Confessions of a Wino

You have to admire the Kiwis.  They took on the French at Sauvignon Blanc and won.  Then they turned their attention to the battle of the Pinot Noir.  This most fickle of grapes, like Brigitte Bardot, promises so much yet regularly delivers no more than a handkerchief full of jizz.

Realising that Burgundy Pinots have almost impenetrable reputations, New Zealand winemakers took a radical stance.  Screwcap closures combined with young drinkable zingy wines were palatable in both flavour and fashion.  This meant prices vied with Ugg Boots for the captain of the Fashion Victim Rest of the World XI, whilst production and maturation costs were relatively low.  Still innovation pays, or ought to.

The label on this wine explains that it was bottled “unfiltered”.  A better description might be “cloudy” and not in the “bay” sense.

Maybe this is just a faulty bottle.  It didn’t taste awful, but then again it fell way short of remarkable and certainly not worth the £18 The Wine Society sent a congratulatory letter of thanks to my bank manager for.

I have another bottle somewhere – I will try that and report back.

Yet another strange thought troubled my grey matter when I smelt Momo – more cats’ piss than Dog Point!  And that is a compliment.

It is really zingy with balance provided by honeyed apples and pears.  If you like your Sauvignon Blancs tartier than Bet Lynch, you will love this.

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I could fall in love with Jane Hunter,
I have never met her, she might be a munter,
But if I could turn back the callous hands of time,
Her success, her money and wines would be mine.

After all, if her wines are a personification of her true self, then surely she must be gorgeous, tasty, exciting, full-bodied and just a little tarty (in a nice discreet way)?

But, probably, I would not ask her to hurry the wines to my cellar because, having tried her Sauvignon Blanc for the last few vintages, I think it tastes much better after a year or more of ageing.  I know this flouts convention, that NZ Sauvignon Blancs should be drunk within a year.

There is much competition amongst Kiwi winemakers these days.  Since the success of Cloudy Bay, ten thousand maniac (give or take a few thousand) imitators have gradually eroded the price of Marlborough gooseberry cat-pissers.  I got my 2009 Hunter’s from the Wine Society (£10.50) at barely a gnat’s fart more than the price of the 2006 (£9.95).

The 2009 is a bit two dimensional.  Gooseberry and sugar.  It is zingy but bland, if that is not too much of an oenological oxymoron.

Nonetheless, from previous experience, I suggest you buy a few bottles and lay them down for, oh I don’t know, twelve to twenty four months and I am sure you will see massive improvement.

As if it wasn’t hard enough already (no pun intended), blokes everywhere are giving up hope of ever getting another blowjob.

Before Americanisation, I used to think that “head” was the foam on a pint of beer.  As a mature Wino, I now I fully realise that it is the bubbles on top of a Bellini.  And I love a Bellini.

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Have you ever watched a football match where the result went against the run of play?  Or fancied a bird whose face was constructed from the Pam Ayres book of beauty?  Or eaten something like a Seekh Kebab that looks like a dog turd but tastes bloody lovely?

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Buying an iPhone is a bit like getting married to Pamela Anderson and then finding out she’s done a porno.  Almost everything is exquisite, near perfect, round, supple and enticing.  But you quickly start finding out that a few assumptions you made were wrong, and everyone knew but you.

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Under pressure from my peers at work to get a push email device, I quickly rejected the Samsung Omnia and, less readily, the Nokia N96, so that left me with a technological fruit cocktail to contend with:  Apple or Blackberry.

I’ve been a Nokia man since I switched from an ancient Ericsson in the early 1990s.  I was an early adopter of mobile phones on account of working in a disaster planning role.  Oh how we laughed in those early days as we ate in a curry house in Bingley enduring super slow service.  I had an idea.  I pulled out my brick shaped device, telephoned the restaurant and ordered the bill to much guffawing from other customers.  Doesn’t sound so stupid nowadays but phones then were primitive, and I was the only person in the resto, possibly in the whole village, that had such a bulge in my pants.

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Pungent nose, zingy flavour but slightly flat aftertaste – like a Szechuan hot and sour soup.  Not as fruity as some NZ Sauvignons but this Martinborough wine is appealing nonetheless.  Slightly different style with a bit of steel and hints of Chablis in that sense.  Palliser Estate Sauvignon Blanc 2007 used to be available from the Wine Society for £9.50 but a quick search of their website reveals rien.  Perhaps it’s out of stock.

Good evening credit crunchers, how are your bank shares doing?  Yes I know, mine too.  With the sole exception of HSBC.  With a much higher than average capital ratio, HSBC shares have risen 4% this year, whilst other banks (e.g RBS, HBOS) have tanked to one fifth of their recent value, and my old mate, Mr Bradford is owned by the British Government whilst erstwhile Mr Bingley has emigrated to Santander in Spain.  Luckily I sold B & B at about £2 while the credit crunch was a mere cream cracker.  They traded at 20 pence on the day they were nationalised.  I would have sold all my shares, but which bank could you trust your cash with?

It is not just banks, all capital expenditure has been frozen at a corporate and personal level.  How many people do you know buying a new car at the moment?  A new phone?  A new TV?  Heating oil?  Food?  Chateau Latour?  Nope.  The world is frozen with fear and we are riding an apocalyptic stallion of self fulfilling prophecy into a deep depression.

And if you want to dig yourself out of a depression, you will need cheap alcohol as your spade.  You could do worse than trying to cheer yourself up with this New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, at £8.95 from the Wine Society, a mere fraction of the price of the Cloudy Bay you used to drink in better times.

Auntsfield Long Cow 2007 is pale, grassy and full of cats’ piss.  (For the keen grammatinarianisticians amongst you, the pungency is such that I think there was more than one cat).  The acidity, though, is good and there is plenty of white fruit.

For the few remaining bulls amongst you, if your bank shares are still heading south, (and you can no longer sell them short), why not take a long position on this cow?

They say that Pinot Noir has barnyard aromas, but this one was more like green manure, just starting to rot away nicely before being ploughed back into the soil to nourish and re-energise.

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