You can laugh but...

..I rather like this. It's a tasting note written live as it were, as the writer was sipping the wine. Whether you think it's all bollocks or not, some of the words remind us how beautiful the English language can be. The writer, by the way, is a serious wine buff who knows his onions (as it were). And if you want a bottle, you can get some here. Cheapest price is £2,000 a bottle.

1985 La Tache; Grand Cru Monopole; Domaine de la Romanee-Conti: wild strawberry, plum, herbs, wood, charcoal, wood, cinnamon, raspberry, fresh, meaty, hugely complex. gamey, forest floor, wild blueberry, wonderful stuff, bonfire, chocolate, Asian spices, burnt matches, peat, cherry, minerals, iron, earth, hints of sous bois, blood orange, rosemary, thyme, oregano, eucalyptus, minty, but this kept developing in the glass, tannins have dropped away but it has a great backbone of acid, this will hold beautifully! Coffee, expresso. salt beef, salt, shitty, this just keeps changing. Sea air, asparagus, saline, vegetal, sea shore, sea shell, oyster sauce, milky, creamy, wet soil, lemon, grapefruit, sorbet, core of wild red fruit, wild raspberry and strawberry; molasses, superb depth, salt and pepper, fish and chip shop, beer batter, fresh plum, lemon, roses, rosebush, rose water, ethereal and deep, transcendental, pepperoni and chilli sauce, fish sauce, almonds, nettles, underbrush, grass, pollen, honey, dust, lifted but deep! WOW just wow! Blackberries, smoke, bonfire, wild raspberry, earth, cooked cranberry, this is the single greatest wine I have tried in my life! Fresher, lighter and more ethereal! Gunpowder, oxtail, cooked beef, cooked lemons, perfume, nail varnish but not in a bad way! Pork Crackling, so deep, so complex! Burnt fat; cooking oil, rubber, wax, maldon sea salt, squid, octopus, sea water, burnt raspberry, leather sofa, cigar, cigar box, almost like a Diplomaticos No. 2; fresh strawberry, bulls blood, absolutely brilliant, the best and most complex wine I have ever tasted! Wonderful texture! ******** [easily the longest tasting note I think I have ever written and the only guaranteed 8* wine!!!!!!!!!!].
A really brilliant wine that we thought would never show in the way it did with its poor levels and ashy, disintegrating cork! It was a revelation, and we even saw a beguiling peachy light in the Decanter. You just have to be sorry for any wine that had the pleasure of sharing the table with such a wine! Oh how I feel for that wine!

Wa-hey!

The Intrepid One, on his return to Blighty from the war hell that is Libya, kindly left the Combo household a large tin of green tea, given to him by a Chinese worker he met at a drilling site in the desert. Rather surprisingly I've been drinking the stuff and yesterday evening went to get a spoonful when I noticed a small, sealed plastic bag at the bottom of the tin. The contents look interesting. What shall I do people, drink it or smoke it?

Re TIO and Mad Dog McClane: I cannot post on your blogs even though you are both Blogger, the format is different I think. Any ideas anyone?

Malvern Hills

This lot pitched up at the weekend. What's the collective noun for Morgans? A creak?

Sweet Expectation

Thought you might like to see some genuine in-class Italian graffiti:

There is a scrawl in this one below that says "our mission is perversion" and a broken heart below. Elsewhere, not visible, is "Sesso senza amore" - "sex without love".

 

Rather worryingly this is in a classroom where the pupil age is 14. Presumably they're all at it like rabbits, except for the plug ugly ones of course. Interestingly, teenage pregnancies here are almost unheard of. There was a Peruvian girl in the local village who got knocked up at the age of 14 by an Albanian lad but she was whisked off, never to be seen again. Maybe here in Italy sex and love do go hand in hand when you are a young teen, but I'm too old (damn! damn!) to find out. In Blighty you are (I think this is going to sound very 1960s) either in the family way or you have a bun in the oven or you are up the duff. There's probably a lot worse too now. 

In Italy they say the woman is in dolce attesa, sweet expectation.

Says it all really.