Wine, food and travel with Clare : Thirty Fifty at Leicester

Friday, 20 March 2015

Thirty Fifty at Leicester

I was very lucky to win two tickets to Thirty Fifty's wine tasting at Maiyango Hotel in Leicester. We have been to a Thirty Fifty wine tasting before - their weekend at Bosworth Hall is amazing, you can read about it here - Bosworth Wine Tasting.

We had not been to Maiyango before but will certainly be visiting again - on arriving we went in to the restaurant which is street level, the lovely barman directed us outside again just along the street to a glass door and advised us to take the lift to the third floor. Although thinking this a little a little strange we did as instructed and were amazed. The hotel have very cleverly allocated the first and second floors as bedrooms and their top floor as their reception area, bar and function rooms, with amazing views over the skyline of Leicester.

The reception/bar area had floor to ceiling patio style doors that lead our to a decked balcony with tables and seating - perfect for summer evenings.

Hotel's photo of their decked balcony

Leicester Cathedral spire

Maiyango's reception and bar

Our tasting host for the evening was Rob Golding whom we had met at Bosworth, and after introduction Rob led us through to Maiyango's function room, with again views over the skyline. The tables were laid with tasting glasses, notes, water glasses and water, and sharing platters. It looked very inviting, professional yet relaxing.

Rob is very good at not only explaining about each wine but his knowledge of the wine industry, human anatomy and the world in general added even more to our evening. Thirty Fifty do make wine tasting fun and as we've experienced before add in a little bit of competitiveness amongst the tables with a quiz and bonus points being available during the evening.

I will be sharing our findings on the wines but if you are looking for some of Rob's knowledge, answers to the quizzes and how to earn bonus points I suggest you book a place on a tasting evening or on their fantastic weekend breaks - Thirty Fifty Wine Tasting Courses.

We enjoyed seven wines in total but two were blind tastings so all I'll say on those is 'Yes' we got the white and were very surprised by the red - it's great fun to test your palette.

So here's our tastings:

We started the evening with Chapel Down English Rose 2013 - a light sparkling wine with a wonderful nose of strawberries. This was followed by a wine we had tasted before at Bosworth, again a light wine but this time a sauvignon blanc from the South of France.

La Serre Sauvignon Blanc Vin de Pays D'OC 2013

After the blind tasting we had two lovely red wines, one from Portugal and one from Califonia. Throughout all the tastings Rob suggested various items from the sharing platter to go with the different wines, we had a beautiful Red Leicester cheese with the Sauvignon Blanc and some gorgeous spicy sausage with the red, as well as olives, bread and ham.

DFJ Vinhos Vega Douro 2011 - Portugal

Delicato Old Vine Zinfandel 2012 - California

To finish our evening we enjoyed a sweet dessert wine from Chile, it's an usual sweet wine as being a Sauvignon Blanc grape it has flavours of grapefruit which gives expectation to sharp sourness but it is beautifully syrupy and sweet.