A drink is still a drink. Innit?

In preparation for tomorrow's Neighbourhood Watch party, to give our livers a head start, Z and I are having an alcohol-free day, or at least part of one.  It's possible that the very last droplet of wine last night was consumed after midnight, and we might be forced to have a small glass of sauv blanc with the halibut steaks and boulangere potatoes later on.  But in the meantime we're enjoying a new cocktail:


Crush some juniper berries and infuse them in a small quantity of tonic water.  Add a few drops of angostura bitters, stir well and strain over ice and a slice of lime.  Top up with tonic to desired level.
This is called a Ginless Wonder.

Wild in Wales? Not sayin’

On reflection, I don’t think I should tell you too much about that balmy summer evening in the tiny Welsh seaside village of ■■■■■■■■ back in 1993.  We were young (I was only 51) and foolish, and indiscretions were all too easy.

So, I’m not going to write about the note that was left on the cottage door (“Where are you, you bastards?  We’re THIRSTY!!!”), or the rushed curry and the leap over the wall to the pub next door, or the intense conversation, some while later, possibly concerning the disjunction between divergent views (one English, one Welsh) of contemporary Welsh art which narrowly evaded damage to both artists and artworks.  Nor am I going to write about a brief decamp by a few parties to the (closed) restaurant across the road, for music, dancing, wine from the cellar and nearly forcible separation of inappropriate pairings; nor the bemused expression on the face of the bartender back in the pub when asked, at half-one, whether they were still serving; nor about the difficulty, sometimes, to tell the difference, by sight, between whisky and brandy, and the consequences.  Especially, I’m keeping quiet about the insistence, in the face of adamant dissuasion, by one party at about three that it was perfectly all right to drive the mile back up to their caravan because “I drive best when I’m drunk; besides, I really enjoy it.”

Finally, I’d better not mention the cliff walk next morning, and how one party was unable to partake for, let’s say, annular reasons, whilst another mistook a low-flying coastguard biplane for a high-flying eagle.

No, best draw a veil over all that.  Apologies to those readers who were anticipating something salacious.  You had to be there.

 

Coffee Cluedo??

A well-known department store chain has announced that it is to trial a rebranding of the coffee in their in-store cafeterias, to make life easier for purchasers to work out what they want.  I have some sympathy with this; some of those beverages can be quite daunting.  I was proud of myself a few weeks ago when, in a C0sta at Southampton airport, I ordered an Americano and got what I expected – a black coffee with milk on the side.  And I’ve never dared to enter a St@rbucks.

But I do think D€benha∑s – for it is they – are perhaps at risk of obfuscation by over-simplification (and if there’s a word for that, please do let me know what it is).  Apparently, 70% of their customers struggle with terms such as ‘cappuccino’ and ‘espresso’, which are to be renamed ‘frothy coffee’ and ‘a shot of strong coffee’.  Really?  If this is true, then it does seem to suggest something about the majority of their clientele, or their opinion of them, which I’m sure D€benha∑s didn’t quite intend.

But fair do’s to them, if they think it’s going to help.  I rarely enter the store by choice (sometimes you have to go through it to get to the car park), and never their café.  What does bother me slightly, though, is the ‘director of food services’ (and there’s a job title for you – what happened to ‘catering’?) claiming, as he does, that this will enable shoppers to “spend less time playing coffee Cluedo.”  Now, I don’t know whether this guy has ever played Cluedo, but a moment’s research would have revealed the inappropriateness of this metaphor in every single respect beyond smart-ass alliteration.  ‘St@rbucks Scrabble’ would have been marginally better.  Nothing would have been better still.

 

No Nose

The tasting notes for my splendidly named Turkey Flat Butcher’s Block Shiraz Grenache Mourvedre 2010 told me to expect hints of five spice, plum, cherry and blackcurrant, with smoky, meaty undertones.  As it happened, I had several of these ingredients in the house – plums, meat, smoke and five spice –  so I had a sniff.  I can’t swear to any of them, but I do now know that my little jar of Chinese five spice powder smells of sawdust.

Tonight’s Rioja Reserva Dos Maderas 2006 exhorts me to detect cinnamon, clove and toasted bread.  My jars of the first two do have a bit more nose to them than the five spice, because I use them more often, so they’ll be slightly fresher; I don’t have any toast to hand, I’m afraid.

I see I also have, amongst others, allspice, caraway, fennel, kaffir lime, saffron, fenugreek, juniper, asafoetida, two sorts of pimento, three sorts of peppercorns and, um, curry powder in my spice drawer.  Not having the corresponding wines in the rack, I can’t test these, but I don’t mind betting there’ll be a fair proportion of sawdust amongst them.  The asafoetida must go back a decade.

