Winning Bank Holiday weekend – Part I

I had been looking forward to this Bank Holiday weekend for ages. As I like ‘organising’ stuff and as Jeff is one of the most laid back men I’ve ever met, I decided to ‘surprise’ Jeff by organising some cool things to do this weekend and I have to admit to feeling pretty smug as it all came together very nicely indeed and we had a really, really enjoyable few days.

I arrived at Jeff’s house on Friday, after work – I was supposed to be going out with some of my work colleagues, however they had cancelled – therefore I didn’t see Jeff until about 6:30pm as he works later than me. I suggested we get pizza in and just watch some TV, have a chilled night. I’ve never ordered domino’s pizza online and I have to admit to being rather impressed – not only did we manage to find a 25% off voucher online, just by Googling ‘Domino’s Voucher’, however once we had placed the order – Domino’s have this online status thing – 1 to 5, with 5 being ‘order placed’ to 5 being ‘delivered’. Whilst we were watching an episode of ‘Monsters inside me’ on the sofa, both of us kept looking to Jeff’s computer to see if the status of our pizza had been updated – it was really quite cool and it only took about 25-30 minutes to be delivered, not bad considering it was a Friday night!

We were up quite early on Saturday and headed into town. I parked my car in my work car park and Jeff and I headed to the train station, however not before we had a ‘Cheeky Starbucks’ for breakfast – Fruit toast and a cup of tea, yummy! (although Jeff doesn’t share my love of tea, so he opted for a hazelnut hot chocolate instead) The weather wasn’t too bad at all, although I didn’t have a coat (my only coat is about 3 sizes too big for me) and it was a bit cold on the train station platform, whilst waiting for the train. Thankfully the train was on time and we managed to get to Waterloo for 11:00am. We got the underground to London Bridge and knew we would have plenty of time to get to Vinopolis (http://www.vinopolis.co.uk/) , which was our first cool ‘thing’ that we were doing on Saturday. As soon as we got off the tube, we found the most amazing market – Borough Market.

As neither Jeff nor myself come from London or have ever lived in London, we’re not really knowledgeable on London life and what goes on, so whilst I had been to Vinopolis before, I had no idea that there was such a massive market very close by. I think both Jeff and I felt a bit disappointed that we had already had something to eat, as by the looks of things, there were amazing things that we could have had to eat – it was like Winchester Farmers market, but better! All exotic types of mushrooms, amazing breads, wonderful olive oils – We were very good and didn’t buy any of it, but only because we knew we would have to carry all the things that we had purchased around, for the entire day – and we really didn’t want to do that!

After walking round the market for a little while, we made our way to Vinopolis and arrived there about 11:50. I had bought the earliest tickets possible and the earliest tour we could take was 12:00. I chose the ‘Vinopolis vineyard tour’, which included 6 standard wine tastings, 3 premium wine tastings and a Bombay Saphire cocktail tasting. We sat on the wooden benches just outside the ‘How to taste wine session’ arena and a nice woman came round to take our little tickets. If you’ve never been to Vinopolis – both Jeff and I would highly recommend it. What happens is, you buy a ‘tour’ which is a self guided tour and you are given a number of paper tickets on a card. You are also given a tasting notebook, which holds up to 45 different wines and a pencil to write all the comments down. You redeem each ticket for a 30 ml ‘shot’ of wine and you can choose from about 150 different bottles. You can choose tours which include rum tastings, whiskey tastings, beer tastings – however as I wasn’t keen on any of those, Jeff and I just stuck to wine and gin :-)

We enjoyed the ‘how to taste wine’ session and even though I had been before, I did actually learn some other interesting things, things that I will hopefully remember – for example, the longer the ‘legs’ on the wine, the sweeter it is. After the session, we went straight to the premium wines as they were directly facing us. I have a bit of a sweet tooth, so stuck to quite sweet wines, whereas Jeff went for a lot of red ‘peppery’ wines. I had a really nice wine ‘Domaine Bottgeyl Les Elements 2009’ which is a French wine that uses Gewurztraminer grapes. It was lovely – sweet, but not too sweet and very, very drinkable. Even Jeff didn’t think it was offensive, and we have very different tastes in wine!

After we had used up all three of our premium wine tickets, we decided that we would ‘upgrade’ (something you can do, if you want to buy extra tickets to various things) and do the Champagne tasting. It was only £5 for 3 tickets, however you don’t get very much. Jeff and I didn’t mind though, as we weren’t really there to get totally drunk and just thought it would be nice to learn a bit more about various wines. The bloke in the Champagne area was brilliant and a total Dude. ‘Vincent’, explained everything – how to tell if the champagne is a vintage, the difference between the various different champagnes. He was polite, interesting and really, really nice. Jeff and I had a really nice chat with him and we didn’t feel rushed at all as for a Saturday, it wasn’t too busy.

We then redeemed all of our standard wines – I found another amazing one from Canada called ‘Framboise’ from Southbrook Farms. It’s a fruit wine that’s made from Raspberries and tastes pretty much like Raspberry jam. It was gorgeous! I let Jeff have my Bombay Sapphire ticket as I’ve never been too keen on gin and it seemed stupid to drink something you know you wouldn’t enjoy.

Jeff and I spent about 2.5 hours in Vinopolis – we could have spent longer in there easily, however, we had a restaurant reservation for 6:00pm at Marco Pierre White’s Steak and ale house (http://www.mpwsteakandalehouse.org) and we wanted to get some lunch beforehand, so we weren’t too drunk! Thankfully, next to Vinopolis is a Waggamama’s so we headed in there for a quick amai udon / ginger chicken udon and then went for a rather long walk from the South Bank to Covent Garden. I think it took us about 50 minutes to get there, which was fine, however when we arrived, Covent garden was literally crawling with football fans.

I’ll be totally honest – neither Jeff nor myself are ‘into’ football in the slightest and therefore we weren’t overly keen at the loud football chants that we kept hearing every 30 seconds. Whilst there weren’t any fights, nor any acts of violence, it was quite intimidating walking through massive crowds of very large, bulky blokes who were quite drunk, shouting loudly. I absolutely love Covent Garden, but not on that Saturday! Jeff and I decided it would be best to leave – we did head for a tube station, but it was so, so busy we realised that it would have taken ages to get a tube, so even though we had travel cards, we opted to get a taxi from Leicester Square and asked the driver to take us to Marco Pierre White’s restaurant. It didn’t take us too long to get there and we went for a coffee as we were a bit early (5:20!).

The actual restaurant was absolutely brilliant. It’s not cheap, not by a long shot, however I personally think it’s worth the money. The staff were really polite, extremely attentive and our food (we had a main and a desert) was cooked to perfection. We both asked for ‘rare’ steaks and that’s exactly what we got. The ‘triple cooked chips’ were brilliant and my sticky toffee pudding was just melt in the mouth’. We left feeling very, very full, but very content!

Jeff and I were absolutely knackered when we headed back on the train and we went to bed soon after we got in. However, we had had a brilliant, brilliant day and crossed two things off our ‘to do list’ :-) The best thing was though, we still had Sunday to go…. Another brilliant day of doing really cool things together…..

- Molly