It is possible, at least technically, to taste wine without drinking a drop of it. An aberration for some who will only see in it the illustration of a coitus interruptus, but what do you want, that’s how it is. There are situations which, seemingly wacky or quite simply useless — life is too short to turn your back or your tongue on a good glass of wine — offer humans a challenge that takes them to an unsuspected level of sobriety. This is basically what your wine critic will assume throughout the coming 2023 vintage.
Not that non-alcoholic wine doesn’t exist — and here we are faced with a first-class oxymoron! -, because it exists and it is disgusting, and even when these lines were written, I suffered neither from anosmia nor from ageusia and even less from sweet madness, but because it remains possible to fill his contract by practicing the craft while remaining on the cutting edge of sensory integrity while tasting wine. To better spit it out, of course.
I know that I am going to disappoint, not to say offend, Mrs Nadine de Rothschild, whose etiquette, good manners and assumed propriety remain fundamental pillars in terms of social cohesion, but she will nevertheless have to get used to the fact than carrying the wine in the mouth, circulating it to better spit it out is now part of social conventions. Not to mention that it is possible to master the thing with art, skill, precision and, yes, discretion.
blow the ball
Like you, I love wine. The SAQ would certainly not reap close to four billion handsome Canadian dollars (including 1.350 million in dividends) if there were only a handful of Quebecers who were involved in the thing. We are very far from the repentance of a man and his sin. Closer on the other hand to a man and his spittoon! On closer inspection, however, the writing of this weekly column is already in line with this approach which advocates abstinence from alcohol, because the product is systematically spat out, be it this magnificent Rully “Les Plantenays” 2019 from Domain Mia ($43.25 – 15040865 – (5+) © ★★★ 1/2) or, even more difficult to gallantly glavioate this one, this superb 20 year old Tawny Port of the House Taylor Fladgate ($72.25 – 149047 – ★★★★ 1/2). A gesture equally incomprehensible and apparently illogical, but what do you want, that’s how it is.
It was Hugo Meunier’s documentary that very recently put a flea in my ear and the spittoon within reach. Because his recent proposal, blow the ball, targets our behavior with regard to alcohol as precisely as it illustrates the hypocrisy which reigned at the time in the “confessionals” of the Liquor Commission where the cursed bottle was camouflaged behind its brown paper packaging. Drinking without seeing or being seen.
By questioning the role of the monopoly in promoting alcohol via the Inspire loyalty card, the documentary filmmaker also points to a contradiction that the Éduc’alcool program is trying insidiously to temper in order to better regain a virtue. The “drinking without seeing or being seen” erected virtuously on the altar of an all-Catholic guilt is now replaced by the “trouble of not knowing when to stop drinking” which, according to Dr.r Réal Morin, public health specialist and quoted in the film, have a real cost for our institutions.
However, there is no question of hiding your face or imposing a moral lesson on you here in this post whose credo has been, is and will always be celebrated over the years under the sign of “do what you wood” where responsibility, civic and respect go hand in hand. True that one can be won over by the sovereign joys of intoxication which the Romans and Greeks were fond of at the time by crossing their goblet with the gods. It is true that one can take off on a balloon ride from time to time to say thank you to life, but the true wine lover knows very well that he cannot spoil his wine so dearly paid for by ingesting it immoderately under pain of break off this intimate and privileged conversation with the winegrower or winegrower who wants to talk just as soberly as sincerely with him about the fruit of their own passion.
The exercise that I impose on myself — far from a wine sputtered three meters away in a thimble but skilfully redirected in my spittoon — will undoubtedly allow me to double, even triple my tasting objectives, and this, until at the dawn of the New Year 2024 where we will do a little review together. Without the slightest fatigue. Besides, we’re not here to have fun after all!