In a series of blogs, Jeremy, Simon and Jenny are looking back at their highlights of 2024.
Read Jeremy’s best moments of 2024
This year has been full of warmth, despite a difficult harvest in many of the places we travel. It’s also been a year when I’ve enjoyed visits to many magical places for the first time, always with great company to share the experience.
Our lunch at La Conseillante in Pomerol after a visit to Chateau Figeac in St Emilion on our Bordeaux Gran Reserva tour was magical. After we gazed from Petrus to Cheval Blanc in the vineyard we enjoyed a glass or two of Louis Roederer to ease us into an en primeur tasting of the 2023 and lunch in the barrel room with the winemaking team concluding with the 2017 and 2012 vintages. The wines (following a sumptuous 2015 at Figeac) were extraordinary, the setting exquisite and the company was very fine. Lunches don’t get much better.
In May I travelled with Pia Sorensen for the first time on our Harvard tour to Bordeaux and Rioja. Pia is a guru of fermentation and runs a globally followed Harvard cooking and science course so it was a real joy to listen to her lecture about food transformations centred on Ventamoncalvillo’s caramelised onion ice cream before we then went to sample the real thing with chef Ignacio at his restaurant in Rioja. Ventamoncalvillo’s magic was illuminated even brighter than usual that day.
Limu is a quiet gem of a restaurant on the coast east of Palermo, a place of gorgeous flavours and unusual local wines that always makes the journey there worthwhile in the capable hands of young chef owner Nino Ferreri. We started 2 tours there in 2024, the October dinner that kicked off our Stanford tour of Sicily was a very special occasion as we took the place over and created a camaraderie that would enrich our travels all the way to Taormina. Grazie Nino.
Camaraderie was a strong theme on our tour to the Rhone in May too. After 5 Michelin stars in 5 days along the Rhone, we sat at round tables in La Vieille Fontaine in the heart of Avignon with so many friends who had shared numerous journeys with us. There was a palpable sense of warmth in the room not just due to the very fine Chateauneuf du Pape slipping down a little too easily but also a sense that we were sad to end this tour but eager to start the next one. The craic was good.
No trip to San Sebastián for me is ever quite complete without a trip up the hill to that most remarkable of wine cellars at Rekondo and I love to tell the maestro himself, Señor Txomin, which wineries I’ve recently seen and hope for a nod of approval. He’s a bit slower now and needs a walking stick but as I mentioned La Conseillante, Chapoutier, Guigal, Murrieta, Benanti and Haut Bailly, his eyes twinkled ‘Que Bueno!’
