Hastings Wine and Seafood

20-Sep-08 - Hastings Seafood and Wine weekend, the third since they started and the third with absolutely fantastic weather. I don't know who they've got on the organising committee but s/he obviously has friends in (very) high places. Last year they welcomed 30,000 visitors over the weekend and this year there seemed to be even more, from babes in arms to grannies on sticks, all chasing ice-cream, fish, noodles, fish, chips, fish and fish. Oh, and wine of course. I hosted two tastings in the Tasting Zone with fish from the Hastings fleet (the largest surviving beach-launched fleet in the UK, remember) along with wines made within 30 miles of the town (which, of couse, means that foreign parts such as Kent are also represented). We presented samples of smoked mackerel and (unsmoked) conger eel, plus two local cheeses, Sussex Blue and St. Giles, with five wines. The Ortegas (Biddenden and Harborne - with some Müller-Thurgau) did best with the fish, and a rosé from got the vote with the cheese. The red, from Saxon Valley, was a really good stab but, much as I admire their efforts with Pinot Noir, I'm afraid there are still a few years to go before we see a really top-class English red. People were asked to try to match the wines with the nibbles and it was a fascinating exercise. But who was the beautiful, tall, willowy blonde young woman with the beguiling east-European accent who was asking me about wine courses at Plumpton? I never did find out. In complete contrast, on the Saturday return trip the front carriage in the Worthing train had two tables of shaven-headed thirtysomething twats drinking cans of beer, effing and blinding and no doubt thinking themselves terribly clever. No-one else did.

We did it again on the Sunday. Jill had 'volunteered' to drive on the Sunday because, as ever, they were digging up the railway line between Brighton and Lewes making it a ridiculous almost-three hour journey from Worthing (50 miles). Mind you, the regular train takes an hour and a half, and the Hastings leg is in one of those toy trains with only two carriages which they run from Brighton to Ashford to catch the Eurostar (which now only stops there twice a day), and is always packed.