Vinopolis, City of Wine and Surprises - Part 3

The day we visited, there were four such tasting rooms set up and we had wines from South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Hungary, Portugal, and Spain. California wines available were from the Hess Collection from Napa Valley, Fetzer, Mondavi, Fetzer, and Gallo of Sonoma. We found the tasting staff to be educated about the wines they were pouring and our particular tasting host, Vincent Monnier, was especially knowledgeable, giving us accurate descriptions of what to expect in aroma, taste, and finish in the wines we tasted.

Other wines rotate through the tasting tables, meaning that one never knows what will be available amongst the 150 wines for tasting. But once again, that's part of the delight in visiting. There are numerous surprises. There were even more regions to sample, but we also wanted to partake of their restaurant that has people visiting just to have the food.

Before going to our meal, we visited the Hess Collection that is an exhibition space devoted to contemporary art. Donald Hess (Yes, the proprietor of the Hess Collection wines from Mt. Veeder in the Napa Valley and a partner in Vinopolis) had sponsored an exhibition by Franz Gertsch, an artist who made tempera paintings that covered walls and looked as life-life as photographs. So, our visit to Vinopolis was remarkably like a visit to a contemporary art museum as well.

Other detours prior to going for a meal were the wine shop and the gift shop. The wine shop had signs indicating appellations, and it its floor space was filled with numerous enticing wines. While visitors from the U.S. are a bit limited in the amount they can carry home, Vinopolis does have the ability to ship to different regions of the world. In fact, they even have developed a website for selling the wines available from producers who show wines at Vinopolis.

We continued to the gift shop where Hugh Johnson's line of glassware competes with Riedel crystal for wine connoisseurs' attention amidst a vast array of other wine-related gifts such as corkscrews, foil cutters, decanters, stoppers, pour spouts, books, and more.

Even the Danish royal family has toured and picked up a quantity of wine cooler bags from the shop. (They do make nice picnic bags for those summer days when a cool bottle of Viognier or Chardonnay is needed to moisten the palate.) We finally picked up a few items for friends back home and continued onward to a meal. Yet, Vinopolis is also a web presence, selling gifts at its website: www.vinopolisdirect.co.uk, so that is another option for finding some unique wine gifts that enophile in your life.

While lighter meals or snacks are the fare at The Wine Wharf, a small cafe in Vinopolis, we decided to visit the Cantina Vinopolis. It has a fairly extensive wine bar where one can order a glass of wine while chatting with friends or waiting for a table. Our meal happened to be one of the most impressive we experienced in London and it topped off our visit quite nicely.

Finding Vinopolis is fairly easy for anyone who navigates London on the tube, by bus, or by train. The closest tube stations are London Bridge and Southwark.

Vinopolis will undergo a few cosmetic changes in January 2001 as Vaughn-Arbuckle promises even more surprises for visitors in the future. Much like each vintage, it appears that Vinopolis will continue to grow with the seasons. So far, the vintages look promising, and we'll never know what to expect at the next turn.