Getting A Good Cocktail

London is a great place for enjoying cocktails. That’s just as long as you can stomach the prices you pay. Since moving here six months ago, I’ve sampled a fair few, when I’ve had the chance and been feeling flush. So much so that I think I can say with some certainty that I’ve realised my taste runs mainly to the classics. Not that the photo above could be described as a classic – it’s Kopapa’s Passion Fruit Batida, which they describe as ‘fresh lime, passionfruit and cachaça sweetened with a little sugar, served short & laced with Myers’s rum’. The barman persuaded me to try it, and though it was lovely, it was still too sweet for my taste. It was a pleasure to watch him work, though.

Interestingly, I’ve occasionally tried a few cocktails on my regular trips around Europe, and what I seem to find there is that cocktails are more part of the everyday landscape, but at the same time that this seems to have led to them becoming rather run of the mill. For instance, a cocktail that I tried at a bar run by Martini and D&G at the Dolce e Gabbana flagship store in Milan. The salty food to go with the drink was a total necessity, but the martini itself was a let down. The gin simply wasn’t up to the job, and they’d added too much vermouth. Here in London, I’ve had carefully made martinis in the Harvey Nichols bar and also (strangely) in the 5th View Bar at Waterstone’s Piccadilly. The latter know exactly what they’re doing – a choice of gins, dirty or clean, served however you like. They come to your table to mix it too, which adds a fun bit of theatre.

For myself, though, I’ve yet to come across a cocktail that I could drink more happily than a margarita. You can get good ones all over London, but two things often let them down. First of all, there’s a tendency to make them too sweet. Second, you’ve got to use quality tequila and quality orange liqueur. For me, Cointreau’s the only serious option. But that still leaves lots of imponderables. I used to make margaritas at home with a proper margarita glass. But they’re currently lost in transit, so I’ve been making do with a taller glass recently (actually, for those who are interested in such things, it’s an Ittala glass designed by Aino Aalto back in 1932). The problem with a taller glass is that unless you’re going to serve yourself an enormous margarita, you’re forced to serve it over ice…

… and that’s where the pictured margarita falls down, though the melting ice does at least mean that the drink lasts a little longer. Home made cocktails can be wonderful, but they sure are hard work! However, I may have discovered a potential solution. I have a local pub where one of the bar staff makes fabulous cocktails – he’s quite the artist, in fact. The pub is The Lost Angel in Battersea, one of a group of four venues owned by the same team. The decor’s a bit naff, but I’ve come to love the place. I can particularly recommend the Espresso Martini. Now there’s something that you could hardly call a classic…

A Tale of Two Museums

I get it. I really do. The renaissance is sexy. The Baroque is sexy, if you like Caravaggio. Modern art is clearly sexy. Medieval art, however, has taken vows of chastity and is hiding in the corner. Probably self-flagellating.

This seems to be the message of how people see the medieval world. Shame I love it, then. Shame also that I work with medieval art on a daily basis. Silly me.

Matters are made worse by the fact that I don’t just like medieval art. I tend to be into decorative art and design, rather than painting or architecture. Most people can be persuaded to get excited about a building. Far fewer get excited about embroidery. Still, them’s the breaks. I can accept this.

No, what really winds me up (sometimes) is the way in which museums can unconsciously reinforce this message. Two trips I made recently to Milan and Berlin summed up what medieval art too often is, but might be.

Milan’s a wonderful, messy, bustling city. And sitting like a spider at the heart of it is the massive Castello Sforzesco, an enormous castle that’s utilised by the city as a series of museum spaces for many of its art treasures. The obvious one being Michelangelo’s final work, the Rondanini Pietà. The ground floor sculpture galleries – which include some pretty impressive medieval works, by the way – are impressive, and must have been done about fifteen years ago. A couple of floors up, the visitor then walks through a new gallery on the history of Milan. Then there follow a whole series of (to my eye) dull paintings galleries. The route continues into another part of the building, at every stage giving the world-weary visitor the chance to jump off the ride, give up and leave, having seen what presumably, they most wanted to see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the persevering visitor can continue up onto the battlements. This is wonderfully Italian – little signage, no particular nods to the gods of Health and Safety, and a route up to what promises to be a complete waste of time and energy. However, emerging breathless into the upper reaches of the castle, I was met by a whole other suite of galleries. These took me through ceramics, musical instruments, and finally, into the gallery housing the metalwork and medieval ivory carvings. The galleries had become pokier and pokier, and I don’t imagine that these spaces have been given a facelift in fifty years. Not that I’m complaining – I understand how hard it can be to get funding, and besides, museums have to prioritise. But I spent forty minutes to an hour wandering in this unprepossessing gallery, looking at some truly gorgeous works of art. And during that time, I was the only visitor who’d managed to penetrate the museum’s defences that far. The subliminal message is what interests me – only an obsessive will find this stuff interesting. The rest of you – give up. It’s not worth it!

