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!

Words, words, words

There I am, just vacantly tootling along, thinking either about nothing at all or which bottle to open this evening and then a word just zooms along and - bang! - after years of failing to see the etymological link, there it is staring me in my face (faccia in Italian but that one's too obvious). 'To avoid' in Italian is evitare, and then I heard someone on the wireless say "inevitable" - light bulb time! But why don't we have 'evitable'? Well, we do actually but has anyone ever heard it used? I haven't, but it's there in Chambers. And then there's one of my favourites (another that no one uses), 'beaker'. And guess what Italian for glass is? Bicchiere! Bingo, another shaft of illumination that I should have clocked years ago, especially with all the beakers of Sercial I've caned in Gordon's.
Etymology is one of the few interests I managed to acquire at St. Custard's when in an early Latin class, our master 'Plum' Tucker wrote one word on the blackboard:  

peninsula 

 and then asked us how the word came about. We just sat there in our freezing Devonshire classroom, smelling of manure and Horlick's tablets, and then underneath he wrote two Latin words:

paene (almost) + insula (island)

and ecco! revelation. Thanks Plum, against all the odds something stuck.