Wino Takes All

Amazing what a couple of good nights out can do for the soul. I am now exhausted but feeling more sane than I have for a long while. Last night's wine tasting was fairly pleasing. I was seated at a table with a couple of colleagues and six other strangers who work in the building. In front of us were eight bottles of wine, four white, four red, covered in foil. The tasting was ostensibly to teach us the difference between Old and New World wines - but we were also challenged to see if we could identify even more details. Our first pairing was two white wines, and the instant I sipped number one, I knew what it was: Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. I knew for certain because it is basically all I have been drinking since I did a wine course last summer - I have it at home, I have it in restaurants, and it's even our tipple of choice when we go to the godforsaken O'Neill's next door to our building.

Now, shocking though this might be, I don't actually see myself as a shy, retiring flower of a girl. On the contrary, and I know this may be hard for many of you Faithful to believe, I sometimes think I can be fairly forceful and persuasive! So I was about as gobsmacked as I get when our self-appointed team captain decided that both the first white wines we were tasting were Rieslings. I tried to show him the error of his ways, gently at first and then using other skills such as rhetoric, patronising scoffing and derisive lip curling, but nothing worked and they handed in 'our' answer sheet unapologetically. I can't deny that I was about as smug as anyone's ever been when we tore off the foil and found a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. I'd even got the year right (by complete fluke). I don't think my head actually came away from my neck with the force of the self-satisfaction, but a rupture wasn't far off.

From then on, my table decided I was some sort of wine genius, a Jilly Goulden of the banking world, and no answer was written down without my say-so. Sadly, since I have only been drinking one wine for the past eight months, I am entirely clueless about every other grape and was thus zero help. All I could do was confirm that something "wasn't Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc" which wasn't that valuable when we were drinking deep reds.

Anyway - it was a fun evening and I let my hair down, ate too much tapas and knocked over a bottle of £90 Bordeaux. Oops. Today I felt so much perkier that I managed to make it to the gymnasium but promptly tarnished those efforts by adjourning to O'Neill's with Laura et al. at 5pm, and quaffing white wine while inhaling ready salted McCoy's before heading to Donald and Bee's and having a delicious curry and several after-dinner chocolates. Now I'm back in bed feeling revoltingly full and almost human: my neuroses are pacified, the gas leak has been fixed and all is ticking over nicely. The fear of needing a new boiler is still looming but denial is not just a river in Egypt and I'll do my best to enjoy these last brief moments of abject poverty before the bailiffs arrive. Keep your fingers crossed.