Too Much Wine?
Originally published in Spanish in Diario Sur, 21 Julio 12
Too Much Wine?
AJ Linn
In a recent survey of residents of old people’s homes in England, one of the questions was ‘What do you regret most about your past life?’ Perhaps not too surprisingly 74% of the males were sorry they had not had more sex. (The writer is male).
My old friends are also becoming rather boring in the regrets department. They say as they get older that there is still a lot of good wine to be drunk, using the expression, ‘So much good wine and not enough time to drink it all’.
As a declaration of intent all wine aficionados will consider it praiseworthy, although if they could be totally sincere and if their partners were not still living, my friends would probably give the same reply as the old people who were surveyed in England. But in any event they are setting themselves an impossible task. Why? Because every day of the year new wines come onto the market, and because of current technology most of them are very good. And what about all the wine already available that still has to be drunk?
Just to show that the world is awash with wine at a time when consumption is plummeting like a stone, consider the ramifications of the International Wine Fair, held in London earlier this year. A total of 7,750 wines were on display, of which 1,151 were Spanish. The Decanter World Wine Awards, run in parallel with the Fair, required that 200 experts (sommeliers, wine writers, wine merchants, Masters of Wine) spend a week tasting the wines from 47 countries. New Zealand wines won the highest number of awards, and Turkey, Slovenia and Croatia all did well. The wine that got the most gold medals was Gaja, from Piedmont, Italy.
Spanish wines did well as they always do, and in reality more wines got prizes than didn’t. Same in the International Wine Challenge (IWC), where 900 Spanish wines obtained medals of some sort, whether gold, silver, bronze, tin or whatever….
There is definitely too much wine swilling around, and what never ceases to amaze me is that it all seems to get drunk. Or is it like those puppies you see in pet shop windows that week after week get bigger and then disappear? Is surplus wine just poured down the drain or made into vinegar? No-one will ever admit to either.
Whichever is the case, my old friends are going to be very busy over the years that they still have left to enjoy the good things of life.
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