Lunch with Prosecco Riccardo at the Old Hat Supper Club

Prosecco Riccardo sponsored a lovely lunch at the brand new supper club, The Old Hat Club. A bunch of food and wine bloggers were invited along to lunch be introduced to the new range of Prosecco from a small producer from the Prosecco region in Northern Italy.

Eschewing the traditional model of selling wine, Ritchie Tomadin has decided to use some savvy Social Media Marketing strategies and leveraging the power of twitter and blogs. As a result, he is introducing his wines to the UK by inviting food and wine bloggers to Riccardo Prosecco sponsored meals at supper clubs in London.

The Azienda Riccardo is a 100 year old vineyard in the Veneto region of Italy. They are the first company to guarantee their products with the food chain product traceability certification. You can trace the history and the grapes used of each bottle by the tags on each bottle. Here is a Ritchie introducing the wine.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1pT5AnqEvw

The great thing about supper clubs is the informality of the setting and also the brings out the voyeur in people. The Old Hat Supper Club is in a newly converted house in Islington and is run 4 friends, Amy, Emma, Harry and Tim. They have created a lovely space to host these events and on this warm summer day, the lunch started out in the garden. Harry had built himself a wood fire oven in the garden and much of our lunch was cooked in there. We started with some canapes and a very strong cocktail of vodka, strawberries, black pepper and of course prosecco.

So we learnt that scowlers are the Cornish name for sardines, which we had grilled and stuffed with herbs and served on a tomato bruschetta for the starter. This was paired with the first of the wines, the bubble free Prosecco Vino Tranquillo.

The main course was Roast Pork which had been poached in milk then roasted in the wood fire oven with butternut squash puree and very crispy goose fat roast potatoes. The vegetables had been slow cooked in the wood fire oven and had taken on the smokey flavours, adding a rather surprisingly enhancing flavour to the dish. The crackling was so successful that is started a bit of crackling thievery across the table, fuelled by lots of Prosecco Riccardo of course.

The second wine was the first of the bubbly ones, the Prosecco Treviso Brut which should retail at about £12 in the UK.

For pudding, we had a Moroccan Citrus Tart with frozen yoghurt which arrived after a bit of delay. Seeing as this is only their second event, there are probably a few kinks to iron out. The highlight of this course was the Extra Dry Prosecco Cartizze which was the star of the day. It was fruity and sweet and was my favourite of the 3 wines. This is made from grapes grown in an area called Cartizze which is the some really expensive land at €1m per hectare. You can try this for yourself as I believe they stock Prosecco Riccardo at Gastronomica and not a bad price of about £25 but soon to be available cheaper, so watch this space. They are also in the process of building an ecommerce shop where you can buy it at a cheaper retail price. Try this one and it might convince you to ditch Champagne for Prosecco.

Of course, that was not the end of the lunch. We adjourned to Luiz and Gerald’s garden for more chat, to help plan where to build their wood fire oven, more drinks and the world cup finals. What great way is there to spend a Sunday.