Some comments on Cathy van Zyl's reports from Jerez, and some scandal about El Bulli

From Bisso Atanassov:
Though Yoel supposed that the site visits should have fallen down drastically after Cathy published our photo on Grape with that "beautiful look" of ours (but we tried to look better after a night with Sherry – the wine, not the girl) I think it's worth telling how this "seen at" happened. Actually this should have been better filmed.

Yoel, whom I met the day before at TopWineSpain, came to say hallo while I was talking with Cathy. I presented them to each other only by names, and we continued to chat. After some time Cathy turns to Yoel and asks:

'Who are you?' (you could read "Ok, boy, take your schoolbag and go home, it's too late for you to be here!" between the lines. My first reaction was the same.)

'I'm a sommelier' Yoel replied modestly.

'Where?' Cathy continued to be suspicious.

'At Le Gavroche'... *some slight amazement here* ... In London.

'Oh, Le Gavroche? ...Le Gavroche?!?... In London.. .Wow! Oh!! WOW!

They exchange their business cards, Yoel reads Cathy's and what follows is:

'Oh, she's an MW?... Wow! Oh! WOW!'

I promised him that I'll follow him through the Wine Fair to record the people's reaction to his position at this famous restaurant, but unfortunately got obsessed by ... guess who? Sherry of course, so I didn't keep my promise.

Another point: Cathy's being too soft about the so called 'Ferran Adria lunch'. Being a 'happy man', I never read weather forecasts, or programmes about events that I've visited before: I know more or less what to expect. So I just missed the fact that Ferran Adria 'was going to cook for us'. And I classified the lunch as quite an ordinary one (the dessert actually was a disaster and some found the gazpacho too much bathed in olive oil). Though the mention of 'El Bulli Hotels' on the individual menus made me think for a second that it was the El Bulli – but with this kitchen I thought the name was a pure coincidence.

By the way, Ferran Adria is right now in a middle of a culinary scandal: a mate chef Santi Santamaria accused lots of the Spanish new wave chefs, with Adria in the lead, of using "additives in haute cuisine that might not be toxic but have undesirable consequences". He also said that those guys (El Bulli in the first place) have opened their kitchens to "the big chemistry industries" and has asked the journalists to investigate how that happened.

So maybe that's why Adria decided not to cook for us? Maybe he remembered the Brunello-gate at Vinitaly and didn't want an ElBulli-gate at TopWineSpain? So everyone would think that it was an ordinary meal with no chemistry added and there would be no international scandal.