I have to admit this is an unashamed plug for a new branch of a local business.  Matt has been delivering excellent local food to holiday cottages in North Cornwall for a while now and his new venture, starting in early March, is to deliver our excellent local produce to your door if you happen to live in London.

Have a look at Matt’s web site and see if you can use his services - for all the remainder of the country that doesn’t live in London I’m sorry he can’t look after you yet but this is for two reasons, one he has to start somewhere and two he has a friend who can do the distribution for him there.  If enough people from other UK cities ask you never know he may well be able to expand further and reach you - even if we have to plough up the garden here to grow enough to supply everyone!

http://www.cornwallinyourkitchen.com is the web site, paste the link into your browser and happy shopping!

Last night we held a wonderful wine tasting and dinner in conjunction with Wadebridge Wines and McKinley Vintners.  Guy brought Paul Ham over from Alpha Domus in Hawkes Bay NZ for a tour around their distributors and we were lucky enough to host the Cornwall part of the tour.

We started with a free tasting in the Met Lounge and we had over 30 people come along for this and it was a great start to the evening - the wines were excellent and the talk informative and entertaining.  I think we all enjoyed all of the wines and we each struggled to find an out and out favourite.  More information is available on www.alpha-domus.co.nz .  My favourite white was the viognier followed very closely by the sauvignon blanc.  In the reds we tried three, all with the same grapes but different quantities of each and different wine making practices and it was really interesting to see how the wines differed, I would go for the Navigator here, the middle of the price range as my favourite.

Following the dinner a few of us moved through to the restaurant for a lovely dinner: Adam and his team did us proud with some exceptional cooking and all the guests were really impressed.  We drank some more of the same wines we’d tried earlier, matching them with the different dishes.  We had the sauvignon blanc first with a poached pear, walnut and goat’s cheese salad, followed this with the viognier matching well with a crab and lemongrass risotto and then the Navigator with a very pink lamb rump with a tomato and chick pea stew.  We finished with an orange sponge, orange curd ice cream and custard and had a little drop of late harvest semillon with this, again a lovely match.

As Hawkes Bay is a little further north in North Island than some of the more famous regions like Marlborough the fruit ripens that bit more and gives greater tropical fruit flavours - they are still cool climate wines, not just as cool!

If you are visiting this part of north Cornwall do call in to see Tamsin at Wadebridge Wines, if you are here in the east side of the north island of New Zealand go and see Paul!

Every year we bring all the senior teams from the hotels together in Torquay for our annual conference.  This year the theme was managing in a changing environment, which we are certainly in at the moment with the way the economy is going.

We were supported by some very capable students from South Devon College who planned the theme and all the different workshops for us.  It was sometimes not immediately obvious how the sessions linked back to the theme but once we had worked on them for a while we began to see how it all fitted together.  As well as working pretty hard in these sessions we also had plenty of time for fun too - learning to juggle was very amusing as well as hard work.  Joyce warned me that she was a bit stiff the next day and I was too - not from the arm muscles with all the throwing and catching but bum muscles from all the bending down to pick up the balls from the floor where we kept dropping them!

We also had fun building a raft with 4 big drums, 7 poles and loads of rope: all my scouting skills came back in a flash and I tied some nifty nots to keep it all together.  Once we’d carried the raft down to the outside pool we had to get it across as quickly as possible, one of the students was kitted out in his wetsuit to paddle it across but we thought around that and attached ropes to pull it across!  On the first go the poor student fell off but once we told him just to lie down and hold tight we had the raft across in 8 seconds!  Nobody came near us but we had a 20 second penalty added for the first run.  One team’s raft still hasn’t made it across the pool!  You might say that pulling the raft across was cheating, we just say using our initiative and playing to the letter of the sparse rules.

As well as all the work sessions we also had some social time too and this is a very important time in its own right as we build contacts and friendships across the group though it can mean staying up until 3 in the morning!  Peter’s team looked after us really well and Richard, the chef, produced some great food for us, especially the gala dinner on the last night.  We’re already looking forward to next year’s event.

We have managed to set up another wine tasting here at The Met, the last one went really well but was quite a while ago so we are really looking forwards to this one.  It will be hosted by Anthony Hamm from Alpha Domus Wines in Hawkes Bay, NZ and is taking place on 26th January.  We are doing something a little strange with this as the tasting part will be free!  This is a great way to encourage people who might not have been into the hotel before to venture across the threshold and it also introduces some new and excellent wines to Tamsin’s customers from Wadebridge WInes.

We will be following the tasting with a dinner which will be three courses and the wines from the tasting for £30 per person, I am about to have a chat with the chef to start to plan the menu, this will be fun but a challenging job to find the right dishes to go with these great wines.

If you want to come you can book via us at the hotel on 0800 2300 365 or through Wadebridge Wines on 01208 812692.   Have a look at the website to help you decide!

http://www.alphadomus.co.nz/index.php

This was what Mel said this morning while she was setting up breakfast.  I must admit I was having my first cup of coffee and thawing out after the drive in to work when Mel told us about the view out of the restaurant window but tore myself away to go and have a look:  the colours were stunning as the sun was still below the horizon but just getting light and casting a beautiful purple light across the estuary.  The tide is quite low at the moment so there was some water to reflect the light but also some sand showing amongst the buoys to give it a really atmospheric feel.  I did say that it would have been really hard to take a photo that would do the view justice, to get the light just right and to show the shadows too.  One day I’ll have my camera here at the right time and will then have a practice, until then you’ll just have to take my word for it!

We’ve been basking in some glorious sunshine here in Padstow for the last couple of days and all the visitors have really been making the most of it.  It really is the right weather to wrap up warm and go for a good walk - which is what the local seagulls have been doing.

OK, not putting on hats and gloves but they have been walking around on the harbour!  Rob the harbour master has told me that there is about 1/4″ of ice on top of the water.  We won’t be selling ice skates just yet but if this weather carries on…

Or bledhyn newydh da as we say in Cornwall.  We saw the old year out in style last night with a great houseparty here at the hotel - almost 70 people partying away till the early hours and what was really great to see was lots of people still staying up chatting in the lounge afterwards.

One family had gone out in to town to see the new year in and came back around 1 ish and got chatting to a young couple who were just finishing off their drinks in the lounge and not surprisingly ended up getting quite a few more.  I left them playing games with sambucca and a lighter (passing the flame around the group).  When I saw them at breakfast they were all Ok but may be one or two sore fingers!

Everybody else was in fine form this morning an only a very few people didn’t make it down for breakfast and most of those had been out at different parties.

I think my only resolution for 2009 must be to write here more frequently!