Tuesday is Wine Night

.. And Wednesday starts with a bit of a sore head.

It was a little over a month ago, scrolling through my Twitter feed during another dull lunch break at work, that I spotted The Suffolk Kitchen declaring a table for two had become available for their monthly wine tasting dinner. Now, to give you a bit of background, me and my chap have been eyeing up various wine nights in the restaurants around Cheltenham for quite a while. However, we never seem to have enough pennies at the right time, or, for some reason, we stupidly manage to talk ourselves out of booking onto one, which we inevitably regret. Its true, we are FOMO's. We have a fear of missing out. And when we hear of how much fun people are having - about the tasty food and bountiful wines - we become green with envy, kicking ourselves for trying to be "responsible adults". But not this time. A quick phone call, and an average Tuesday excelled into being an impromptu dinner date night.

 With 'Old Wines vs. New Wines' as the theme, this seemed like a good introductory evening. A chilled glass of prosecco was handed to us as we were shown to our seats, and a menu/scorecard on our table, alongside some freshly baked bread, kept us amused whilst waiting for the restaurant to fill up. Simon, the owner, and Ranulf, the wine merchant, explained that during that particular week both the food and wine menu had been changed, and as a result they were using this night to showcase what was on offer. There are three courses, each having a choice of three different dishes (meat, fish or veggie) with the exception of dessert, which, thankfully - because I couldn't choose - is a sharing platter of all three. Then with each course there are two wines, in this instance, one brand new to the restaurant, and one that had been booted off of the list. 

A bit of banter between courses, a few Q&A's, and one to one chats at the table; we tasted, scored, and slurped our way through the night. The more we drank, the more critical we got, having to re-evaluate our earlier scores, debating over finish and flavours; clearly in those couple of hours we'd become wine connoisseurs. At the end, votes were counted, and unsurprisingly the New Wines reigned supreme; a bit of a win/win scenario for the two 'opponents' Simon and Ranulf.

It all seemed to go like clockwork, not once were we left waiting, and they definitely weren't shy on the wine.. So, naturally, after such an enjoyable evening - a steal at £35pp - we booked straight away for the next one. We won't be missing out again. Lesson learnt.