Friday 21 August 2009

Paper Bag Waiter

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Ah, a blog about wine.

I'm going to be writing about wine. Real wine. None of your Supermarket Wine, or your Wrapped in Lilac Tissue Paper From Oddbins Wine. Not even your Half Price From the Garage Wine. I want to write about the holy grail of lonely evenings and bored mornings, Cornershop Wine.

Cornershop Wine is a wonderful thing, so mysterious yet so alluring. I've always found expensive wine stressful, the umm-ing and aah-ing of which to choose, the "Oh God it's so expensive, but it's bound to be great, this one has a lovely colour-scheme on the label, they must have had a good design team, if I just buy this Cabernet I'm gonna get laughed out of the shop, they're probably talking about me now, in French, I wish I could speak another language, they always said I had good potential in French class, I just never pushed myself, I never push myself at anything, I wish I had passion, why don't I have passion, I'm weird and odd looking, freakishly tall and yellow yet can't even talk about a serious issue without cracking a joke or cracking up, I should at least have a fucking passion, I'll just get the Cabernet."

It's not worth it.

And what's more, is that when you finally do get your beautiful, expensive wine home and slip a little bit onto your tongue, it's great. It's really great. But you knew it was going to be great, it was £10.98. You knew it. There's little acidity, full tasting berries and chocolates, just like it said on the label. Lovely.

But there's no challenge, no thrill of chase, alarms or surprises etc. It's like browsing Amazon and reading the reviews of each album, listening to the samples and clicking through to your email confirmation. It just doesn't seem as fulfilling as pawing through a box of second hand records and pulling out a daft old Chimney Sweep covers album for £1.99 and giving it go. It's probably going to be rubbish, it is called 'Soot Yourself' after all, but it's satisfying.

Cornershop Wine forever walks that fine line between brilliance and stomach ache. Especially the cheap stuff. Oh, cheap stuff, how you taunt me! You can barely read the label, no-one can! So no chance of any finely stubbled bow-tie coming up to you and pronouncing loudly, the grape type and its qualities, alerting all and sundry to just how out of your depth you are. Just you. And four other baggy-eyed types circling the '2 for £5' basket.

I think these writings will concentrate solely on this end of the Fine Wine spectrum. The £2.99 or 2 for £5 price bracket. Most often, these will be horrendous and tart enough to turn the roof of your mouth into velcro, and very much a last ditch attempt at hitting that pissed satisfaction threshold. But sometimes, not often, in fact not at all, they turn out to be something quite wonderful. And this is when you can pull that 10 pound note out, and blow it on a couple of lost days of satisfaction.


A quote:

"Well, to be honest, after years of smoking and drinking, you do sometimes look at yourself and think...You know, just sometimes, in between the first cigarette with coffee in the morning to that four hundredth glass of cornershop piss at 3am, you do sometimes look at yourself and think...this is fantastic. I'm in heaven."
Bernard Black
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