Confessions of a Wino

Do you ever wonder why people insist that Sauvignon Blanc smells like “cat’s piss on a gooseberry bush”?  Exactly how many people have smelt a gooseberry bush, never mind one that a cat has pissed on?  What sort of cat was it?  Was it in season?  Male or female?  What had the cat eaten and drunk?  What variety of gooseberry?  Was the bush flowering or in fruit (or neither)?

I’ve just got in from a motorway traffic jam and I’m astonished by the exercises my brain races through while the car idles.

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Now, I could bore you with the old story about Dick van Dyke’s ropey cockney accent, but I am going to spare you that.  Instead, I am going to bore you about the third English wine I have sampled this year, Limney Horsmonden 2006.

Well the first thing to say is that they are not going to win any prizes for label design.

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Well the English football season is back and what better way to celebrate Man City’s stunning victory over West Ham, than with an English wine review? 

This wine was made from a grape variety about as well known as most of the Man City first team.  For those not in England, Sven-Göran Eriksson has been on a buying spree across the globe bringing in players from Bulgaria, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and Bosnia & Herzegovina.  Names like Elano, Bianchi, Geovanni, Garrido, Fernandes, and Schonburger.  Oh no, hang on, that last one was the name of the grape used to make this Three Choirs Stone Brook 2005.

 

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Where is the sense of individual responsibility in society these days?  My parents and grand-parents all lived through at least one world war, enduring hardship and shortage.  When something went wrong in their lives, their first reaction was to set about putting it right using their own endeavours.  I am not saying that governments and corporations should be absolved of negligence, nor that they should not take sensible precautions to increase safety for us all, but the balance of responsibility has shifted too far.  Matt Rudd writing in The Sunday Times agrees.  In a simple day out with his wife and toddler he counted a whopping 289 warnings/instructions.

If parents can’t be trusted to educate their kids to the point that they understand that coffee “may be hot”, or that smooth floors “may be slippery when wet” then the world has lost something.  In today’s litigious society (it starts in America, quickly migrates to Ireland, and lands in the UK shortly afterwards) the first thought when we have an accident is “who can I sue?  How much money can I make?”  So the inevitable result is a world full of nannying warning signs that guide us, cajole us, restrict us, instruct us but rarely inform us.

The warning on my bottle of Bacchus 2006, however, was clear and stark, “Made in England”.

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