Monday evening, first day back in the office after the holiday's for me, first day back on the radio at JackFM for Alison... kids back to school, decorations to come down, emails galore to answer. Last night saw more freezing temperatures and even a sprinkling of snow when we woke up. No doubt about it, red wine is needed.

Supper is sausage's and mash (with -5C forecast tonight we need big, tasty food to keep us warm!), and I really must catch up with wines on the tasting bench... so to put 2 ands2 together here tonight we are having what I hope will be a big-ish red from Bordeaux: Chateau Tour de Biot 2006.

It's a straight AC Bordeaux made by Gilles Gremen coming in at a very un-Bordeaux 13.5% alcohol. Quite smooth with nice juicy/ripe fruit. 'Dusty' blackcurrants and a hint of tobacco. Green-edged, but not unripe (more like leafy) fruit on the palate. Easy-going and pretty good. I'm not a huge fan of Bordeaux at this level as I'd prefer something from Spain or the New World at this price point, but this wine manages to do a good job in its class.

Why not write your own review/tasting note for this wine, or others you taste, via Snooth? We have!

Find out more about Snooth, the social networking site for wine.

Goldwater Sauvignon Blanc 2007 (SnoothRank: 4/5)
New Zealand > Marlborough (January 2009)
Intense pineapple nose with hints of pink grapefruit. Fresh and very fruity. Lovely balance on the palate with crisp acidity and bags of tropical ripe fruit - nectarines and pineapple, and just a touch of greeness. Lovely stuff and a great pre-dinner aperitif myRating 0/5

We have set up an account at wine social networking site Snooth, where we can share our tasting notes for wines with you - and you can do the same with us. Hopefully, in due course we will ahve all our wines listed on Snooth and you ca comment on them all there as you taste them.

 See you online at Snooth!

PS, I've also set up a personal account at Snooth under my own name - so you can see what non-surf4wine wines I'm drinking and tasting too!

.... Don't worry, I'm not about to bore you all with my New Year predictions / list of resolutions (but I do promise to be more punctual and better organised in 2009). However, looking at some of my favourite wine blogs over the last couple of days i did find a link on Jamie Goode's blog to the very witty and worth reading 2009 wine-world predictions of Doug Wregg over at Caves de Pyrenes. (See Jamie's 2009 predictions). Both are definitely worth a look.

Actually, one of my aims in 2009 is to take more photographs, and get round to publishing those i take. Hopefully this Blog will benefit, and they will be  be a Surf4Wine Flickr page soon. You can also check out my Facebook page for pics. Anyway, watch this space... 

More a photo post than a blog post to be honest! Golden sunset reflected in golden Cape Muscat (Rhona Muscadel 2003 from Graham Beck for those interested)

After three days of Christmas indulgence and excess Mrs C and I decided to get some sea air, so toddled off to the South Coast for the afternoon.

You'd never know this was taken on Bournemouth sea front - it looks more like sunset on the Med. Well, it doesn't look like Bournemouth anyway.

And to cap it all, the pic was taken with an iPhone. Not bad when you consider what a terrible camera it is supposed to be, and how it gets rubbished for its photo quality in reviews!

If you are ever in Bournemouth make sure you check out WestBeach - a really good seafood restaurant where we ate the poshest Fish Finger sarnies while watching the sun go down.

WestBeach was voted South East Seafood restaurant of the year 2008, I think, and runner up for Best South East restaurant too. But don't just take my word for it A. A. Gill was smitten too!

Can't wait to go back when it's warmer....

PS: For more Pics from WestBeach check out my Facebook profile

Mrs. C had a yearning for one of her favourites from her Uni days - Hungarian Goulash. All that Paprika and Chilli hardly makes it the most wine freindly of dishes. Plus, I was in the mood for Pinot Noir! As it turned out the Lawson's Dry Hills Pinot 2007 that I had bought earlier in the day in Majestic Wine's New Zealand 20% off wine offer didn't fair too badly.

The sweet, gamey, plummy fruit of the wine actually paired very well with the ultra-tender, slow cooked Pork that I bought earlier in the day from local Pork farmer Q Gardens's - the sweetness of the slow-cooked meat and the tomatoey, tangy sauce it was cooked in teamned up nicely with those ripe, juicy elements in the Pinot. M'mm, not such a bad match after all...

