Fellow Wine Lovers,
167 days. Over 45% of the year. More than 5 months and we really hadn’t missed it. As we went to bed on Wednesday night we knew life was about to change, yet again. For so long we hadn’t had to worry about what went on before 7am, in truth on many an occasion it remained a mystery what happened before 8 but now was crunch time. School was going back in and the teenager with the sharp haircut and new schoolbag had set his alarm for 6am….
When we awoke on Thursday we were all still unaware of what happens before 7am because the ‘bloomin’ alarm hadn’t gone off’ (amazing how a digital clock can make such a unilateral decision in the middle of the night but then, as mentioned, what happens before 7am stays before 7am) and with that we were thrust back into the routine. A rush to JJ’s for milk that could so easily have been bought the day before, the new game of hunt the facemask and the hurried sprint to Earlsfield all welcoming one 16 year old and his parents back with loving arms. Meanwhile, in another bedroom another teenager slept on none the wiser because she wasn’t going back to school until tomorrow, ha!
So, we’re back and it feels like almost immediately there is more to write about. The sheer thrill of the start of a new school year has never before had so much potency and dare I say it, optimism that we can see a shadow of our old lives returning, giving hope that they could take on corporeal characteristics at some point. Many people mock and deride routine, citing freedom of spirit and living for the day as realistic mantras and there is certainly something to be said for this, however after the last 5 months of discombobulation and aimlessness it’s comforting to get some old habits back.
And we’re working on our old routines. As discussed last week, we have relaunched our monthly case club that got back-burnered in April. We’ve also started to have people asking if/when/how we will start doing tastings again. This is a trifle more tricky but is definitely something we have been thinking about and I think we’re going to take advice on it; on Monday 21st September we are going to our first supplier tasting for a long time, a tasting held by the buying group that we are a part of and whose members are all independent wine merchants like ourselves. We will see how the tasting runs, we will brain-pick our peers and, hopefully, we will come back suitably enlivened (it is a tasting after all) and full of ideas on how we can proceed here. Give us a few weeks and we’d like to think we’ll have a plan!
We read, with interest of course, the daily discourse on Covid-19. With the proposal that a variety of gastrointestinal upsets in children could be signs of the virus we immediately had questions. Our first caller asked: As children are the same species as adults, is there not a possibility that similar upsets in adults could have similar significance? At the same time, could it not also just be something we ate? The next question, from our reader in Essex, goes thus: the list of potential signs of Covid is growing – as the list grows the likelihood is that more of the population will display or have displayed at least one of the symptoms in the last 8 months – does this mean more of us have, potentially, already carried the virus? Or, again, was it just something we ate?
Perhaps many more of us have had, and subsequently shaken off, this thing than any records may show – which could be a positive as we move away from summer?
Meanwhile, the USA has hopes of releasing a vaccine on its population two days before the Presidential election – what could possibly go wrong? More locally, Wales and Scotland have gone out on their own and made travellers returning from Portugal quarantine for 14 days. In certifiable absence of joined up thinking, England isn’t making holidaymakers from Portugal hide at home at all… so you could fly back into Bristol and if you live in Bristol you could go back to work in Cardiff on Monday morning but if you fly into Bristol and live in Cardiff you have to quarantine… mind boggling!
In the drinks world we return once more to our occasional foray into drinks we’re not sure we need/celebrity bandwagon jumping. Everybody’s favourite Just Eat ambassador, Snoop Dogg has launched Indoggo, a strawberry gin that ‘goes lighter on the juniper and dials up the strawberry and citrus flavours with its sweet and fruity finish’ – so a gin that really doesn’t taste of gin… mind you at $30 a bottle, you will actually be far closer than some in getting what you paid for.
Meanwhile, over in Italy the Delevingne sisters (Cara, Chloe & Poppy) have been busy watching other people picking grapes from 40 year old Glera vines to provide the market with not one but two new Prosecco’s. Hooray for them.
And that, I believe, is that. I’m off to watch the Tour de France without any of Wayne’s commentary whilst Wayne is off to drink white port and eat sardines – we’re living out our dreams here!
Saúde!