What do you do when someone farts in wine class?

Well, nothing. I was deadpan. I think it is possibly the most compassionate moment of my life. Cathy, opposite me, was begging me to cave. She was internally DYING with laughter and saw right into me; she knew I was weak, that I would give in and together we would laugh “hahaha YOU FARTED?????? That is UNCOMMON IN PUBLIC@!” But I kept it together. And thank god, as karma is a bitch and I do not want to cross the fart gods in this uncertain time of professional development.

So this eve was Beaujolais; a wine I love but one that has recently dropped in sales and is now deemed ‘unfashionable’. I find this terribly hard to take. Beaujolais Villages, and particularly Georges Dubeauf, is a wine that reminds me of Sunday and my Dad and the first time I realized what wine was AND that I liked it. So there were many people at wine class giving it a hard time and I had to hold my tongue as ACTUALLY thousands of people drink Rose, a substance in my eyes that should be used as floor cleaner and yet here we are, slagging off an 18 pound bottle of hand harvested French wine, simply because the label is too colourful. BITCH PLEASE. And it got worse when we tried a Jacobs Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, nicknamed ‘the alcoholic Ribeena’. Now, I love a good wine and quality is both important and noticeable. But it is a luxury to be able to afford a bottle of wine above six pounds on a student budget. And I think Jacobs Creek do an excellent job of providing good wines that are drinkable with or without food. Perhaps my judgment is clouded somewhat by sentimental memories of buying three bottles of Jacobs Creek for ten pounds at the bottom of Jerningham road in New Cross to accompany a vat of bolognaise that fed the five thousand. (Or just me, Becca and Harriet…) Either way, its easy to judge when you are used to drinking expensive vintages or you naturally put price above substance. This is how the wine industry and wine enthusiasts are tarred with the ‘posh twat’ brush, a brush I am pretty familiar with. So, I am prepared to drink as many bottles of wine as I have to and shout incoherently at as many strangers as I can UNTIL people truly start to believe that the world of wine is changing hands. 

A note on wine...

So I have started a Sommelier course in London Bridge, it lasts roughly 12 weeks and at the end I will take an exam and hopefully have a certified Level Two Sommelier qualification. My first session last week proved to be a pretty eye opening experience. Not only was I completely incorrect in thinking I knew ANYTHING about wine, but I also learnt that men who like to drink wine and talk extensively about it are actually as ignorant as the rest of us, they’re just pissed and loud and have the utter arrogance to say anything enough times that you cave into their opinion. A case in point of this was the weird old wino at the back of classroom who shouted “I taste blueberries!!” at our tutor so many times that she had to pry the tasting glass from his dead lock clamp of a hand and inform him that “no, there are no blueberry traces AT ALL in this wine, perhaps you had a blueberry muffin before class?”. Honest to God, I am not making it up. Aside from that, it was actually really interesting. We tried six different wines, three white, two red and a desert wine, all varying in price and region. We then tasted them with salt, sugar, apple, cheese etc to check for balancing acidities and how to match wine to food. So top insiders tip for you; you can actually have any wine with any kind of food as long as you salt or put lemon juice on your meal. It is not wine that makes food better but actually food that brings out the varying qualities of wine. For instance, red wine is commonly paired with steak because of a presumed affinity in the richness of texture and flavor. However, it is actually the salt on top on your steak that deepens the umami aspect of the meat and that in turn brings out the ‘tannins’ (resonating flavors) of your glass of red wine! Also, Cote De Rhone can be drunk with any meal, its balances with salt, acidity and sweetness and is relatively inexpensive. I also learnt that women are normally better Sommeliers, or more selective tasters than men, as we have more complex taste buds. So LADIES, don’t buy into the masculine dominance surrounding the wine list at restaurants, you have more capacity to choose a nice wine than you know.

So to conclude, the nicest wine I tried at the session was a 2006 Pio Cesare Barolo from Italy, acclaimed to be one of the world’s greatest wines. So if you have £34.99 knocking about, go and pick up a bottle! If not, the Wine and Spirit Education Trust cellar is situated on Bermondsey Street, London Bridge.

Salad=Fluxus

Alison Knowles made the Fluxus statement ‘make a salad’ in 1962. In my opinion, the salad is exactly what the genre denotes: a happening!!!!

Friends will know my passion for salads. The Marks and Spencer Prawn Layer is a particular favorite of mine. In fact, the extent of my passion for the Prawn Layer is such that it could probably be classed as a personal character trait (if it is at all possible to make prawn mayonnaise and grated carrot a tangible extension of your SOUL) Yes, I think salads are important. And I know your first thought; is their appeal purely because of the health sticker attached to them. And in truth, that is part of it. Having a really varied, tasty salad that is filling and aesthetically vibrant makes me feel good about myself. However, it can also make others feel as equally bad. The words ‘I had a salad’ are incredibly loaded and can be akin to a live explosive. “Can I please have the Caeser salad with dressing on the…” BOOOOOOOOM and the sound of flapping pizza dough spinning through the air whilst you get pummeled by Pollo ad Astra and American Hot in Pizza Express. However, there is an alternative side to the salad that most people miss and if played out correctly can change the conception of ‘having a salad’ forever. Salads are made up by lots of individual leaves that create a multitude of tiny nooks and crannies to encase (and hide) loads of different bits of food that taste much better than the actual salad leaves. Try imagining your salad as a porous sponge or maybe one of those fossils with loads of long tubey holes running through it that you bought on school trips to the Butterfly Farm in year five. Basically, something with a multitude of holes into which you can put other things. Because lets be honest, everything tastes better stuffed. So instead of ‘tossing’ your salad, try ‘stuffing’ it! And I have just realized that the past two sentences are full of genuinely unintentional sexual innuendoes. So if you have sniggered even slightly then I think you should take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror.