Wine

As everyone is aware, there are many varieties of wine. In my own cellar, for example, one may find, amongst others, Shiraz, Malbec, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon (only for the cleaning lady, of course, and for chucking into stews), Rioja, Chianti, Frascati, and Chablis. I'm seriously considering opening a Chablis in half an hour or so, in fact, to accompany the seriously good chicken on ciabatta sandwich that I have just created, which I shall consume in the conservatory.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that, generally speaking, the better the quality of the original raw materials, the better (and, consequently, more expensive) the resultant wine.

Generally speaking.

Something is confusing me, though. It is a truth universally acknowledged, is it not, that cheap, shitty raw materials result in cheap, shitty wine? Hence, for instance, at the bottom, Working Class end of the scale one finds rhubarb wine, elderberry wine, dandelion wine, and so forth. What could be more common and brutish than those pathetic weeds and vegetables?

So how come house wine always languishes with them at the very bottom of the bibendary scale, often going for no more than seven or eight quid a bottle in a restaurant?

Given that, even with the current property crash, a house nevertheless still costs at least upwards of £150,000, you might reasonably expect any wine that's produced from one to reflect such initial investment. And that's before you factor in the substantial extra costs of having teams of peasants harvest the bricks, tread them, and then transfer the ensuing juice to vast fermentation tanks.

There can only be one answer: House wine is manufactured from condemned, slum dwellings. Drinking it is therefore the equivalent of eating condemned meat. Consequently, just as condemned meat is generally diseased, so, too, is house wine. House wine gives you salmonella and E-Coli. It probably gives you BSE, too. This is why people who drink too many bottles of house wine always stagger around and fall over, like BSE afflicted cattle.

QED, I think.

My Lunch

For lunch I made a highly acceptable moules marinières which I ate in combination with freshly baked French bread. The combination of mussels, white wine, butter, parsley, garlic, and shallots was akin to a thousand naked, nubile angels massaging my each and every taste bud with precious unguents. Only one thing marred my ultimate satisfaction: the premature death of some of my ingredients.

I’d bought about 2lbs of apparently healthy mussels earlier in the day. However, when the time came to clean and “beard” the things, I discovered that the mortality rate was something like 10 per cent. There were at least five bivalve corpses in the bag, and another two or three on the critical list. That's to say, though their shells were open in imitation of death, they remained closed when I then squeezed them shut, apparently recovered. But for how long, exactly? Whatever, it wasn't a good sign.

In my opinion, you ought to be able to dial 999 and summon some sort of Emergency Service dedicated to mussel revival. So if, like me, you've got some that look a bit dodgy, you could summon paramedics to give them oxygen, heart massage, or whatever, to keep them alive just long enough to get them into the pan.

I'd like to know what killed them in the first place, though. I think it might have been suicide. They could have heard me chopping the shallots and smelled the wine and butter mixture bubbling away, and thought, "Fuck! This is it! I'm going to die a horrible death!" Whereupon, rather than let me have the satisfaction of killing and eating them, they took their own lives.

Then again, I suppose I should be thankful that they weren’t Islamic fundamentalist suicide mussels, otherwise they might have tried to take me with them, too, pissed off over the UK’s support (and, by extension, mine) for the invasion of Iraq and the actions of Coalition forces in Afghanistan. Forty or so bivalve jihadists could probably self-detonate in my shopping bag with lethal results, simply by farting in unison while keeping their shells tightly shut.

In future, to minimize the risk of this happening, I’ll be careful to always buy a few rashers of Danish bacon whenever I shop for mussels. That way, if they are members of Al-Quaeda's seafood division, the proximity of the forbidden meat should dissuade them from exploding, lest they turn up at the Gates of Paradise all smoky bacon-flavoured. Allah, Muhammad, and the 72 allotted bivalve virgins would, I’m sure, be less than impressed.

My Sunday Lunch

Today I had a haggis for lunch, served up with neeps and tatties. It was a genuine, mutton-based haggis, too, enclosed in a sheep's stomach. None of that Sainsburys/M&S, plastic-wrapped, pork-based crap for me, thank you very much. Furthermore, I poured a wee dram of Scotch over the top to ensure authenticity. And now I shall spend the rest of the afternoon drinking the rest of the bottle.

Anyway, the point is, if I had eaten two of the things, some people might have said that I'd consumed two “haggises”. Well fuck them. I have decided that haggis is a fifth form declension Latin noun, therefore the nominative plural is “hagges”. Then again, given that the word is clearly a triliteral and, as a result, quite possibly Arabic in origin, another possible plural is haggisaan (حجسان)- the dual nominative. (Except, of course, when the dual is the direct object of the verb, that dual then takes the accusative, giving us haggisayn (حجسين).)

Be warned.