26. T’Gallant Pinot Griso

At the best of times, Christmas time presents a ridiculously difficult chore of buying novel presents for friends and loved ones. You can spend hours and hours wracking your brain for some inspiration for gifts and despite eons browsing what the high street and internet has to offer you may find nothing suitable.

So imagine you are in the position where you are buying a present for someone who is leaving the country as happened to my family the Christmas before we left. They couldn’t buy anything for us to take to Oz as we were already pushing the weight limit and if they did it would have to be very small and very light. Also they couldn’t buy anything for us to leave in the UK as that would be pointless. In short, we just told everyone to give us money. Hey, it’s light and small and I can certainly make room for it.

However, my youngest sister, who had spent a year in Sydney about 4 years ago, excelled herself by booking a meal for us in Cruise restaurant right on Circular Quay. She had spoken to one of the staff there, a pleasant guy called Stuart (who apparently had won some barman-of-the-year award back in Edinburgh) and paid for the meal over the phone with her visa card... from Scotland. How cool was that?

When we arrived or our meal we were shown to our seats which were right beside the huge glass windows which looked out over the harbour to the Opera House. The sun was just setting and the sky was rapidly changing from red to grey-blue to black.

The menu was mainly fish and game based and we opted for snapper and kingfish both of which were divine. Isla got her hands on the wine menu and chose a bottle of T’Gallant pinot griso to go with the fish. It was certainly big enough to handle the rich sauces that accompanied our dishes and it had a lovely, long waxy finish with just enough fruitiness and summeriness to make us remember that although we were settling well in Sydney, we were still really on holiday.

We finished the meal with one of Stuarts speciality cocktails. The bar was adjacent to our table and as he was making them he shouted over, “I’ve got a treat for you two!”

“Really,” we replied together, “what are you making?”

“Vodka and Irn Bru!”

It was orange, but thankfully that’s not what he was making. It looked a bit like a tequila sunrise but was far tastier. It was bitter/sweet courtesy of the vodka, pineapple, white fuzzy peach puree and some other ingredient that I didn’t catch the name of and it had a pleasant dry afternote thanks to the topping of champagne. We asked what it was called but Stuart said it didn’t have a name. In fact, there wasn’t even a cocktail menu – he just knocked up whatever he felt was right for that particular drinker.

He certainly measured us up correctly because despite the fantastic taste of the cocktail, it was loaded with alcohol. That plus the wine put a nice spin on things for the bus trip home.