What I did with my weekend...

For one reason or another, time seems tight at the moment (isn't it funny how, given that time is an elastic concept, it can be tight or stretched, but never seems to be loose or slack?) We're at the peak of tasting season (I'm meant to be going to eight tastings this week, and could easily add another five or six), I'm travelling at the end of next week (to Geneva for a couple of days) and the beginning of the week after (to Bordeaux for a day and a half), have three articles to write this week and have eight people coming for lunch on Sunday (to give up my social life would be to admit defeat, I feel).

And so it was that I realised that unless I tasted all the wines I needed to taste for the article I have to write this week over the weekend, it wouldn't happen and there would be an almighty car crash of a missed deadline. So on Saturday afternoon I spent an hour unpacking the cardboard boxes that cluttered the hall (merely stripping off all the packaging tape, getting rid of the foam sleeves or pebbles that cushion the bottles, labelling the wines with the names of the company that sent them to me – it's amazing how many people send in bottles with no information, as if you'd recognise who they came from amid the dozens of other bottles you're dealing with – and deconstructing the cardboard boxes so that they can be put out with the rest of the recycling is an exhausting job in itself). I squeezed close on to 30 bottles of white wine in the fridge so that they could chill overnight and lined up the reds (see picture above).

The next morning, after a breakfast of two scrambled eggs, a slice of multigrain toast and some smoked salmon – yum – I made a start on the whites. I was done by lunchtime and was hoping to plough on with the reds in the early part of the afternoon, but Mark then reminded me that we'd been planning on going to see the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern. When I suggested it might be better for me to finish my work, he sulked, so for the sake of marital harmony, I went to the gallery. I'm glad I did, it was a splendid exhibition. The only flaw was that the galleries were chock-full of people and I feel that Rothko's canvases are probably best appreciated in silence, in a place where you've got the time and space to meditate on them in peace. No matter, they were still awe inspiring.

On our return home, I went through the 36 or so bottles of red I had waiting for me. I was so exhausted at the end that I could barely uncork the last bottles (another reason to vote for screwcaps). My teeth were stained black from the tannins (never a good look, particularly because advice suggests you wait at least an hour after you've finished your tasting before you brush your teeth as the wine acids soften your tooth enamel and you're in danger of brushing it away if you clean your teeth too soon) and I've never been so grateful to sink into a warm bath (perfumed by Ren's brilliant rose bath oil, an affordable luxury for this recessionary world).

Thank goodness the weekend's over. I don't think I could stand the pace for much longer...

A big challenge

I've spent a couple of days over the last week or so helping to judge at the International Wine Challenge, one of the three big wine-tasting competitions to run each year here in the UK. The picture, left, gives you some idea of the vast number of wines entered in such competitions. They're big business: big business for the people who run them (who charge a fee for each entry) and big business for the lucky winners (who get to put a sticker on the neck of the winning bottles in the hope that this will help them sell more wine).

Each day for the past fortnight, 100 or so experienced tasters – journalists, wine makers, wine merchants and sommeliers for the most part – have rocked up at one of the Barbican's exhibition hall. We get split into groups of between four and six judges per table, under the guidance of a panel leader, and then the tasting begins. The first week's job was merely to sort wines into three categories: Out (you really don't want to put that in your mouth, do you?), Commended (it's drinkable, but far from exciting) and Medal-worthy. This is done by tasting your way through flight after flight of wine – a flight is made up of anywhere from a couple to a dozen bottles of wines of a similar style (for instance, German Riesling or Australian Shiraz) – and then deliberating over the various merits of the wines.

The second week, any potentially medal-winning wine is re-tasted in order to determine whether it's worthy of a Bronze (good, but not remarkable), Silver (batting well above average) or Gold (outstanding). Yesterday was a week two-day, and my judging colleagues and I tasted our way through 75 wines, awarding one Gold, about three or four Silvers, numerous Bronzes and kicking a number of wines back into Commended positions.

After a day spent tasting like this, my teeth were stained black with tannin (which makes you look like your dentist learned his skills back in the 17th century) and I have to remember not to smile politely at anyone on the bus on the way home.

Excess all areas

This modest collection of bottles should give you some idea of a regular working day (if there is such a thing) chez Hughes.

Some time late last year I hatched a plan with one of my colleagues, The Guardian's Victoria Moore, to spend a day finding the right kinds of food to match with German Riesling. Now Riesling is one of those grapes that wine buffs love but most people are uncertain about. Part of this unpopularity is due to the fact that people think all German wine is Liebraumilch, Piesporter, Blue Nun, Black Tower or generic Hock. Even if they don't bundle Riesling in with these wines (which often have little to do with the grape in any case), people think the wines are too sweet (in fact a good German wine, even though it might have some residual – ie unfermented – sugar in it, balances this sugar with crisp acidity) or, if they're not sweet, they're so acidic and mineral that they come across as being austere and unfriendly.

