ITs Food

My new Dell Vista Business PC finally turned up. I don’t care what people say about Vista, when I had a quick 10 minute play with the default Dell installation (before a wipe, natch) it made me smile.

Got a bit of a backlog of wine reviews to work my way through.  I’m also going to revamp the format giving a bit more information, a rating, price guide and where I got the wine from.  Coming up…

• Sainsbury’s SO organic Fairtrade Argentinian Malbec
• Casillero del Diablo Carmenere 2005
• Blossom Hill Red (!)
• Brown Brothers Crouchen Riesling
• Brown Brothers Tarrango
• More…

Phew!  Plus a new Book Review section!

I found this excellent blog a week or so ago called Living in Bury St Edmunds. I must have spent close to three hours reading Ruby’s (anagram of Bury) musing on living in Bury with lots of great photographs.

Well, I logged in to WordPress at the weekend and saw a big hit in visitor numbers. Hmmm, interesting I thought… A quick check of the referrers showed that Ruby had linked to me in a really nice post. Wow, thanks Ruby! Glad you liked my post on how to source local produce. Looks like Simon and the gang at Country Farm Meats is going to get a visit from Bury’s top blogger soon. That’s Ruby, not me!

So, time for one of our “oh-so-rare” tech posts! It seems everyone is talking about OpenID these days. I saw on Twitter the other day that Leo Laporte said he was “signing up for every possible openid - just in case” and Kevin Rose from Digg.com says they’ll be supporting it.

So, yes, itsfood now has an OpenID. Will it catch on? Will it just turn into another Passport/Windows Live ID? I don’t know, it seems a few people on the web aren’t sure, there are pro’s and con’s. I personally use different passwords for different websites which can sometimes be tricky, especially when some websites have a stupid password policy which means my standard pattern doesn’t fit! The idea of Single Sign On for all websites is a nice idea.

Sign up for an OpenID and let me know your thoughts on whether it will work or not.

Hardys Stamp Riesling Gewurztraminer 2005, originally uploaded by itsfood.

Okay, time for a bit of a favourite.

You know, some times you just want to open a bottle of wine and enjoy it. Not worry about how it’s going to taste, think about the complexity of the wine. This is one of those wines.

The “Hardys Stamp Riesling Gewurztraminer 2005″ is from the mega wine group Hardy’s. Although it’s labelled as a a blend of Riesling and Gewurztraminer (one of my favourite grapes) it’s actually made from 66% Riesling, 20% Gewurztraminer and 8% Muscat de Frontignan. It’s a medium wine so maybe a little sweet for some but when served chilled it’s perfect for swigging. Reminds me of an excellent, but now sadly defunct, Vouvray from Tesco which I used to glug down in the mid-90’s with friends whilst I did my Masters degree.

So, it’s gluggable, dependable and fairly cheap (~£4.40 per bottle in a half case or ~£5 in-store). Try it with Chinese (or something sweetish, maybe Thai) you can’t really go too far wrong.

For it’s pure value and gluggishness I’ll give this four out of five!

Link: Hardy Wine Company on Wikipedia