February, the month of love and lovers. Lots of hearts, pink colours in the ads, kisses, lips, cupids, chocolates and bubbles. I have never celebrated Saint Valentine and never has my wife complained.
Talking about saints now, I am reminded of Saint Thomas Aquinas and his infallible method called antithesis, created to prove his point by explaining the opposite to the question that he wants to prove. So, in the spirit of proving my one and only love for WINE, I will try to prove it by exposing to you, my loyal readers, my biggest hatreds to wine:-
• I hate it when the waitress brings the food menu and forgets the wine list, so I have to ask for it and the kind waitress takes hours to bring it.
• I hate when the white wine is hot. Period. I can’t drink it. I’m forced to put ice in it.
• I hate Champagne or sparkling wine with no bubbles. I give it to my cat.
• I hate it when people cannot drink out of an ordinary glass, they ‘must’ drink from big German-made crystal wine glasses. I can drink wine out of an empty yoghurt container.
• I hate wine connoisseurs and their encyclopaedic knowledge. Nerds.
• I hate people that love natural wines, even though I love natural and orange wines.
• I hate wine cocktails. I think they always taste like Fanta.
• I hate the wines my mother buys when I visit her, always cheap Chilean Carménère.
• I hate it when wine lists are sorted by country, they should be sorted by grape varieties like in any normal country.
• I hate half bottles of wine, they look ridiculous on the table.
• I hate all the names of vineyards with animal names (monkeys, birds, etc.) or saints names (Julia, Ana, Maria) or “don” names (Don Juan, Don Mateo, Don Señor)
• I hate the title ‘Wine Ambassador’, the worst pseudonym for ‘alcoholic’.
• I hate Rock Stars that drink from the bottle during live concerts, except for Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, who we can always forgive.
• I hate when my wife tells me how many glasses I drank the night before.
• I hate that morning after feeling of having said something that I should never have said.
Frankly speaking, I hate with all my heart to be a wine lover. I would prefer not to be one. I would have better to be a bird watcher, a car lover, a puppet collector or an opera freak, but I can’t. I have tried with no success.In the month of love, I declare my unconditional and eternal love for wine.
