I'm doing wine now

[j4]

As regular readers of rhodri will have already seen, he's recently been writing on the subject of wine, which reminds me: I read in the Sainsburys magazine the other day that if you like Merlot, you should try Malbec. Now, I thought Malbec was the other one of Lambkin Simbert, whichever one of them was the Young Pretender, the one who didn't drown in a vat of lampreys ... or was that St. Nicholas of Syrah, patron saint of red wine? Anyway, I bought a bottle of Malbec. But I haven't drunk it yet.

Just thought I'd share that with you, there, as I know some of you are dedicated Merlot-drinkers.

Further to rhodri's musings, though, I think the problem with saying "I like wine" is that it's a bit like saying "I like sex". I mean, we all want to give the impression that we're a bit more discriminating than that. And maybe some of us are! Yeah! Let's be positive here! But Britishness dictates that we can't look too knowledgeable or discriminating, otherwise we'll be seen as gay, or foreign, or possibly even both. There is only an inch of respectably-ignorant grey area between the blokeish, brutish bellow of "BOOOOOOZE!" and the tantamount-to-being-on-the-guest-list-for-Elton-John's-wedding "Personally, I favour a full and fruity red" (let alone boringly-parodied rumblings from the realm of Pseud's Corner about the scent of fresh-mown grass) ... but it's the inch in which we live.

So, as Sir Elton almost certainly didn't say as he uncorked the nuptial champagne: bottoms up!

Comments

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Perkin Warbeck.

I think I've had malbec, it was OK.

I do sometimes get puzzled by people who register 'sex' or 'books' as LJ interests, because in each field there's probably more I'd rather not have than ones I would. But I don't think the same applies to wine; it's a rare and dreadful one I won't have at least a glass of.

[aldabra]

I think probably the more interested you are in a set of things, the more of them you'd rather not have, iyswim. If you're interested in architecture you're going to notice and be annoyed by shoddy building; if you're interested in Lego you're already going to have lots of standard pieces and be more after the unusual ones. If you're interested in swimming you won't want to go to leisure pools. Whereas if you've never read anything in your life and someone's left a book on a tedious train journey you're going to be relatively unconcerned about what it is.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

But otoh, I see plenty of people sat on the Tube contentendly staring into the middle distance, whereas if cornered on there without something I actively want to read, I'll grab anything, even local papers, just to keep my brain from shutting down.

[simont]

if you're interested in Lego you're already going to have lots of standard pieces and be more after the unusual ones

... or, conversely, you might subscribe to the school of thought which thinks Lego was at its best when it consisted of perfectly generic pieces with the aim of allowing you to build whatever you liked, and rues the day when it took a right-angle turn into shipping boxes full of complex specialist pieces which can be used to make one specific thing (palm tree, Star Wars speeder bike etc) but nothing else remotely interesting, thereby spectacularly missing the point of a toy which had previously imposed no limit short of your own imagination.

Not that this invalidates your point, of course. :-)

[aldabra]

Yes, me too. But I already have all the blue 4*1 bricks I want, but if I found green ones at a car boot...

[sbp.livejournal.com]

We had mainly yellow ones of those - possibly because I had a set that built a garage once. And out of regular pieces - not even pumps or people. Just a green floor piece where the cars could go. And big flat red rectangles for the roof. Simpler days.

[j4.livejournal.com]

in each field there's probably more I'd rather not have than ones I would

Hmmmm, that's an interesting way of looking at it.

There are certainly more books that I wouldn't go out of my way to read than books that I would go out of my way to read. And, out of all-the-books-in-the-world, there are orders of magnitude more books I'm not actually capable of reading (because they're not in a language I can read) than there are books that I am capable of reading. But I am quite generally interested in reading and writing, and how people write (even when they do it badly), and what people choose to read, so the chances of me getting something enjoyable/interesting/amusing out of a bad book are higher than the chances of me getting something out of a bad wine.

There are wines that I like, and if the choice of drinks is between several wines I'll have enough of an opinion (even if only choosing 'red' over 'white') to pick one; but if you ask me "What do you want to drink right now?" at any given time, the chances of the answer being "wine!" are quite small -- I'm much more likely to choose beer, or Coke, or coffee, or gin.

Sex is kinda different (obv. - duh!), because while there are gazillions of people I wouldn't be averse to the idea of having sex with under the right circumstances, there's only one person I actually want to have sex with at this point in my life.