THE Australian Wine Bureau lives in a most unusual place - in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare. Perhaps the bureau is fond of the Burren, and spends its spare time rambling over the limestone escarpments sniffing wildflowers and improving its olfactory skills. Or possibly the bureau is a great lover of Irish music, and loves slipping off to the pubs, festooning itself with the bladder and tubes of the uillean pipes, and whiling away the evening creating the airs of its hibernian ancestors.
Or maybe the bureau lives on the Burren because it has a perpetual hangover from wine tastings, and it needs to have fresh Atlantic gales on tap to blow away the mental debris resulting from excessive indulgence in a gallon too much of cab sav or sove blonk. I do not live on the Burren; and with the latest invitation from the Australian Wine Bureau to join it in a wine tasting, the time has come to declare: wine tastings are a thing of the past. Never again. And suddenly I feel like a galley-slave being tapped on the shoulder by the boatswain and being given a ticket home, a new suit and spending money for the journey. Freedom. Until you have been to a wine tasting, you do not know the meaning of the word tyranny - made all the more unendurable by its supposedly voluntary character.
Never again
The truth is, wine tastings are amongst the greatest torments that western civilisation has been able to devise. Only one person in ten thousand has a palate which can, after two or three wines, tell the difference between a strawberry milkshake and the Naas dual carriageway. I have been to more winetastings than there are Murphys in the telephone book, and I know: soon after the third or fourth brew slides between the incisors, you are pleased to be able to report the season of the year accurately, give or take six months here or there, or distinguishing between a 1990 Montrachet Grand Cru and a poke in the eye with a burnt stick.
Reporting confidently and knowledgeably on what you are drinking is either the preserve of the one in ten thousand, or of charlatans such as myself, who bluster, boast and lie.
I am of a certain age, and those days are over. The Australian Wine Bureau informs me that it is having a Coonawarra wine tasting on September 11th in the Herbert Park Hotel, and I reply with joy: count me out. With a song in my heart I declare: I will not be there. With a yodel of joy on my lips, I cry, that day I shall be elsewhere. And this dawn, the boatswain's lash off my back, I am forced to ask myself: why have I for years and years submitted to the tyranny of the wine tasting? Why do others? Why will so many people be dutifully shuffling into the Herbert Park Hotel next month, like guilty-looking boys being shown into the head's study after rude noises were made in assembly? Why will they dutifully taste and spit, taste and spit, taste and spit whatever the winetasters have set on their stalls for hours and hours and hours?
And it is hours and hours and hours. The Oz wine tasting lasts from 12 noon to 8pm, with some 80 wines to taste. Even if during the tasting you manage to spit what you have tasted into that foaming lagoon of regurgitated plonk and other people's lukewarm saliva sloshing about in the communal cuspidor, and if you manage to avoid le splashback - which normally covers your face and your nostrils with a vinous glue firehoses cannot remove - and even if you knowingly permit not a single molecule of wine to go down your throat, you will still end up legless.
Sobriety impossible
If you're lucky, you'll merely finish the evening lying on the floor singing The Boys of the Old Brigade while visiting Australians, grinning fixedly, edge towards the door. If you're not, you might just find yourself in bed the next morning, gazing in disbelief at the glasses on the bedside table containing the teeth of the Flanagan sisters you picked up during the latter stages of their joint 80th birthday party at The Pod - because it had seemed such a clever idea to go clubbing after the wine tasting.
No matter what they say, nobody stays sober during the wine tastings, even if they try to - and not many people do. To have to taste 80 wines and to swill them out undrunk is an inhuman, unbearable task; the only way to make it endurable is by allowing a little slippage down past the tonsils with each tasting. Which means that by the time you are one quarter of the way through the winelist, you have consumed 20 wines and a grin of warm idiocy is spreading over your face.
And there are of course the tasting notes. I too have written tasting notes, as the sauvignon blancs and the chenic blancs and the zinfandels and the pinot noirs and the merlots shuffled over my palate like a bare-footed bus-queue which had spent the night pressing grapes. I have read my notes the next morning, while a brace of 80 years snored beside me, their teeth on the cabinet, their limbs propped against the bedheads, their wigs perched on the dressing table. The notes run as follows. First wine - stylish, witty, subdued, elegantly composed, good legs, drinking okay now, better still in two years. Second wine. Ditto. Third wine. Ditto. Fourth wine. Ditto. Fifth wine. Sixth wine. . . at which point my ruminations are normally interrupted by the brace of quivering octogenarian voices beside me wondering aloud: "Who's a naughty boy, then?" and an aged claw or two begins to grapple hopefully under the sheets.
It is not necessary to find yourself prey to the voracious Flanagans to know that no good can come of wine tastings. If there is a single person made better or wiser or happier by being present at one, I have yet to meet him or her. They are merely exercises in palatal and mental bombardment, at the end of which even the most exquisitely refined of senses cannot tell the difference between the dhoti of a Bangla Deshi beggar during a cholera outbreak and Schubert's Mass in C Minor. So farewell Australian Wine Bureau. Farewell, Sopexa winetastings. Farewell, wines of Chile, Italy, Spain, New Zealand: farewell you all; and most of all, farewell too to the fair Flanagans.