The Aperitif Guy

Autumn is my favourite time of the year for cooking and entertaining. I love to cook with wild mushrooms, orchard fruits, game birds and nuts. Autumn flowers may be hard to come by, but squashes, pumpkins and displays of golden foliage can bring great beauty to your table. Now's the time to let go of my preference for white linen and reach for the cinnamon-red tablecloth, or even a deep brown one. I've been thinking about the flavours I particularly associate with autumn and how we might bring them to the aperitif table. I'll look at four flavours in particular: smoke, apples, pears and blackberries. Smoke Smoked foods of all descriptions make for delicious aperitif nibbles. Simple cubes of smoked cheddar cheese are lovely with a sweet white wine. Look for something with a hint of apple, like a late harvest chenin blanc. Don't ever be afraid of serving a sweet wine as an aperitif. As well as wine, port, Madeira and sherry can all bring a touch of sophisticatio...

My Beloved lifts up his voice, he says to me: ‘Come, my love, my lovely one, come. For see, winter is past, the rains are over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth. The season of glad songs is come; the cooing of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree is forming its first figs, and the blossoming vines give out their fragrance.’ (Song of Solomon) In an early post about approaching the aperitif from a drinks host’s perspective ( http://blog.theaperitifguy.co.uk/2018/09/a-drinks-hosts-guide.html ), I wrote about how my aperitif drinks tend to follow a seasonal cycle: Gin, spritz and longdrinks in the summer, fortifieds in the late autumn, Champagne to lift the blues of winter. Now we’re through the ‘hunger gap’ of late winter and the days are noticeably longer, it’s time to break out the cocktails. Not the serious ones: Manhattans and Old Fashioneds can wait for another day. Spring is the time for fun and frivolity, for the glad songs, as the above q...

You’ll see from my bio in the corner that I claim to have learnt to eat in France. I lived there as a student in the late 1980s, away from home for the first time, away from my familiar culture and cuisine. Some things, like eating with a fork and bread (rather than a knife and fork) or following the main course with a salad, were noticeable immediately as different from home. My awareness of aperitif culture was more of a creeping realisation. I remember being surprised that so many customers in my local bar drank pastis in the evening, when they drank more familiar drinks earlier in the day or later at night. I just put it down to French strangeness at first. As I made friends, I was invited out to dinner more often, and it became evident that something very specific was going on. The pastis drinking was part of the preparation for dinner. I began to realise that the dining experience didn’t begin at the first course as at home, but with the introductory drink beforehand, u...