Le Tour de France
an archive of the webmaster's specials

Webmaster's Specials for July 1998:

1] Don't mention the World Cup Football

However it seems to have gone to their heads - they are offering the excellent House Champagne at just £9.95. I've got my stocks and there is still a great stack of cases left. A light fruity slightly yeasty biscuit taste and full in the mouth. Find a way to serve it chilled...

Our ISP have just trebled our free web space so see the page detailing House Champagne for £9.95 here.
2] Do mention the Tour de France (the cycle race).

And if there is a French 1-2-3 in the Tour and Le Tour De France decide to knock another £2.50 or so off the house champagne perhaps even I would be supporting the French riders!

My team in the Internet Tour de France is Ullrich, Zabel, Jalabert, Virenque, Zulle, Olano, Moncassin, Castegrande, Dufaux, Blijlevens, Boogerd, Riis, Bartoli, Pantani and Cipollini so watch out for a mass collision involving all of these riders...

Again, since Demon Internet have given us another 10MB free we have added a Tour De France 1998 (the cycle race) page here.
Webmasters Specials for June 1998: Enjoy the weather and a bit of good food and wine. The end of May brought us some wonderful weather and your webmaster was sitting in the garden contemplating the June special and enjoying some bread in the form of Wholemeal Walnut Loaf, the excellent Camembert au lait cru (be sure to get the Le Rustique version) cheese, the aromatic wind dried Jambon de Vendee dry cured raw ham with a touch of herbs from the charcuterie; and a glass or two of wine (look no further then the paragraph below this for a hint). Patrick the tame baby robin was enjoying a mealworm or two and the damselflies were enjoying whatever damselflies enjoy doing on the pond. Take a moment out to enjoy yourself, hope that they don't tax good weather, and savour a little simple, good quality food and wine.

22nd. May 1998: Welcome to the new site, please bookmark http://www.letourdefrance.demon.co.uk/ After we updated details for Apex Cycles, Interlude Restaurant and Le Tour De France in the search engines, the vino site was using up rather a lot of bandwidth, so we have now moved the Le Tour De France site here to its own domain. We are using the same fast ISP and still using the vino webmaster; and the old vino Le Tour De France details for April will stay there for another month or two.

Webmaster's Specials for May 1998: Two spring wines for you at about £6.00 a bottle. Crying out for a mild or warm day: White: Chardonnay Domaine Sainte Colombe et les Rameaux 1996. As good quality full-flavoured Chardonnay d'Oc as you can find for £6.35 a bottle. Red: Domaine de la Bouletiere 1995. An Organic Coteaux de Cabrerisse from Michele and Lionel Faivre. This is light (11.5%) and fruity, and complete with the UNIA organic seal for just £5.90 a bottle.

 

Sorry: since my recommendations the Sancerre featured below has run out; "May" has no letter r in it and the Langoustine featured in March are coming to an end, and I don't think there is a lot of Viognier left (December's special) and November's fresh walnuts are long gone because I ate them all. So there.

Webmaster's Specials for April 1998:

Sancerre Domaine Les Grands Groux 1995 £7.05. Superb quality, from a "particularly successful" year. A good example of just what can be made from Sauvignon Blanc grapes. Fouassier Pere et Fils south facing estate at its best. Using 35 year old vines (it says on the back of the bottle) and grown on a chalky soil - 95% limestone, 5% clay. The bad news is that I didn't know when I picked this as my special that there are only a few bottles left. Grab a little gem for just £7.05. Superb with the langoustine (see below). [02/05/98 SOLD OUT: I warned you.]

Langoustine: my Webmaster's special for March 1998

Langoustine (as if you didn't know) are scampi before some damn fool takes the tails, wraps them in cardboard and deep fries them. 14/03/98: I've just taken a photo - see right (if you want the full detail on which shellfish is which take a look at the Anand Sastry ingredients links here). Jean-Pierre usually buys them on a Friday and they are ready on a Saturday, ready to eat. We enjoy them as a starter on a Sunday with a little mayonnaise; break off the tail, take off the shell and eat the tail meat. If you get bigger ones (like the ones recently) you can fuss around and extract the claw meat - there is not much but it is also good. At £2.25 per quarter this makes a wonderful starter. The season is just ending, get them while you can.
Langoustine from Le Tour de France 14/03/98

 

 

The webmaster's special for February 1998 is the Sony Mavica MFC-FD7 digital camera that records .jpgs at 640 x 480 straight onto a common or garden floppy disk, has batteries that last for ages, produces close-ups, has the 10X zoom range of a 40 to 400 mm lens (on a 35mm camera). It produced such gems as the new pictures you may have seen here, for instance those of the close-up of pissaladiere, the fresh croissants, part of the range of cheeses, champagne and oysters, corbieres wine labels (and the langoustine above). The camera would make a bit of an expensive meal of crunchy mouthfuls, the lithium-ion battery would need to be filletted out first and I would suggest serving it in a light brioche with a very strong red wine.

 

The Webmasters special for January 1998 is Boulette d'Avesnes cheese. A small, strong paprika and herb flavoured cheese with a red rind. It starts out as cow's milk from Flanders, is flavoured, then ripened for at least 3 months, and traditionally the rind was washed with beer. The product is tangy and strong, it is not seasonal but always seems to me a winter wonder. To consume this before its best before date is a crime for which the guillotine should be re-introduced. This is a strong cheese and will cut through anything but the strongest wines (it is also acceptable if you have a cold!). A little goes a long way so the £3.20 or so for a small whole cheese in its sealed pack is good value - you get more flavour than from 6 bushels of supermarket plastic. [Apologies for the poor picture of the label - I'd eaten the cheese and scraped the label and thrown it away before I decided to try and scan it!]

The Webmasters special for December 1997 was Domaine de La Ferrandiere Viognier White Wine. (10/01/98 they have taken my words to add to the wine page!) Viognier is getting better and better from such sources as Oc, but is still hard to find; it has even taken off across the pond as the thinking-person's Chardonnay. And here for just £6.95 is a wine that with a different name on the label could command more than twice the price. Fragrant, strong, complex. Huge Johnson suggests lightly flavoured pasta dishes. Rich and fat, the Which? wine guide says to look out for it. Oz Clarke says musky, overripe apricots and spring flowers, the rarest of the world's great white grapes. I say buy a bottle.

We thank Demon Internet our excellent ISP. We are grateful to vino our Webmaster, for and assistance.

Thanks especially to our Systems Consultant Oliver Theis, not only for setting up the vino system, but also for specific help on this site.

If you are a bit of a foodie you might also like our fanzine pages for French-trained Super Chef Anand Sastry and Interlude Restaurant pages, particularly the Anand Sastry related links page, with wine, ingredients and restaurant links.

Accents: we know we have missed them out, but although Le Tour de France is a French delicatessen, it is in the UK, Jean-Pierre himself says he does not bother with accents and many browsers have difficulty with them. If you still feel aggrieved then çäâéèôàüëê to you and sorry we have used a pound sterling symbol sometimes.

NEW 14/03/98: Le Tour de France now receive e-mail concerning all Le Tour de France matters (and the vino webmaster would be pleased to receive any e-mail related to this web site). However we don't want junk e-mail, so before you send us anything you should first read the mailto agreement page.

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URL: http://www.letourdefrance.demon.co.uk/choice.html Latest update: 12th. July 1998.