any sign of mustiness or any other off putting whiff.

I left the bottle to rest for a while, then decided to decant it, just incase there were large sediment deposits, which suprisingly there weren't, just a stubborn streak of sediment down the side of the bottle and a little towards the bottom of the bottle.

Then a little taste pre-dinner, just to make sure it was alright.

What an amazing wine! All the tanins mellowed to nothing, blackcurrants and spice with chocolate were all the aromas and flavours I could think of as I tasted it.

I bought this bottle years ago as it was the closest I could get to my year of birth, I chose Lynch Bages as that was the first really good growth Claret I ever tasted at the age of 17 working in a restaurant.

Sadly the 1966 Krug I bought in Bentalls 15+ years ago hasn't survived as the cork gave up the ghost a while ago, and the level is now below the neck label, so this is probably quite expensive vinegar by now. Luckily it looks like the 1967 Port I found a few years ago in Berry Brothers & Rudd is very much intact and the level is well in the neck still. Win some, loose some.

Today I discovered.....

....Costco! A friend took me to the warehouse in Reading by Green Park (next to the big wind turbine you can see from the M4 at J11)

What a place. I've done warehouse shopping in the US before, and Cash 'n Carry in the UK, but never anything quite like this.

Some great deals were to be had, on big ticket items I think a fair amount of research will have to be done, but on everyday household stuff, food & booze it seems that great savings can be had, but everything seems to come in such large quantities!?

Although it was late on a Wednesday and it was cold & snowy & J11 is a nightmare it seemed relatively busy, but still fairly easy to get in, get what you want & get out. Application pending!

If you drive in the UK.....

.... you should take a look at this article on the BBC News website.

It details the fatal road accidents in the UK from 1999 to 2008.

Some quite staggering statistics.... "On average, some seven people are killed every day on the roads in Great Britain. Hundreds more are injured, many of them seriously, often with life changing consequences.

In 2008 alone, 2,538 people died and nearly a quarter of a million were injured.

In the past 10 years, the death toll has amounted to 32,298. As such road crashes are the largest single cause of accidental death for people aged between 5 and 35 years."

Take a look at the maps and put your postcode in, the level of detail is quite chilling, it really brings home just how dangerous a simple thing that most of us take for granted really is.