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2007 Domaine du Joncier Lirac Le Classique

2009-11-06T07:44:19Z

My wine reviews are written from the point of view of a rank amateur with no formal training, based on a sample size of one bottle of unknown storage history. These notes are primarily for my own records and future reference and are published here for interest only.

Domaine du Joncier is a Rhône producer in the AOC of Lirac, actually in the village of Tavel, owned and operated by Marine Roussel since she took it over from her father in 1989. The Lirac Le Classique is a blend of Grenache, Syrah, Mourvèdre, Cinsault and Carignan. The label describes Lirac as a little-known gem of a region, opposite the (reknowned) Châteauneuf-du-Pape area.

I bought this bottle from Waitrose for about £7.50 — my most expensive purchase yet, choosing the 2007 due to that vintage’s excellent reputation in the southern Rhône. Due to the relationship between tax, duty, fixed shipping and packaging costs and the wine itself, it can be very beneficial to spend just a bit more than rock-bottom prices on wine.

The label promises “berry fruit and spice characters with a deep flavour and long complex finish”. I certainly got that, although I found it too complex for my liking. It did not taste at all unpleasant or artificial and was clearly a high-quality product; but it didn’t seem to have a clear message or signature taste. Maybe my palette isn’t highly trained enough yet, but I preferred the simpler Châsse Du Pape reviewed previously.

Quite strong at 14.5%, partly due to the Grenache content. Probably worth a punt if you’re after a classy, complex wine, as it’s clearly intended for drinking properly rather than as a casual beverage. I may try another bottle in the future once I’ve come by a bit more experience.

M42 J6

2009-11-04T23:05:00Z

Update: just had the following email response from Amey:

The road marking that you requested has been included in a package of minor works at the junction which is included in the forward programme works for this area.

We are also carrying out a safety review at M42 J6 and I have forwarded your email below and photographs to the engineer carrying out that work.

Hopefully this page won’t be needed for much longer…

This is the account of a still-ongoing personal quest of mine, to get a short stretch of white line painted on the roundabout where the M42 meets the A45 to the east of Birmingham at junction 6.

As a quick summary, the lack of a line encourages traffic to stay in a lane when it should (according to road signs and lane marking text) be spiralling outwards, to the detriment of traffic to their right who need to spiral outwards at that point. It causes daily frustration, aggression, congestion and delay.

I’ve sent several emails to the Highways Agency and Amey Mouchel (who are responsible for that junction) with no effect other than a polite content-free reply. Here’s the latest missive I sent. If this junction’s poor design affects you too, feel free to write to the same people.

to: enquiries@ameymouchel.com,
cc: ha_info@highways.gsi.gov.uk
date: 4 November 2009
subject: M42 J6 lane markings

The chaos continues at this junction. A reminder of my previous complaint:

At the south to west quadrant of the roundabout, the lane text and road signs make it abundantly clear that M42(N) traffic should move outwards from lane 3 (inside) to lane 2 (middle). Anyone in lane 2 at the south traffic lights should be either moving to lane 1 (NEC) or exiting to the A45(W).

However, the white lines do not encourage this behaviour. Many drivers heading for M42(N) take up position in lane 2 on the south section and stay in that lane, causing chaos at busy times as sign-abiding drivers attempt to merge in from lane 3 in the short west section.

All that’s needed to fix this problem is an extra white line making it clear that the right of way lies with traffic changing from lane 3 to lane 2; and that staying in lane 2 is not correct behaviour. This is exactly what happens in the east to south section where there are no such difficulties.

The attached image shows the problem from the air, together with my proposed solution.

If there’s someone else I should be contacting to get this change implemented or at least reviewed, please let me know.

and the image — click to open a large version in a new window:

There is a Highways Agency webcam covering the patch of road at the top-left of my image. Check it out on this BBC site — around rush hour, you should regularly see the inside lane blocked by someone attempting to move to the middle lane, but unable to do so due to someone else incorrectly staying on the middle lane from the previous section.

2007 La Châsse Du Pape Côtes du Rhône

2009-10-23T21:58:00Z

I bought this bottle from the Co-Op in Lichfield: it cost around £6 if memory serves, which it usually doesn’t these days. I’d imagine many people buy this due to the fame of the similarly-named Châteauneuf-Du-Pape wine, which sells for rather more than this one.

La Châsse Du Pape, like its Newcastle cousin, is a Southern Rhône wine. The Rouge Réserve is a blend of 60% Grenache, 35% Syrah, and 5% Cinsault and Mourvèdre. It’s sold by Maison Gabriel Meffre under the Côtes du Rhône AOC, as it doesn’t meet the requirements for the winery’s local and more specific Gigondas AOC because the wine is blended from several Rhône vineyards’ production. It has an alcohol content of 14%, due to the high proportion of sugar-rich Grenache. More details can be found on their annoyingly Flash-heavy website.

I chose a 2007, as that year is meant to be one of the best for Southern Rhône wines specifically, due to particularly good local weather — and because it was what was on the shelf. The bottle and label are good quality and evocative, with a crest both moulded into the glass and printed on the plastic cork reading SOLIS TERRAEQUE VINUM FRUCTUS, which means something like “wine, the fruit of the sun and the earth”.

