Now, I’ve been banging away at the booze since I was around fourteen. My mum’s sherry, my father’s Advocaat (google it kids, it’s disgusting) my grandmother’s Mackeson and then the familiar rites of passage through cider, beer, poncy lager, vodka & lime, Dubonnet & lemonade, Jack & coke, Malibu with ice and so on; generally overdoing it for too long.
My eagle-eyed readers might have both noticed a glaring omission in the above piss-artists roll call.
Wine. I didn’t drink a glass of wine until my early twenties – I shit you not. My upbringing in the Cardiff/Newport hinterlands meant that I considered wine as something The Queen drunk at state banquets, the people up the road in the bigger houses would maybe have a glass or two at Christmas, or you were given a bit at church with a funny biscuit. It was also something that exotic foreigners would drink ‘cos they couldn’t hold their beer.
Little did I realise that in a few decades I’d be spending more on the stuff than the GDP of a small Pacific island, thinking absolutely nothing of paying well over £50 for a bottle in a restaurant. As ‘The lads’ in Newport and Cardiff we would pride ourselves on being able to get utterly shit-faced on a fiver; plus we’d have a packet of 10 Rothmans.
So it came as some surprise to realise that The Wine Tasting my wife and I attended on Sunday was my first. Let me confess, I was extremely nervous about the whole event, worrying that I would embarrass my self by saying things like:
‘Just fill the fucker up mate, keep going,’
‘What in the name of shit is this? Welsh Chardonnay? Ethiopian Riesling?’
You get the drift. Or worse, doing the old hold-your-arm-up-like-an-elephants-trunk-and-neck-the-lot-behind-it gag, or as my dear friend William would have shouted on entering the rather hushed and serious event: ‘Let’s Go Fucking Mental!’
I shuffled from table to table with my order form and a sheet of paper for taking notes politely saying ‘yes it’s jolly nice’ to every sample I was religiously offered with a verbal essay of which ‘notes’ or ‘weight’ to be looking out for. A fat woman dressed like Alison Steadman with a bright purple face said ‘I love Pinot Gris’; I muttered ‘That’s fucking obvious’ under my breath, secretly hoping she heard me. A vintner on one of the tables told me that Uruguay ‘was a small country,’ I told him I had indeed passed Geography exams in Junior school and did he know that all Uruguayan women were stupendously fuckable. That shut Mr Throwback up.
We gently beat a retreat on a beautiful Sunday in our idyllic village, strolling over the green with Wolstonbury Hill above us towards a relaxed lunch… until… ‘fuck we’re out of wine!’
Thank Jesus for the Co-op where we purchase five bottles of Paul Masson California Carafe.