I normally manage to put together an article on the best wines for Christmas according to what I have tasted, but this has been a strange period in my imbibing journey and I explain below why I have had to pull the plug on this year’s edition.
Some of the following has been published before but it was written for the blog on the Wine Society of which I am a member. Nonetheless I thought it was sufficiently interesting to be seen here. I could be wrong of course but decided to give it a go, so bear with me for the intro which may seem familiar.
I haven’t commented on here very often in the last three years, for a variety of reasons one being health. I have written in detail about my experiences within the NHS organisation, the good the bad and the ugly-plus an extra ingredient I won’t elaborate on again just about covers it.
Three years ago I collapsed and woke up six weeks later having undergone two brain operations within 24 hours and a serious bowel operation a week later. Fortunately I was sedated during my time at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge so knew nothing about what had happened and the subsequent procedures. I was then transferred back to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital where I eventually started to recover, after catching Covid and contracting a bowel infection that was supposed to finish me, a change of doctor - long story - and a change in medication, and treatment.
The reason I mention all this was that what happened to me and what happens to other people if brain surgery is involved one suffers a change or loss, temporary or otherwise of faculties, memory, smell, taste.
At the time wine was not on the list of things I should be worrying about, far from it. Various tests and exercises brought about improvements in memory function. At first even my birthday was beyond recall and constant illusions muddied the progress - seeing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at the bottom of one’s bed as I did earlier is not to be recommended when you are trying to be positive!
After rehab home at last and the question of food that I could eat and the thorny question of what I could drink came to the forefront. The food was relatively easy: no spicy items, very little green stuff and a lot of trial and error was involved.
Now to the drinking. I was told no problem with wine in strict moderation, so I started to sample and the fun started.
At the start red wine caused problems so was cut out completely, later to be reintroduced a little at a time, so white wine was my staple, again in moderation.
All my long held preconceptions went out of the window. Some had no smell, some had no taste, those that did have one or both had changed completely from my inbuilt conception as to what they should taste or smell like. In many cases the taste or smell was amplified way beyond that which my memory could remember, particularly fruity reds such as certain Rhone varieties with matching sometimes glorious over the top aromas.
As for my extensive Riesling collection many, but not all of the trocken/dry wines became dull and lifeless and it became a case of suck it and see.
Two things came out of this for me. Firstly there was after a period of seeing where all this was going, i.e. would my tastes get back to something like the previous normal. They did with most foods, and did settle with wine, but not as before, so after much consideration I made the decision to sell all that which was obviously out of kilter with my new tastes. Out went what was left of my Bordeaux; I had previously off loaded nearly all my EP, en primeur, in storage, of the region anyway; Chianti tasted like battery acid and Barolo not far behind. The list is too long to expand on here but you get the picture. In whites many became just dull; for Riesling spätlese seems to be the sweet spot, no pun intended and buttery Chardonnays over the leaner versions, acidity over other components is now a no-go area, though not totally, which is strange.
The second part is interesting in that it assumes there is a right and wrong appreciation of wine virtues/values, but if I had been born with the appreciation of wine I have now my outlook and taste would be totally different from that which has guided me for the last fifty years. No longer can I say that such and such lacks x because now it doesn’t. Is it a dilemma? No, it is simply another’s view of the same product; in some ways I have been lucky to have two bites of the same cherry.
This is no different to the way the brain interprets sound and vision. Illusions cause the brain to come to different conclusions. It all brings the tasting both amateur and professional into focus: it matters not a jot what someone else says about a wine food music etc, it is what gives you pleasure at any given moment in time.
To finish a short story, my oldest fiend died of dementia recently in Adelaide, Australia. We had known each since we were five years old so it was a long relationship. In ‘95 my wife and I managed to get three months of holiday during the winter and went on a world wide trip including six weeks plus in Australia and stayed with my friend for three weeks-plus in Adelaide.
He was not into wine other than drinking it! but we stayed in the Barrosa for some days and visited some forty wineries in the Barossa and sub regions…
Back home the following Christmas a case of wine arrived from my friend from Oz. He knew little of wine but a friend of of his did so it was selected by the friend on his behalf. At the time it seemed a good idea if this was made an annual event, so a sum was agreed which I sent him and some suggestions for the case; wines unavailable here in the UK would be included.
This worked well for years but recently as the dementia took hold he started to make mistakes and his friend was longer involved, and the last case before I stopped the exercise showed why. Virtually the whole sum allocated was spent on one bottle, I had to make good the shortfall.
The bottle as below:
Out of curiosity I looked up to see if this was available in the UK, and B&B wine merchants have it at around £350 a bottle. I would never pay that for any wine, though in the past I pushed the boat out before wine prices hit the stratosphere.
Was it any good? A lot of hype surrounds it. In my current phase of appreciation the nose was phenomenal, a glorious sniffer; in the mouth for me it was a tier class Bordeaux so I’m probably not the best person to judge that aspect now, or maybe I am?
And yes it is a screw top.
Anyway a glass was raised to my old friend.
And a glass was raised to my consultant who explained it all to me.
It is now over three years since the operations so not much is likely to change now and I have to accept that my receptors have a different slant on the things and will remain that way. Not the end of the world, as I said earlier I should in many ways be grateful as certain wines and food that did nothing for in the past now are very acceptable. Funny old world.
