Rod Liddle: My career as a wine writer started out so well

Ah, this all started out so well, and with such good intentions. This attempt of mine to write seriously and informatively about wine. Well, to write about wine, full stop, really. There was always going to be a problem with someone who rather likes retsina, I suppose. My chief criteria for judging wine is quantity.

The many bottles of Spanish wine arrived. My wife and I sat in the courtyard, at the little iron table. I had a notebook on the table, and there was a bucket beneath the table, so that we could spit out the wine, like I’ve heard they do. It was a warm and scented summer evening; earlyish — the rabbits were hopping around in the field, the bats were still asleep. The bottles were lined up. We had Manchego cheese, and olives. We kicked off with an Allende Rioja 2009, a yellowish confection. I suspect readers of The Spectator would probably prefer a Pinochet Rioja rather than an Allende Rioja, but never mind. I swilled the stuff around my mouth, Alicia did the same. We spat into the bucket, via my trousers. I picked up the pen. ‘Quite a… BIG taste, I think,’ I said. My wife nodded. ‘It’s very oaky,’ she said, ‘and I like it.’

What does she mean ‘oaky’? She’s never tasted any oak, to my knowledge — so how would she know? Maybe she just meant it’s okay. We kept drinking and, for a while, spitting, until my wife said that we don’t usually drink decent wine, we just buy that £4.99 Pinot Grigio from Morrisons, buy it by the lorryload, isn’t it sort of a waste to be spitting good wine out into a bucket? And that, really, is when the rot set in.