Smelly Cheese

Wednesday April 25th

We continued the wine tasting at McGuigan's, which has a smelly cheese factory and tasting shop on site. The cheese shop promised local produce and country hospitality, though the woman on the counter was from Knutsford, which wasn't quite the country we had in mind.

The wine tasting hall at McGuigan's is like a Munich bierkeller. Ella ran between cases of wine, threatening to knock the display bottles over with her purple balloon and pleading with me to "throw it" while Darren did more sniffing, chewing and quaffing, the Jilly Goulden of his generation. Afterwards we had a rainy stop at Tempus Two (see the photo), a high-tech looking place which seems to typify the new-world, profit-driven approach to wine making. We spent some time tasting wine in the Loire Valley a few years ago, where they lovingly hand-turn bottles in underground caves for months on end. Tempus Two is a world away from this.