A WINE REVIEW ... (SORT OF !!)

As I sit down to this humble task of reviewing a bottle of wine, one might wonder why a man of my usual proclivities, more accustomed to the critique of culture, art, and the human condition, would stoop to the level of beverage commentary. Wine-tasting you see, considered as a public performance, is the most successful confidence trick since the Emperor’s new clothes. The participants gather in solemn conclave, armed with glasses no larger than a thimble yet priced like Fabergé eggs, and proceed to treat a simple agricultural product as though it were a cryptic message from the gods.

First comes the tilt and swirl, a manoeuvre executed with the gravity of a brain surgeon positioning a scalpel. The purpose, we are told, is to “release the aromas.” In practice it releases mainly the taster’s conviction that he is doing something profoundly sophisticated. The liquid climbs the sides of the glass like a mountaineer who has taken a wrong turn, and everyone nods approvingly, as if centrifugal force were a mark of civilisation. Next, the nose is inserted—often to a depth that suggests the taster is trying to inhale the entire vineyard. Eyes half-close in rapture. A pause. Then the pronouncement: “Graphite… undergrowth after rain… a hint of liquorice and old saddle.” One listens in vain for the honest admission: “Fruit, mostly.” But honesty is not the point. The point is to produce a verbal bouquet more extravagant than the liquid itself, a bouquet composed of nouns no two people can ever agree on.

And yet, here we are, with a bottle of M&S's Chenin Blanc in hand, a testament to both the democratization of wine and perhaps, the democratization of taste. The label promises "citrus and tropical fruits", a description so vague it could apply to a fruit salad at a mid-tier hotel breakfast buffet. But, with scepticism as my companion, I pour the golden liquid into a glass, and I am immediately struck by its hue, a reminder of autumn sunsets rather than the harshness of the British winter outside. The first sip is a revelation, not because it's ground-breaking, but because it's so unpretentiously enjoyable. Here's a wine that doesn't demand you to have a PhD in Oenology to appreciate it. There are notes of lemon, yes, but also a whisper of something akin to mango, if mango had gone on holiday and come back slightly disappointed. It's crisp, clean, and utterly devoid of the bombast one might associate with more self-important vintages.

It is the kind of wine one would take to a dinner party hosted by friends who appreciate good company over good wine - a rare breed, these days. It's not the wine you'd discuss at length to impress a sommelier; it's the wine you enjoy while discussing life's more pressing matters, like why British summers seem to have abdicated their traditional duties. At £7.99, it's a steal, not because it's cheap, but because it offers more than its price tag suggests. It's the kind of wine that makes one ponder the irony of wine snobbery when, at the end of the day, what we all seek is pleasure in a glass, not a lecture on vintages and terroir.

In this age where every glass of wine seems to come with an essay on its heritage and lineage, M&S's Chenin Blanc stands as a beacon of simplicity. It's not about the wine; it's about the moment. The vocabulary of wine-tasting is a triumph of pseudo-precision. Terms drift about like expensive fog: structure, minerality, length, grip, tension. Each is vague enough to mean anything and authoritative enough to silence dissent. To question them is to reveal oneself as a philistine, which in this context means someone who thinks wine is for drinking.

And in that moment, this wine does what all good wines should do - it fades into the background, allowing the laughter, the conversation, the joy of good company to take centre stage. So, here's to you, Marks & Spencer, for producing a wine that reminds us why we drink in the first place. Not for the accolades or the pompous tasting notes, but for the sheer, unadulterated pleasure of a well-spent evening.

THE TOP 20 THINGS I WOULD DO IF I WAS AN EVIL OVERLORD ...

1) My Legions of Terror / henchmen will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, NOT face-concealing tinted ones !!

2) My ventilation ducts will be far too small for a human being to crawl through.

3) My noble half-brother, whose throne I have usurped, will be killed, NOT kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dark, dingy dungeon near any possible escape routes.

4) I will NOT use any plan in which the final step is horribly complicated, e.g. “Align the 12 Stones of Power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion at the moment of total eclipse”. Instead, it will be more along the lines of; “Turn on that thing there”.

5) The artefact which is the source of my power will NOT be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in a socking great big dirty safe-deposit box with a big lock. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.

6) If a group of my henchmen fail miserably at a task, I will NOT berate them for incompetence then send the EXACT same group of idiots back out to try the same task again !!

7) When I've captured my adversary and he says, “Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about ??” I'll say, “Nope”, and shoot him. No, on second thoughts, I'll just shoot him, and THEN say “Nope”.

8) After I have kidnapped the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, NOT a lavish spectacle held in a castle in three weeks' time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out !!

9) I will NOT include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will NOT be a large red button marked “Do Not Push”. The big red button marked “Do Not Push” will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it..

10) When my guards split up to search for intruders, they will ALWAYS travel in groups of at least two so that if one goes missing, the other will immediately initiate an alert and call for backup, instead of quizzically peering around a corner.

11) I will NOT design the Main Control Room in my impenetrable fortress / space station so that every single workstation is facing away from the door !!

12) One of my advisors will be an average eight-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be immediately corrected before implementation.

13) All my slain enemies will be cremated, or at least have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them, NOT left for dead at the bottom of a cliff near a village of wise, kindly old martial arts teachers !!