And this is what I would call ‘Normal Setting’ for medieval art in museums. But in Berlin, I had the wonderful experience of visiting the Bode Museum, which specialises in medieval and renaissance sculpture, but also currently houses a wonderful display on medieval metalwork in the basement. The Bode is beautiful. More than anything, it just shows how strong medieval art can be when it’s shown to the public with the same confidence that you’d have if you were displaying a piece by Leonardo da Vinci or Donatello. The art itself is fine. It’s the signals that are sent out by the way it’s presented that is so often the problem. I especially enjoyed coming unexpectedly across these two tomb figures in the basement.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not complaining about curators. They know the value of what they’re looking after. And I’m not complaining about ‘ignorant’ museum visitors either. After all, people respond, naturally, to the way in which works of art are presented to them. If the display says it’s important, then they’ll pay more interest. What I’m whinging about is two-fold. On the one hand, there’s only a limited amount of money to spend on museums, and so often it’s spent on the most well-known things, making them even more well-known and more likely to have money spent on them. This is a cycle of ever-decreasing returns. On the other hand, it seems to be human nature to see works of art in a way that is more circumscribed than we might like to believe by the way in which it’s presented to us. This explains why lost works by great masters can be ‘rediscovered’ and suddenly be thought to be masterpieces, while works that people thought were amazing a hundred years ago can now more often than not be ignored by the modern visitor. So – does art have any kind of inherent value, or is it all about spin?

The Ceramicist of Barcelona

I’d love to collect art, but I never feel I could justify the prices I’d have to pay to buy the things that most excite me. Which is why the only real ‘art objects’ I own are ceramics, which are a beautiful and affordable way to buy handmade works of craft and design. The time when I seem to be most receptive to this sort of thing is on holiday, and I’ve visited a number of art potters’ studios dotted over Britain.

Recently, though, I was in Barcelona, and stumbled across the shop and studio of Carmen Balada. In this tiny shop, she designs and makes a number of her pieces. Larger works are produced in a workshop outside the city.

The shop is a treasure trove, filled with designs and sketches for new works, half finished pieces, and completed objects on shelves, tables, the floor.

Ms Balada herself is charming. We had a fun chat about the new V&A Ceramic Galleries. She told me that she is an enormous fan of the Museum. One of the interesting areas she’s moved in to is the depiction of insects in her work, and not prettified up, either. They appear on pots, but I think are at their best on the white tiles she produces.

What is so appealing about Carmen’s work is her blending of European with Japanese traditions, and the tension between graphic and plastic within her work. I came away with two bowls and a tile. I’ll be returning for more.

You know you’re obsessive when…

… you’re cleaning the kitchen, and decide that now would be a great time to pull out your collection of gourmet tequilas and have an impromptu taste off. To be quite honest, the only thing puzzling me is why on earth I didn’t come up with this idea before.

Wine connoisseurs will sneer at me, because this has to be the most poorly organised tasting ever. First off the bat, it’s neither ‘vertical’ nor ‘horizontal’. In a vertical tasting, you try several vintages of the same wine. Well, fair enough, that doesn’t really apply to spirits like tequila. Horizontal tastings compare several wines, often from the same region, all from the same year. In other words, the aim is to compare like with like. And that’s where my little tequila party falls down.

See, for those of you who still think tequila is Jose Cuervo slammers at a student party, posh tequila comes in several different varieties. They have one thing in common, though. They are all made from 100% agave. The agave plant looks like a giant aloe vera, and it’s the mashed up pulp that becomes the starting point for the distillation.

Well, my own little collection, assembled haphazardly over several years, has representatives of various styles, from the unaged spirit (blanco or silver) through Reposado (partially aged) to Anejo (several years of aging in wooden casks). But it’s a small collection, and not exactly systematic.

Anyway, caveats aside, I lined ’em up, and started tippling. And here are my un-expurgated tasting notes:

Corralejo reposado: hard hitting, acidity, clean, slightly chemically, in a good way

Don Julio reposado: really smooth (too smooth?) and oaky

El Tesoro de Don Felipe anejo: easily the most vegetal, an exotic and punchy taste.

Patron silver: smooth, yet with a raw vegetal quality.

The surprise here for me was the fact that I came out of this not really feeling great about the Don Julio Reposado. The Don Julio brand is a high quality, modern one, and they do everything right, to the extent that they’re very popular with tequila enthusiasts. On the other hand, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the Corralejo. Now, this is a distillery with history – it’s one of the oldest in Mexico, having been established in the seventeenth century. But for years, they produced a bastardised, non 100% agave product, and their tequilas are regularly criticised for having too strong a flavour of alcohol, and an almost chemical edge.

But what I realised is that tequila is, perhaps more than any other spirit, in the eye of the beholder. The tequila renaissance has been fired by being aimed squarely at the US market – in other words, at drinkers who have been educated to prefer quality bourbons. But tequila can run the gamut from tasting purely vegetal, through a rum-like sugar flavour, through to the smoothness that you get from ageing in oak barrels. For me, the Don Julio is just far too well behaved. It tastes like a bourbon. The Corralejo, on the other hand, while it tasted more punchy with alcohol, had a lot more vegetal character. I think that of all the tequilas here, it would be by far the best mixer. The blanco Patron I found too rough in comparison.

My fave, though, easily, was El Tesoro. But that’s because although it was aged, it still had bags of vegetal character. And for me, that’s what tequila’s all about. Now I guess I’d better get back to cleaning the kitchen…

Day One

It’s a beautiful summer’s day, and I’m feeling optimistic, so why not start a new blog?

The idea, or rather, my idea, is to post about art, culture and anything else that appeals to me. Anyone reading more than a few posts here is soon going to realise that my art interests lean heavily towards a period that for many people, is a cultural wasteland – the medieval.

But I don’t just want to write about dark, pokey churches and fragmentary panel paintings. Although they’ll certainly get their space! I’m much more interested in writing more widely about culture, whether museum exhibitions, theatre, graphic novels or world music. In doing this, hopefully, wider links between all these themes will start to emerge. That’s the theory, at least.

Come back for more.