Wine and Cheese Tasting with Catavino

On Wednesday night, Stephen and I made the short trip to the Westbridge in Battersea for a complimentary evening of wine and cheese hosted by Charlie McVeigh (Westbridge owner and cheese provider) and Catavino (wine supplier).

It was a very informal evening and a great opportunity to meet new food and wine bloggers, the wine and cheese was pretty good too. There was a huge selection of wine on offer and, while we both made a valiant attempt at tasting all of it, we didn’t get through it all. Of those we did try, the ones that really stood out were the Chozas Carrascal sparkling wine and the Castro Martin Family Estate Albarino.  Stephen’s notes are quite detailed on the cava detailing the toast, peach and vanilla nose and the earthy, lemon and green flavours in the mouth.  My memory is less detailed but I remember the bubbles being long-lasting and there not being too much acidity (note to self: remember to leave wine write-ups to Stephen in future).

There were also a great number of cheeses but we didn’t manage to photograph them all, possibly because some arrived later in the evening after we had “tasted” a fair amount of wine. I’m certain we managed to try them all though and our favourites were the Tomette Agour Brebis du Pays (a hard sheep’s cheese from the Pays Basque) and the Tête de Moines (from the Bernese Jura), not least because of the Girole which was created especially to use with that particular cheese.

Alongside the cheese and wine, there was also some tea provided by The Rare Tea Company which I learnt was very useful in cleansing the palate in between wines. I have to admit to being a bit rubbish about tea, strong builders tea is all I really drink but it would never have occured to me that tea could be useful for anything other than being a great accompinament to toast before so this was a great lesson.

Sadly, we didn’t get the chance to eat any food from the Westbridge kitchen which might have explained the sore head the following day (as evidenced by the state of Stephen’s shirt in the first picture!). No such sore heads for the wine bloggers though who spent most of the next morning on Twitter teasing the food people for not utilising the spittoon.