Table debris

Good lunch.

'Ear 'ear

I would like to introduce the new addition to the Combo household to you. She is called Flossie and is a right little monkey. She has ears like semaphore railway signals as you can see.

Stuck

Great bar and trattoria in the middle of nowhere. Accurate use of the English possessive too.

Hoping for Spring

I took this before it snowed (again). They are my Welsh tulips.

Bottle count

This was the count from a dinner last night. From left to right, a serious fizz from one of Italy's best makers, a smasher from McLaren Vale, probably the best Monferrato Rosso (a blend of Barbera and Cabernet Sauvignon) from hereabouts and with the chocolate pudding to finish off a simply wonderful Moscato d'Asti. The latter is so pleasant and light (5º) that it's the sort of stuff you could have a good crack at for breakfast (but only at the weekend of course). The Aussie was a gift brought by hand from Oz. Impossible to find on the shelves around here. Apologies for the quality of the photograph, it was quite late.

A Grappa Frenzy

The arrival of The Intrepid One meant that vaulting off the wagon two days early was forgiveable I think. Saturday evening came and went in a wonderful haze of decent local wines of both colours and some serious nosh (rabbit since you ask preceded by Combo own label mushrooms and stuffed chilli peppers). On Sunday TIO tootled off but there was no stopping Ronnie and lunch at a local restaurant seemed in order. To mark the occasion and to help the digestion (of course), the owner pulled this one off the special shelf, age unknown but at least 40 years old as the company stopped making grappa in 1960.
It was surprisingly mellow with a pleasant aviation fuel afterburn.

Then it was on to Bruno's where he pulled these two babies out, from profoundly different ends of the grappa spectrum.
The Tagliatella is from my favourite grappa house, Nardini, and is a terribly moreish grappa - amaro cross. The other bottle needs to be drunk wearing the sort of kit bomb-disposal experts don before they approach some roadside device in Afghanistan. Not for the faint-hearted.