This wine accompanied a Mediterranean chicken dish with olives and tomatoes (chopped and sun-dried), which I cooked from a recipe out of the well-written Readers’ Digest Healthy One-Dish Cooking book. Unprompted, a family member commented how nice the wine was, which is a good sign.

It’s a complex, heavy, fruity and strong wine. My best attempt at describing the general impression on the nose is “fertile”: like the smell of the countryside without the manure overtones. The bottle promised spicy and vanilla tastes — I could detect the former but not the latter, although a quick sniff of a bottle of vanilla essence as a reference did help to understand the suggestion. I wonder if I would have made the link without the label text, though...?

Irritatingly, the remainder of the bottle had to languish in the fridge for three days before I could finish it. As with the other wines I’ve tried, the fruit tastes diminished significantly and the alcohol “kick” became more pronounced. I really must get some half-bottles or marbles for storage to avoid drinking half the wine when it’s past its best. Interestingly, a significant taste like the aftertaste of very dark chocolate developed in the last glass.

I’d certainly buy another one of these (update: I have), and if this is typical of Grenache-based wines, I’m looking forward to the next two in the queue: Salduba, a Spanish Garnacha varietal (update: very good for under a fiver from Waitrose, didn’t give it enough attention for a review); and Domaine du Joncier Lirac Classique, another Rhône blend.

New Radio 4 weather forecast and information presentation

2009-10-13T04:42:02Z

Radio 4 are trying a new format of weather forecast. Previously, I’d always found it hard to take in the information whilst listening to the forecast on my way to work, but never really thought about why this was.

Apparently, a listener complained that it was hard to absorb, and this triggered the team thinking. One experiment was to read the national forecast in the style of the shipping forecast, one area at a time. This devastatingly simple idea cuts straight to the core of the problem with the old-style forecast: attention span.

The information being presented is essentially two-dimensional: spatial (which is a single dimension, as the regions are effectively a list) and temporal (the time of the forecast). Being an audio broadcast, the data flow of the delivered forecast is one-dimensional (time), so a route must be planned through the 2D data set to stream it to the listener.

With the old format of presentation, the listener is taken on a journey through time-of-day in discrete blocks (morning, afternoon, evening etc.), with the major weather phenomena described, usually in some sort of regional order. The time “axis” is only traversed once. We can represent this as below, with the delivery of the forecast following the red path. I’ve taken the part of a Middle-dwelling listener, with the bits I care about highlighted in green:

If we unwrap the ground covered by the red path, we get a sequence of information showing where the listener does and doesn’t care about the data. I’ll call this a care-now map, as that definitely won’t get confused with any other type of diagram. Here’s the old-format care-now map:

Suddenly, it’s clear why I find the weather forecast so hard to take in! It’s asking for many little snippets of my attention — by the time I’ve realized and started listening, they’ve moved on to the next region.

The new format, however, is much more logical. The listener is taken through the forecast time span multiple times, once per region, with regions combined as appropriate if the same weather conditions apply. Here’s the path taken through the data: it’s orthogonal to the old way:

…and the care-now map:

Much better. I can ignore the bits I don’t care about, and listen to the bit I do want to hear in one continuous section. Well done to whoever came up with this idea, and I look forward to this new format extending to all radio weather forecasts.

2006 Château Tassin

2009-10-12T19:27:38Z

Château Tassin is a red Bordeaux produced by the Gonfrier brothers operating out of the Château de Marsan (which doesn’t look much like a château from the air). This particular example is a 2006 bottle I picked up from Sainsbury’s in Leamington, sealed with a Gonfrier-branded plastic cork.

The vineyard is in the Premières Côtes de Bordeaux subregion of the Entre-Deux-Mers region, and the wine is sold under that AOC. It seems that other vintages may be sold under the Bordeaux Supérieur AOC, which is a pan-area designation indicating older vines than the generic Bordeaux AOC — in this case, 26 years average age.

Château Tassin is a blend of 60% Merlot and 40% Cab Sauv. The producers describe it in a PDF document on their website thus (translated):

Château Tassin has a deep ruby appearance, a round body and ample courteous tannins which extend agreeably.

Tasting notes

This wine was indeed quite tannic (mouth-puckering) — I don’t think I have enough experience to identify “courteous” tannins from presumably-rude ones. The initial smell and taste was more artificial chemical than natural fruit, but not in an overly-unpleasant way. It suggested alcohol hand gel (seemingly a beverage in its own right), minus a bit of the clinical bite of that stuff.

The prime natural taste was of red grape skins (not that surprising for a drink made from red grapes, I suppose) with a hint of cherry acidity but not a cherry taste or smell — just as well, as I’m not a fan of cherries.

The wine also had a curious “hot” aftertaste a bit like whisky, more pronounced on a glass two days after opening. The overall effect was a bit superfluous and uninvolving, as if the true taste were avoiding my senses and slipping down unnoticed in the liquid. Curious.

Not a total waste of money, but I don’t think I’d buy another. However, all the vintage charts agree that the best 2006 red Bordeaux wines are a) not as good as the 2005, and b) not yet ready to drink. Even though this wine falls into the category of cheap, mass-produced supermarket wine, perhaps it just needed more time to mature.