Talk about the mustard left on the plate!  Colman’s have nothing on these spice merchants, do they?  Still, they’ll probably be good enough for wine-making, if I ever take it up again.

Surprise, surprise

It wasn’t anything like a military operation, because intelligence was involved, and it worked. (That is to say, it achieved its objective; and it had one.)  A few marginal things went wrong – the helium balloons didn’t turn up and had to be hastily reorganised; the seating plan for the five-course dinner had to be last-minute adjusted for arcane reasons, with potential mis-delivery of pre-ordered courses; Boy (whose thirtieth this was, in Jersey) threatened, on receipt of programmed red herring texts, to go to the airport and collect people who’d actually arrived the previous day – but in general the General did an amazing job.  I think she tired, during the evening, of being reminded that when she was eighteen she wanted to join the Army.

I know him pretty well, so I was certain, when Boy walked into that bar, that his surprise was genuine.  He’s not the kind of guy who habitually fakes stuff; and he lives, mostly, on the surface: not being devious himself, he doesn’t suspect others of it.  So the massed choir singing ‘Happy Birthday To You’ (in several different keys) may have momentarily thrown him emotionally, but he bounced back.  After handshakes and kisses all round (I got both), he looked at his father and said “Any chance of a drink, then?”

At any party, there have to be a few, er, moments.  Bloke provided them.  Bloke is an enforced non-drinker, due to recent fatherhood, but obviously grabs the opportunity when it jumps up and licks his face.  I’d guess that he’d stoked up the prospect of getting tanked for weeks, and shovelled in more and more fuel the nearer the event drew.  Of course, what happens is that you peak far too soon.  What happens after that depends on what the booze uncovers.  (In my case, I’ve been told, I get mellowly amorous, so I’ve learnt – mostly – to contain that, although being seated between the two most attractive girls in the room didn’t help; I didn’t know which way to turn, but thank you, General…)  In Bloke’s case, evidently, it’s Clarksonian banter.  You know what I mean.  There’s a fine line in there; blokeish ‘banter’ can easily tip over into obnoxious bullying, and the bully, even though he (it’s very rarely, though not never, ‘she’) might still have hazy sight of his behaviour, he has nowhere to go except more of the same.

I won’t go into details, even though he certainly won’t read this.  Eventually he was quietly made to shut up.  It didn’t spoil anything, and most people probably didn’t even notice it.  I intervened a couple of times, and ended up having my shoulder figuratively cried on, at two a.m., when he’d got a glimmering of what he’d done and subsided into faux-remorse.  And I’d only met him for the first time that afternoon.  But I’ve learnt to deal with that kind of business.

You don’t need me to tell you that Sunday was a bad weather day.  Luckily nobody felt much like walking the five mile length of St Ouen’s Bay.  Driving back from Southampton airport, through monsoon rain, I heard Boy’s Nana say “Shame it had to be spoiled by the rain.”  I’ve learnt to deal with Nana too, so I just grunted and carried on driving.

Ideative Plagiarism?

I do hope not.  But recently whenever I start to compose a comment, it ends up as an essay or a rant, and I don’t think it’s polite to post essay-sized comments on other people’s blogs, let alone rants.  (Or is it?  No idea.  I don’t really know the rules of blogiquette.)

Anyway, this one is about tasting wine.  (You know who you are!)  Quite a few years ago, I went to a wine-tasting at my friend P’s.  He was, at the time, a stakeholder in a small mail-order wine merchant, and he’d organised this event, ostensibly for promotional purposes.  P lives just round a few corners, so I was able to walk there and (theoretically) back.  This was a Saturday evening.

The guy who ran the show was absolutely brilliant.  As C (Mrs P) supplied suitable snacks and canapés, he took us through fifteen wines, carefully and informatively leading us from the lightest of light Loires to a dense, almost treacly Barolo, and you really did taste the differences as we progressed.  It was a memorable evening, or would have been had the ‘no swallowing’ rule been rigorously imposed.  As it was, I wanted to order a case of something or other, but the order form somehow became indecipherable.  I seem to remember dancing later on.  And the journey home was, well, staggering.

What I really wanted to say was, it’s impossible to quaff in those quantities nowadays.  Obviously age and degeneration are factors here, but it’s also very hard to find a wine under 14% these days.  I forgot my glasses a while back, so couldn’t read the small print and accidentally came back with two bottles of something which proudly claimed to contain sixteen per cent alcohol.  Sixteen per cent!  That’s practically sherry.  I don’t want to swig near-sherry with my dinner.  Do the producers honestly believe that all we want from our wine is ever-increasing amounts of alcohol?

Anyway anyway, talking of glasses, I found two of  these

at the back of the sideboard, and now I’m going to be sleeping all night with that infuriating jingle. 

Oh, and whoever is constantly hitting my blog with Googlebot, please stop doing it, it's really annoying.  Thank you.