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Getting a taste for it

The drinking and appreciation of wine is arguably one of the great hobbies of Man.

There’s been a lot of it about for tens of millennia and who could argue that relaxing over a glass of something rather special isn’t one of the great pleasures of life?

I’m certainly not going to.

Across the wide spectrum from those who carve a career in the trade – through those who acquire a certain ‘nose’ for the grape and develop their amateur knowledge over the course of their lives or who happily treat wine as a regular accompaniment to their existence –  right through to those who regard it as a necessary ‘kick-start’ to an evening of socialising or even sometimes something without which they can barely function at all, there is a common fascination with different types of wine, origin, grape, process, taste and texture, all of it necessarily qualified by the fundamental truth that each of us will have differing and occasionally peculiar personal preferences.

Furthermore, degrees of natural talent and expertise are manifold – as thousands of wine clubs around the world, well-established or informal, testify.

And then, of course, snobbery – and quite the opposite – come into it, sometimes with amusing results.

Back in the day – and I really mean that, I’m talking the best part of four decades ago – I had a barrister friend who shall we say enjoyed his alcohol (didn’t we all then?) and duly drank industrial quantities of it, whether it was beer, wine, port or indeed anything else that was going.

He was a rugby player which may have had something to do with it, along with his profession.

One day we found ourselves in the Tavern Stand at Lord’s cricket ground during an England versus Australia Test Match.

It was a great day in the sunshine from start to finish – one of those occasions when all was well with the world.

Plus – I cannot lie – a good deal of drinking and carousing was going on.

A group of three Australian fans were walking in front of it, one of them carrying two vast bottles of wine.

This fact – and the state of the match at the time – inevitably meant that the development did not go unnoticed.

And at one point – in response to a good deal of ‘knocking’ banter from the home fans – he waved one of them high and triumphantly above his head to an accompanying roar.

As it began to die down, my pal’s stentorian voice rang out “Ah, my favourite wine – red!” which induced a general crescendo of riotous laughter.

On another occasion in my twenties, on holiday with my Canadian relations, I found myself in a golfing party staying at a lodge far away in the wilds of Ontario in the company of my cousin, a then a budding (but now a genuine) wine connoisseur.

He had warned me in advance that our opponents were all wine buffs and that the evening in question would involve a wine-tasting competition.

The concept was that everyone brought with them a bottle that they regarded as ‘a bit of a challenge’ for the others to identify. These were all wrapped in brown paper in advance so as to be anonymous and the unfolding ‘game’ would be a contest to identify each other’s choices.

The event had an early slight glitch at the expense of my cousin because it turned out that, when his wine (the first to be opened) was sipped by the assembled, it took seconds for everyone – including himself – to agree that it was ‘corked’, a fact that he was not allowed to forget on the night (and it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he still gets reminded about it to this day).

However, the point of my tale is that, much time and vino later in the evening, we came to attack the bottle of the participant who most regarded himself as a real expert. He introduced it as something that he doubted the rest of us had ever tasted and suspected that none of us would be able to identify its geographical origin, never mind its identity.

I knew he was going to be correct as far as I was concerned because this was my first experience of North American wines, but I was most interested to see how my cousin and the fourth member of the party fared.

My cousin went first and, as was the routine, took a sip, swilled it around his gills, looked this way and that, savoured it and then spat it out before making some preliminary descriptive reactions and speculative remarks.

He then took a deeper draught and took about five minutes in total to think about it, muse, share his thoughts and then pronounce his verdict.

His supposed identification was completely wrong.

Our last contestant at the bottle – a diminutive guy with a sparky sense of humour – attacked his similar tasting samples with comparative abruptness and speed.

With an air of disinterested focus, he then came out with the memorable opening statement “Oh, I don’t know … [pause] … some kind of Californian shit?!”, which I don’t mind admitting duly amused the rest of us greatly, and then, almost as a throwaway comment – [and here I must apologise to my readers after this distance in time for not being able to supply any further details, which I acknowledge detracts from the impact of my story] – named a specific wine, from a particular area of southern California, which I for one had certainly never heard of.

The supplier of the wine on the night was astonished.

Said taster had apparently – and, he admitted subsequently, partly speculatively on his part – ‘fingered’ the right area of California, and the right valley, but the wrong vineyard of the two that occupied it!

It was that evening – and indeed that moment – that triggered my lifelong interest in the wine-making industry.

I mention all this because overnight I spotted the following piece by Pat Hagan on the website of the – DAILY MAIL

 

 

 

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About Algy Belville

We are delighted to add Algy Belville to our team of writers. Algy was a director of family film Bodgers and Belville , Wine Merchants of St James. He will be contributing a column on wine. Algy lives in Amberley Sussex , is captain of his Crown Bowls team and a local Councillor. More Posts