His family owns five Bordeaux ch?aux and he is a consultant to more than 100 wineries His name

His family owns five Bordeaux ch?aux and he is a consultant to more than 100 wineries His name crops up everywhere. At the Casa Lapostolle winery in Chile, I once had a nap in the Michel Rolland room. I’ve seen barrels chalked with his name in the cellar at the Remhoogte estate in the Cape. In Argentina, I drove along the Avenue Michel Rolland to reach the epic $50m Clos de los Siete, set up by some of France’s richest wine entrepreneurs, Rolland included.Jetting from Argentina to India via South Africa, Michel Rolland stopped off in London to present 13 of his wines to the press “Nossiter was dishonest,” says Rolland. “He showed the same shot of me saying micro-oxygenation three times. I’m not even that great a fan of micro-oxygenation,” he says of the cellar technique that makes young wines more approachable “I hate the term globalisation There’s no recipe.

A wine is an expression of its terroir and the winemaker is looking for the best wine he can.” If there’s a consistency to his wines, he claims, it’s because demand for quality is greater than ever. “Not that long ago, wines were mostly easy to recognise through their faults. My job has been to iron out those faults, so maybe a wine’s positive features are not so easy to identify.”Kicking off with a quaffable 2002 Grover La R?rve (around £8.99 in a case, Berkmann Wine Cellars, 020-7609 4711) made with his help in Bangalore, Rolland explains that he likes to use the local grape variety where possible, demonstrating this first with the 2002 Bonne Nouvelle from the Cape (no UK stockist) which contains the walk-on-the-wild-side pinotage grape, then a malbec blend from Argentina, the 2003 Clos de los Siete (£9.99, Majestic). But if you cook them they take on a completely different character – bitter, with a twist.Dandelion salad with rabbit and black puddingServes 4Although gardeners wage war against them, we rarely eat dandelions.

It is blanched – grown in the dark – to stop it turning green, but it also comes in a red version now, joining the carmine-coloured radicchio gang. Making up the third colour of the Italian flag (is that why they like their chicory salads so much?) there’s the vibrant, green puntarelle, which comes as a bunch of juicy, dandelion-like leaves attached to the root.Because they’re bitter, a sweet dressing works best if you’re serving these leaves as salad. Its full name is radicchio di treviso, after the city of Treviso near Venice where it is grown. All three, radicchio, trevisiano and treviso, have beautiful ruby-red leaves with white spines, though in the case of trevisiano there’s more spine than leaf.White chicory, otherwise known as Belgian endive to us, or witloof to the Belgians themselves, is another one that goes by several different names, and is not to be confused with the other green, curly lettucey endive, aka fris? The beautifully shaped head of white chicory leaves often comes nicely packaged in blue velvety paper to stop it discolouring. The same vegetable can be called very different things locally.

Market stalls and shops will mark them up accordingly, but it easily leads to confusion. I learned this the hard way when I was consulting for a large dinner recently. I had recommended bitter trevisiano with sweet white asparagus as a starter. The chef I was working with was Italian so knew what he was talking about.

Unfortunately, even with two months’ notice, the greengrocer still got it wrong and supplied the fatter cos lettuce-shaped treviso. They’re all descended from wild Cicoria selvatica, which is related to the dandelion. What they also have in common is that they taste pleasantly bitter.What they don’t have in common is the same name from country to country or between regions. OK, rocket has taken off, but there are many other robust-tasting leaves out there that are commonplace in Italy, Belgium and France and that we could be getting our teeth into. I’m thinking about the refreshingly bitter salad vegetables that are mostly members of the chicory family.
This sprawling clan includes various types of curly endive, radicchio, treviso, fris? Belgium endive and others. When it comes to salad, we’re getting more adventurous, but we’re still more cautious than rabbits, preferring to munch on innocuous-tasting leaves, rather than anything with a bit of bite. The intense and stylish 2001 Clos Apalta from Casa Lapostolle (around £37.50, Selfridges, Harrods, Fortnum & Mason), is based on Chile’s recently rediscovered carmen? grape.