Anyway, Victoria's column is all about finding good food matches for good wines – and I write an occasional food and wine-matching column for www.wine-pages.com – so we decided to call in some wines and spend a day tasting them with different dishes (I know: it's a tough job, but someone's gotta do it).

The day kicked off at 11.30 with a tasting of 26 Rieslings. Once we'd worked our way through them all, rejecting the ones we didn't think were up to scratch for one reason or another, we began working on finding wines that matched some of the dishes I'd prepared. We started with quail marinated in ras-el-hanout (see 'Jen, Coz, Leo and some wonderful wines' for more info), then moved on to slices of smoked goose breast served with caramelised apple slices, a Keralan prawn and coconut curry I plan on adapting for dieters (watch this space for a full recipe some time soon), grilled lemon sole and a mushroom risotto.

Not exactly ideal diet fare, although I made sure I took small portions and swallowed very little of the wine I tasted. The conclusions of the day's experiment should be up on the Wine Pages site in the next few weeks – and you'll probably find Victoria's take in the pages of the Guardian's Saturday magazine within the next fortnight.

Jen, Coz, Leo and some wonderful wines

Mark and I spent Sunday with our friends Coz and Jen, and their new baby, Leo. We hadn't met Leo before – he was born less than a month ago – so I took a bottle of Champagne with us to celebrate.

It was 'just' basic Bolly – one of my favourite of the big brand non-vintage Champagnes. I like its richness – I've never been a big fan of over-priced battery acid, which (to my mind) some Champagnes seem to taste like. I'd decided in advance to allow myself to have a glass (maybe even a glass and a half) of wine. After all, we were celebrating and even though I'm on a diet, there are certain occasions (like celebrating the birth of a baby) when it would just be wrong to stick to the rules too closely (the knack lies in recognising these occasions while not making excuses to indulge too often on some spurious pretext).

We arrived, wielding our bottle of Champagne, and I'd no sooner handed it over than Coz (who is incredibly generous with his wines) said: 'That'll keep – I was planning on opening a bottle I brought back from Champagne last year,' and popped the cork on a truly delicious bottle of Pierre Gimmonet Oenophile vintage fizz. Gimmonet, for anyone who hasn't heard of him, is a talented producer who makes his own wines in the Champagne region rather than selling his grapes to a big company like Moet, Bollinger or Mumm (which is what most growers do). These 'growers' Champagnes' are increasingly trendy in hard-core wine circles, and I think they're often really good wines sold at (relatively) reasonable prices.

So I sipped delicately at my half flute of Gimmonet, then had a mouthful or two of the Bolly. But I'd been quite cunning. Knowing how persuasive Coz can be when he starts opening interesting bottles of wine (and how I have a professional weakness for tasting them), I'd set myself up as the designated driver for our return journey. This certainly curbed my enthusiasm, and much as I'd have loved to hoe into the Champagnes (or any of the other wines that followed), I knew I couldn't – and so did everyone else.

I'd told Coz and Jen that I was going to cook them lunch – they hadn't had the time or energy to cook properly since Leo was born – and I'd come prepared. Or rather, my quails had been prepared, and all I needed to do was to shove them in the oven. They'd been marinating since the previous evening in a mixture of Ras el Hanout (a blend of Moroccan spices that includes cumin, coriander, cinnamon and rose petals) and some olive oil. I'd stirred about three tablespoons of spice into a couple of tablespoons of oil, then rubbed all that yummy spiciness into eight quail, crammed them into a tupperware container and put them in the fridge overnight. When I got to Coz and Jen's, I put them in a pre-heated oven at about 200C for around 40 minutes, then served them with a simple salad enhanced with a few chopped walnuts.

I happened to mention to Coz that I was thinking of using the recipe for a tasting I'm planning to do at the end of the month: an investigation into which kinds of dishes work best with German Riesling. Inevitably, Coz insisted on opening a bottle of Josmeyer's Les Pierrets Riesling from the 2001 vintage – a wine he'd bought on a trip we all took to Alsace two or three years ago. It was lovely with the quail – but I'm still interested to see how a slightly lighter, slightly sweeter German Riesling will work with the dish.

Dessert was even simpler than the main course: a salad of peeled, sliced blood oranges with some chopped dates, all sprinkled with a teaspoon of rosewater (go easy on the stuff – it's very fragrant). Coz opened another bottle to go with this, a Beaume de Venise from a co-operative in the Rhône. It was just right with the pudding: light, fresh and not too sweet.

