On wine

I've just been watching a film, Sideways. It's about a couple of guys - the blurb says they're 30 somethings, but they look way over 40 to me - who head off on a pre-wedding jaunt around California's vinyards and drink a load of wine and meet some girls and end up in trouble as guys always do. The film's not really about wine, it just happens to feature a lot of wine in it. It's a great film, funny, written and directed by the guy who did About Schmidt, the actuary film that I still haven't seen.

It'd be hard to watch a film with so much wine in it without cracking open a bottle myself, a 2004 Pinot Grigio (Is that good? I have no idea. It tastes good to me). It'd be like watching Withnail & I without having a drink or Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan without dressing up in Starfleet uniform.

So I have this bottle of wine open, which I'm drinking currently. I like wine. I like the way that if you drink it from sober you get kind of happy buzzy. And I like the way it tastes fruity and good. I bought some little shredded wheat cereal things with cranberry centres at lunchtime. They taste fruity and slightly wrong. They're like anti-wine.

Despite the amount of the stuff I tend to drink, I don't really know huge amounts about wine. Maybe it's something I could make an effort to learn about. Even if I didn't end up with much actual knowledge, I'm sure I'd have fun making the effort. I know that I like red wine, and I like white wine. I don't like Rose much, and I don't like sweet wines. Other than that I'm not hugely fussy. As long as it doesn't taste too much like sherry, I'm happy.

I dated a girl (for about an hour) once who owned a wine fridge. That seemed pretty cool. A whole full size fridge set at a temperature designed to keep wine great. Cellar temperature. A wine fridge is a much more practical thing to have in a flat than a cellar would be. A fridge can be installed anywhere where there's a plug socket and an amount of space. A cellar, on the other hand, is a complete bastard to install, especially if you don't live on the ground floor.

So anyway. Wine. Yeah, it's great. Cheers!