Learning to spit

Spitting doesn't seem much of an accomplishment to boast of, but it's a first for me, and I'mpleased and interested to discover I can do it - for the first time this afternoon I've been at the sort of wine-tasting where there really was no option but to spit. Oh, I've been to tastings where it was possible to spit, and other people were doing so (most recently, this one - my, there have been a lot of wine-related posts lately...), but mostly I'm happy to drink the stuff. But at the rosé tasting on Monday, Helen mentioned that she had 90-odd vins de pays which she needed to taste, and she'd welcome assistance...

So this afternoon durham_rambler and desperance and I joined Helen and some other volunteers, and tasted our way through some 40 French wines. These were (almost all of) the wines which had been selected as the best of the current batch of vins de pays, and our duty was to taste the wines made with the well-known, international grape varieties: chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, merlot and cabernet sauvignon, for the most part (tomorrow another team will taste the more regional wines). I couldn't have hoped to taste my way round this number of wines swallowing even the tiniest of mouthfuls, so I was relieved to discover that I could cope with spitting out most of what I tasted - and although sometimes a little wine got swallowed (oh, noes!) I still felt astonishingly sober at the end. desperance spat with great aplomb; but I think his height gives him an unfair advantage.

I'd like to be able to say that the wines were stunning, but although there were very few which simply weren't any good, few of them were at all distinctive. Mostly they were pleasant but unmemorable.