Auntsfield 'Long Cow' Sauvignon Blanc 2007 is new to the Surf4Wine Portfolio - so I decided to take a bottle home and give it a go with supper tonight!

 It's a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, and anyone familar with the Surf4Wine New Zealand selection will know how keen we are on Kiwi Sauvignon - something that is also reflected in it being our biggest selling area of our list - so our customers clearly share our enthusiasm too!

I really like this wine: very crisp, refreshing acidity/bit, but backed up with lots of ripe, juicy New Zealand fruit - white peaches ands stone fruit, and oodles of ripe gooseberry's. Not so over-blown as many New Zealand SB's, and thankfully not a hint of any residual sugar. Very food friendly. (In fact we had it for supper with a home-made Tomato tart. Hence a few creeping into my photo here...

Anyway, don't just take my word for it... fellow Blogger Alastair Bathgate blogged about this wine earlier in the month, equally raving about it.

Definitely worth a punt for Sauvignon lovers I think! (Alastair's blog, and the wine!)

Daily Telegraph wine writer Jonathan Ray has picked his Top Ten supermarket wines, which makes interesting reading. I'm not familiar with all the wines, but will be giving a few a try and reporting back here.

I've been doing a bit of supermarket wine shopping myself of late, and have to say that after years of not buying regularly via High Street wine outlets, there have been some crackers to discover. Supermarkets have clearly done a lot to change the way we buy wine, and massive amounts to help increase its popularity. But I have also been shocked by some of the things I've found... in Sainsbury's you can now buy red and white already poured out into glasses and sealed with shrink wrap. Is this to encourage sipping a glass at the checkout or as you pack your shopping into the car?? Clearly a world gone mad when there is a market for convenience shopping at this level! Or perhaps I'm just getting older/more cynical than I thought?!

Well, they say a week is a long time in politics... and couple of months is a very long time to be away from your blog!

But that's a story for another day/blog post....

I'm back now and have lots of news and views to share, and some cracking deals to tell you about from online retailers and out there in the High Street. So, if you want the latest wine news, to hear the inside scoop on what's going o in the wine trade, and most importantly of all, find out where the best deals are to be had, this is the place to be.

Follow my Twitter posts at www.twitter.com/wineguru), and read my and other general thoughts and musings from the non-wine world here too.

Catch you later...

Part two of the BBC Oxford wine tasting challenge. Andrew is aiming to teach BBC Oxford mid-morning presenters Danny Cox and Louisa Hannan everything about wine in just three days - a lost cause some would say, especially as, until now, Danny doesn't drink!

The general idea, aprt form to have a bit of fun, is to see if some rapid fire wine tasting can teach Danny Lou the basics of wine, and then test which has become the better wine taster.

Today is red wines, and like yesterday, it is set-up in two parts.

BBC Oxford wine challenge, red wines. Part 1

We have out up a list of the red wines tasted today if you would like more information.

BBC Oxford wine challenge, red wines, part 2

Up with the lark today as I wanted to speak to Kelvin our web-designer who lives in the USA. Opened up Thunderbird (free and excellent email browser in case you are wondering! Highly recommend it - but I digress...) and the first thing I saw was the weekly email from Wine Spectator.

It features what sounds like a very tasty pasta dish using bacon, pine nuts, raisins and two cheeses, designed by Shea Gallante, the chef at New York's Cru restaurant and partnered with a Colombia Crest 'Grand Cru' Chardonnay.

And it set me thinking about a wine I drank just before the bank holiday, Vergelegen Reserve Chardonnay 2006.

Beautifully poised, elegant and rich, this buttery/toasty Chardonnay would, I think, do as good a job with this pasta dish as the Columbia Crest that The Spectator are featuring. Plenty of lip-smacking fruit and well-judged oak to work with the richness of the dish, but enough acidity not to make the whole combination too over-powering.

In fact, if I had been tasting the Vergelegen blind I would possibly have put it into Burgundy, perhaps from Meursault. And in that context not only is is a lovely wine, but a bit of a bargain too!