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

[stephdairy.livejournal.com]

I'm generalising madly, of course, and I've a lot more experience of French/Italian/Spanish wines than I do of other European wines. However, I do tend to find that while many New World wines are very nice and very drinkable, they're often not very interesting. Which is where we get into how I think about wine.

Flavour, when I'm paying attention to it, is very spatial for me. It's a bit like a frequency graph of a sound, only not quite that simple. Wines can be flat, they can have side peaks, they often have one or two dominant central tones, and all these characteristics vary from my first sniff to the aftertaste. The wines I enjoy the most seem to be the ones with the most going on on this spectrum; many New World wines concentrate much more on one central tone and are practically invisible elsewhere. (Fortunately my normal sense of taste can sometimes say more useful things like "appley" or "bitter".)

With so many non-European wines about, and discerning friends who know the good stuff when they taste it, I'm quite likely to encounter a variety of them anyway, so I'm not missing out by my choice.

Also, it's good to be a little bit snobbish from time to time.

(S)

[j4.livejournal.com]

Interesting points about spatial perception of flavour. I think I know what you mean -- on the other hand, I've had Australian wines which seem to have that complexity flavour (and not particularly expensive/obscure ones) so maybe we are thinking of something different.

Also, it's good to be a little bit snobbish from time to time.

Why?