Bottles of this have been turning up in Le Chateau, my local vintners, for some time now. There's never a price tag for it on the shelf and the staff always have to go through to the back room to do a check even when you say "it's four fifty-nine, mate". I keep on buying bottles of it, slightly against my better judgement because it isn't particularly nice and gives you a head the next morning even if you've only had 3 or 4 glasses (cf. me, last night). Why do I keep on buying it? While, the bottle is a slightly different shape to the other wines and it is particularly dark looking. As a good Henry Green reader, I tend to associate dark comestibles (plums, red wine and some other things I can't quite recall, oh yeah, Christmas dates and plum duff) with unreserved sexual epiphanies:
At that he came out with the story of Christopher's abduction. She was so interested that she forgot to slide her glass forward to be filled. At the end of his tale he leant over to pour more of the dark, tale-telling liquid in. (Caught, 102)
What actually happened was that I ate a bacon sandwich and nearly fell asleep on the sofa. Books, why do you lie to me so? More to the point, why must the wine also lie? My friend Tom and I once attempted to "method watch" Sideways, the amusing (if a little smug) story of a neurotic author and his-soon-to-be-married friend spending a week in the winegrowing areas of North California and getting up to all sorts of alcoholic and sexual misadventures. We thought we would match Paul Giamatti and co glass for glass (obviously, there's a problem of "the time of the story" v. "the time in the story" there, but that's for the stomach pumper to decide) but we utterly failed. Halfway through the film, we were clutching our stomachs, rather than our sides, and demanding the salvic effects of an entire series of Transformers.
In conclusion, all this wine proved was that drinking wine without any food more exciting than the aforementioned bacon sandwich during winter in the United Kingdom is a dead loss and I should either have stuck to tea or gone down the pub.
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