14) My vats of hazardous toxic chemicals will ALWAYS be covered when they are not in use. Also, I will NOT construct flimsy wooden walkways right above them !!

15) I will NOT employ any device with a digital countdown. If such a device is unavoidable, I will set it to activate so that when the counter reaches 117, it explodes just as the hero is just putting his plan into operation.

16)  I will NOT utter the sentence “But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know”.

17) If an advisor says to me “But my liege, he is but one man. What can one man possibly do ??”, I will reply; “THIS, you pillock !!”, and shoot him between the eyes.

18) I will NOT have a son. Although his laughably under-planned attempt to usurp power would easily fail, it could also provide a fatal distraction at a crucial point.

19) I will NOT have a daughter. She would be as beautiful as she was evil, but one look at the hero's rugged countenance and she'd betray her own father … especially if the hero looks like Johnny Depp.

20) Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will NOT indulge in ever increasingly loudening maniacal laughter.

Now, if the makers of “Stardust”, “Star Wars Episodes I-III”, “The Princess Bride”, “The Mummy”, “The Chronicles of Narnia”, “Eragon”, “The Golden Compass”, “Enchanted”, "The Spiderwick Chronicles", and all those fantasy films we’ve been subjected to over the past few years could PLEASE bear these rules in mind !!

Thank you.

DIARY OF A TECHNOPHOBE

I used to think that the greatest invention of the twentieth century was the paperback book. Not the aeroplane, not television, not even the atomic bomb—though God knows that one kept us on our toes. No, it was the cheap, portable, dog-eared volume you could slip into a coat pocket and take to a café, a train, or a hospital waiting room. You could underline it, spill coffee on it, lose it on a beach and feel a genuine pang of bereavement. The book was a companion; it had weight, smell, texture. It aged with you. Now the book has been digitised, and with it, everything else. The library has become a cloud, which sounds poetic until you realise that clouds dissipate. One server farm hiccup and your entire collection of Proust, your annotated Shakespeare, your guilty stash of detective novels—poof. Gone. Not burned in some heroic auto-da-fé, just quietly unplugged in a warehouse in Oregon.

 

And we accept this. We even celebrate it. The tragedy is not merely that objects have been dematerialised; it is that experience itself has been thinned. Conversation, once a slow, exploratory dance conducted over wine and cigarette smoke, is now a staccato exchange of abbreviations and emojis. Where we once risked misunderstanding in the pursuit of genuine connection, we now settle for the illusion of immediacy. A heart emoji is not affection; it is the digital equivalent of a nod across a crowded room. Efficient, certainly. Intimate? Hardly. We have gained access to all human knowledge and lost the ability to concentrate on any of it for more than thirty seconds. The scroll is infinite, the attention span finite. We boast of multi-tasking while achieving multi-distraction. The mind, once a deep well, has become a puddle reflecting nothing but its own ripples. And memory—poor, betrayed memory. 

We no longer remember; we bookmark. Photographs once lived in albums that gathered dust on shelves, forcing us to confront the passage of time whenever we opened them. Now they live in phones, sorted by algorithm, served up by facial recognition software that knows our dead relatives better than we do. The past is no longer a country we visit; it is a feed we scroll through while waiting for coffee. I am not a Luddite. I type these words on a laptop, and I will press “publish” with the same casual indifference with which I once posted a letter. But I miss the friction. I miss the resistance that paper offered to haste, the way a book forced you to inhabit its pace rather than impose your own. I miss the sense that culture was something you carried inside yourself, not something you streamed.

Perhaps the young will never feel this absence. They were born with screens in their cots, raised on the dopamine ping of notification. For them, the analogue world is a quaint museum exhibit: “Look, children, this is how Grandad read the news—on actual paper!” They will pity us, as we once pitied those who had to crank automobiles by hand. Yet I suspect that even they, in quieter moments, feel the hollowness. The screen is always bright, always responsive, always there. It never closes its covers and leaves you alone with your thoughts. That is its genius and its curse. It has abolished solitude without creating companionship. In the end, the digital revolution has not liberated us from drudgery; it has replaced one kind of servitude with another. We are no longer chained to desks or factory floors, but we are tethered to devices that demand constant attendance. The master is now in our pocket, and it vibrates whenever it wants our attention.

The world has changed. Where once we exchanged numbers with the simplicity of pen and paper, now we're expected to engage in a digital dance that feels more like a tango with a machine than a human interaction. My mobile phone, a relic from the early 2000s, serves more as a reminder of simpler times than a tool for modern communication. Its lack of "smartness" is, paradoxically, my shield against the incessant beeps and buzzes of modern life. This transformation into a technophobe is not without its merits. There's a certain satisfaction in resisting the tide of progress, in choosing to live slightly out of step with the current. It's akin to listening to jazz in an age of electronica; there's beauty in the discordance, in the refusal to conform.

Yet, as I ponder over my digital conundrums, I can't help but feel a pang of nostalgia for the days when technology was an aid, not a master. We've come to a point where our devices dictate our lives, where every moment not spent staring at a screen feels like time wasted. Perhaps my technophobia is not fear but a longing for a time when life was less about connectivity and more about connection. In this digital dystopia, I stand as a quaint figure, perhaps anachronistic, but with a silent plea for a return to the simplicity of human interaction over the complexity of human-technology interaction. 

May we all find our way back to a world where technology serves us, not the other way around.