Then, to round things off, he brought out another bottle of wine, a Schloss Gobelsberg Gruner Veltliner – just because we happened to be talking about Austria. If you've never tasted Gruner Veltliner before, I urge you to track down a bottle of this marvellous grape – it's one of the most food-friendly white wines in the world, and the hallmark grape of the Austrian vineyards, in the same way that Malbec has come to be associated with Argentina or Shiraz with South Australia.

The Schloss Gobelsberg wine was outstanding – but, as I did with the Riesling and the dessert wine, I did no more than sip at it to taste it. The same can't be said for Mark, who snored loudly all the way home...

Fair Verona

I spent most of last week in Verona. Lucky me... Verona is one of my favourite cities in Italy. Unlike nearby Venice, lots of Italians live and work in the city, which means it isn't such a tourist ghetto. (Which is not to denigrate Venice itself, which is a wonderful place to be, especially once you're off the main tourist drag.)

There are a few touristy things to gawp at in Verona, including the Roman arena (left), which is the location for splendid open-air opera concerts in summer (or so I'm told – I haven't yet been lucky enough to go). There's a marble-paved shopping street lined with glitzy boutiques, quiet little side streets with tranquil-looking restaurants and bars, a delightful main piazza with a stunning clock tower and a couple of delis groaning with Italian cheeses and exotic salumi and hams. The historic centre is easy to get round on foot, yet large enough for you to get lost enough to make some serendipitous discoveries while you're wandering around.

We (the group was a veritable United Nations of wine hacks, with representatives from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Canada and the US, as well as a British contingent consisting of me and one of my colleagues, Patricia Langton) also got to spend a couple of days outside the town centre in the wine-growing valleys that lie within a half-hour's drive from Verona. Most of the vines here are trained along high pergolas, a very traditional way to grow grapes (to the right are some pictures of pergola vines in winter – you have to imagine them in their full summertime splendour to get the full effect). The countryside – like that of many wine-growing regions around the world – is stunning. There are four valleys nestled between hills that extend upwards into the Dolomites. In late spring and summer, the vineyards that cover much of the land are green and leafy, while in autumn the leaves of each of the five or so main grape varieties cultivated in the region each turn a different colour. This, though, was winter, and although the vineyards look rather sparse, the majestic snow-capped mountains help to frame them rather beautifully.

Needless to say, like any Italian town, Verona has some fab restaurants. The Italians take their food very seriously, and as long as you stay away from places whose menus are too complicated and fiddly, you can eat very well indeed.

As I'm beginning to realise, when I'm travelling, the best way for me to deal with my diet is to revert to portion control and an attempt to guesstimate my calorie intake. There's absolutely no way I can dictate a GI-friendly plate-load, with its idealised 50% veg, 25% complex carbs and 25% protein. A case in point was the lunch provided for us on Saturday, the day of the big Amarone tasting.

The Amarone tasting was the reason I was there in the first place. A quick aside for those of you unfamiliar with Amarone: this is a dense, richly alcoholic red wine made from partially dried grapes that would otherwise be used to produce Valpolicella, a much-maligned wine that can provide an awful lot of bang for your buck. Amarone's have Valpolicella's tell-tale cherry flavours, but these are often layered with notes of dark chocolate and flowers, particularly violets and roses. Not wines for the faint-hearted, but utterly delicious when paired with big, hearty dishes like beef stew or roast duck.

Anyway, I digress. I'd been invited to Verona to taste the newly released 2004 vintage of Amarones, and after a quick press conference, we were let loose on a tasting room that must have contained some 70 big, bold young wines. Inevitably, we got hungry, and all that was on offer was cheese and charcuterie. Sigh...

Ah well. The dinners over the four days attempted to make up for this shortfall by providing us with ravioli with a variety of stuffing (there was one filled with brocolli that was absolutely delicious, as well as a heavenly truffled version the previous night), polenta with wild mushrooms, beef braised in Amarone and risotto, also cooked in Amarone (which turns it a wonderful purple colour). There was loads of cheese to enjoy, too – especially the local cheese, Monte Veronese, which comes in a number of incarnations, from mild-flavoured and daisy-fresh to a slightly aged version whose skin had been turned purple with (you've guessed it) Amarone and an aged, nutty cheese that tasted like a very tangy Parmesan.

Although I found myself tempted to eat all that was put in front of me, I resisted the urge and found an unexpected benefit. By the time we rolled back to the hotel it was easy for me to fall asleep – most of my colleagues, nursing full bellies, had a tougher time of it.