It Was An Excellent Year

Since returning from China I've not been sleeping worth a shit so today Mrs.Bison bought me a bottle of port. As I think I've mentioned, my favorite drink is Scotch but for some reason port seems to help me sleep. Scotch, by contrast, just makes me happy to be alive. I went to put the port in the cupboard where all the drinks are but it was full; this is mainly a result of all the bottles of tequila that I've been given over the years and still not drunk. It's not that I don't appreciate the occasional tequila but it's not the kind of drink you settle down with in the evening. (It's more the sort of drink you imbibe to excess before vomiting uncontrollably down someone else's stairs.)

In rearranging the contents of the cupboard (it was either that or drink a bottle of tequila to make room) I discovered a bottle of home-made wine from 1994. Now let me immediately state for the record that I only once attempted to make wine - I am quite aware that home winemaking is generally the preserve of beardy morris dancers and that since God saw fit to bestow the gift of the off-licence or liquor store on his people, it would be the height of ingratitude to attempt to make cheap substitutes from turnips, berries and other unsuitable shit.

My old friend Fergie used to make wine before he was old enough to drink it. While the rest of us would show up to parties with cans of lager and bitter or bottles of dry cider he would roll up and produce two bottles of anonymous red liquid which he had himself fermented from some obscure fruit. I am aware that wine is a complex drink with many varied tastes and fragrances; I have made it very clear that I am never going to be a wine-lover and therefore confine myself, on those rare occasions where I am forced to choose a wine, to Australian stuff which always tastes OK and doesn't cost much. I am therefore not qualified to render an opinion on your typical wine, but I feel confident in asserting that one would not have to be an expert to figure out in about half a second that Fergie's wine tasted as much like piss as is possible for something that has not actually passed through the urethra of a mammal. It also had an alcohol content slightly lower than that of vinegar and was consequently useless for advancing any state of drunkenness.

So my decision in 1994 to make wine was something of a character aberration, a sudden impulse brought about by discovering large quantities of elderberries and blackberries by our local canal and thinking "I bet I could do something with those!"
The first thing I did was porcupine my hands collecting the fucking blackberries, leaving about a square foot of skin behind on various bushes in the process. I then had to phone my future father-in-law to get a recipe for wine. (This is what we did before the internet was invented. Had I gone to the library to get a book on home winemaking I may as well have taken out a subscription to "Popular Morris Dancer" and "Beard Weekly".) I also had to buy a whole load of glassware, chemicals, sugar amd bottles for this wine production, which ended up costing me somewhat more than buying eight cases of cheap Australian Cabernet Shiraz would have done.

The resulting elderberry stuff (christened Chateau Basingstoke Canal) was not bad, with the caveat that (a) it was made from berries along a canal that had probably been multiply soaked in dog urine, and (b) I have three fifths of fuck-all discernment regarding wine. The mixed elderberry/blackberry stuff was somewhat less good, principally on account of excessive sweetness caused by a dodgy recipe. (Future father-in-law had a beard but was never a morris dancer and so was only partly qualified to dispense winemaking advice.) Even the good stuff, however, didn't come close to comparing with the taste of, say, a basic Glenlivet, or even eight cans of Special Brew, and so it was not surprising that there was some left over when I moved to the US.

I am planning to open the last remaining bottle of Blackberry Death and see how much like vinegar it tastes. Not today, though, since I want to be able to get out of bed without vomiting tomorrow, and I have low expectations for this stuff. One thing is for sure: even if I took the bottle and strained it through eight pairs of incontinent old man's pants it could hardly taste worse than the piss that Fergie used to make. Wherever he is today I hope he's found the fucking liquor store.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison