UVES abundances of stars in nearby galaxies: How good are theoretical isochrones?

Here we report some results from an ESO-VLT programme to observe individual stars in nearby dwarf galaxies at high resolution with the UVES spectrograph (Tolstoy, Venn, Shetrone, Primas, Hill, Kaufer & Szeifert 2002, submitted to AJ). We mainly concentrate on illustrating the issues and uncertainties surrounding our efforts to determine the ages of stars for which we have accurately measured [Fe/H] and [alpha/Fe].