The secret of a good wine

The best wines I’ve ever had are the ones I’ve enjoyed the most regardless of where they’ve come from or what price they’ve been and often it is the cheaper ones that have gone down the best.
It is said that the best wines are the ones kept back by the vineyard owners for personal use and on occasion I’ve found this to be so, but not always, which leads me to believe that good wine is subjective to personal preferences.
My French girlfriend told me the secret of good wine once but she didn’t speak enough English and I forgot what she said. And so ever since then I have been trying to drink enough wine to hopefully trigger the memory of what she said. But I have the feeling that good wine comes from luck at the right time and whether you choose cheap and cheerful or smart and expensive it is how it makes you feel on the night that really matters.

There are those who enjoy the taste, looks and smell of a wine and like nothing better than taking a sip to spit it out and move on to the next glass to swirl around and gargle and say it has the taste of a sweet honey bee in June with a slight aftertaste of jasmine on the wind after midnight.
But with my decided lack of tasting and smelling power my gargling abilities never came to much more than the smell of stale fish and chips with the aftertaste of sex behind the bus stop waiting in line for the last bus home.
So I’ve had to judge wine in other ways, the main one being: did it give me a hangover the next day and if it didn’t then it was not bad. Wine is made from grapes.

The worst wine ever was a one litre carton I bought for a Euro in a Spanish supermarket in Spain and on drinking it on the beach got an immediate headache and retched it straight back up again; so that one was thrown on the fire where it exploded into flames that sparked up into the night; so I gave it three out of ten for entertainment value.
The best wine came from a lady who picked up me and my girlfriend while we were hitch hiking in France and let us sleep in her wine cellar and said we could drink no more than three bottles.
I had no idea which wines we drank in the dark but it was the best night we couldn’t remember and the next day saw us trudging onwards with only a thick head and a raging thirst.

But not everyone can be a wine connoisseur, some have to be satisfied with the old plonk called screaming eagle cabernet sauvignon or some Schrader cellars old sparky from the bottom shelf; or maybe some another wine imported for the masses and sold everywhere and sometimes at discount; and for the most part these cheep wines will leave you waking late morning feeling you’ve done it once more and afraid to look at the bank account to see how much it cost you.
Drinking a bottle of wine in a hot country can be a bit of an adventure just to find any, but when found take the one with the biggest turnover as wine can turn sour if left in the heat too long.
They don’t seem to make much if any good wine in Asia although the grapes are big and juicy; it’s all imported and mostly from Australia, but what there is, is cheap and cheerful.
I found a red South African wine in a Bangkok corner store that did the trick for a while until I moved to Bali and then had to drink the expensive imported Australian stuff that went down ok but always seemed to have something missing; maybe the Australians don’t have the feet for it as the French seen to have.
Wine in the states is plentiful in the stores with all the named wines to be had for around ten dollars a bottle and sometimes a double size bottle for only a few dollars more. And what could be better than an after dinner movie and a good bottle of wine?

It used to be that if the bottle had a dimple in the bottom and not flat it was one sign of a good wine, but these days even the cheaper wines have a dimple so you can’t rely on that.
The saddest wine was the one that slipped out of my girlfriend’s hands on the night we were to celebrate me getting a job and when we went back to the shop for another one it was closed until Monday so we had a long sober weekend preparing me to go to work, but when the day came I was so depressed I stayed in bed.
When my girlfriend came home in the evening she brought champagne and so we celebrated me escaping once again the clutches of the system.
One day we decided to spend a day in France to load up the car with as much wine as it would carry, for personal uses of course, and so took the ship from Plymouth to Roscoff.
The wine warehouse is the place to get it cheap so we bought a few crates of what we recognised and the rest was made up of exotic looking stuff we had some reservations over but needn’t have as it was the best stuff ever and all our friends thought so as well for months afterwards.

My mother used to make elderberry, blackberry and other fruit wines which were an acquired taste that was mostly best left under the stairs for that emergency time that never comes.
Every year she’d make more wine along with jams and preserves that were good for breakfast, until after thirty years of it there was a huge collection that spilled out from under the stairs to under the kitchen sink and many other places, and who knows, but maybe time will mature it all into a good wine worth drinking.
The most evil wine was the one me and my girlfriend had just over the border from Spain in a basement restaurant in Portugal.
The evening began normally with a recommended wine that went down nicely with the meal, but afterwards they brought out a large bottle without a label and after the obligatory two glasses of it the night turned into a dark den of robbers and thieves where everyone was plotting something insidious and secret. The next day brought the worst hangover ever that raged for three days and I vowed I’d never drink that stuff again. Sometimes life throws you a curve ball and you just have to deal with it the best way you can.

But life is not always a bed of roses, things change, girlfriends come and go; there are ups and downs, ins and outs and before you know it the dog has grown old and can’t go for walks anymore. There’s nothing sadder than your best friend being housebound. But so long as he can wag his tail we can still have a conversation beside the fire with a good bottle of white or red imported from the store and remember sunnier times where life was fun and wine was cheap.
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