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The 'Salon Privé'
Concorso for classic cars is held in Woodstock, a small pictoresque
village that has the privilege of having Blenheim Palace, residence of
the Dukes of Marlborough and birthplace of none less than Winston
Churchill, in its neighborhood. The Concorso is wonderful, one of the
most luxurious and exclusive events in Europe, and it's masterfully
organized by Andrew Bagley. I had the honour to be invited to be part of
the Jury for 2016, and I was very happy for that. Staying there, it was only natural to go and
look for a good Martini, and for once the expectations were surpassed by
an astonishing reality.
The 'Feathers' pub across the road from our
hotel, the very good 'King's Arms', has no less than 400 (yes, make it
four-hundred) bottles of different gins on display! The picture above
shows only a fraction of the bar shelves, groaning under the weight of
dozens and dozens of bottles going from the commonplace Tanqueray or
Hendricks to obscure bottles fit for die-hard connoisseurs, like the Regal,
the Bathtub, Big Gin and so on. Francesco, the bartender, comes
from Sicily and he is very good at suggesting gins that one must try, so
my friend Marco Makaus, supreme Martinista in Milano, Anna and myself
were happy to make new experiences. Marco, of course, knew very well
this extraordinary place since Salon Privé 2015 and didn't tell anything
to us about it to make us a nice surprise....
The judgment about this quite extraordinary
establishment could have been even better if they had supplied us with some
green unstoned olives instead of the black stoned (Greek?) things that
we had to accept for our Martini. Anyway, it was a splendid place to be,
enjoying the possibility to try gins that otherwise we would never had
known
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