WINE AND A WHINE

As a rep­tile – I like to think of my­self as one of those lizards that runs across the hottest desert sands with a high knee ac­tion like an Olympic hur­dler, though in re­al­ity I’m prob­a­bly more of a slow-mov­ing ko­modo dragon – wak­ing up to yet an­other spring morn­ing with a sky the colour of an iron lung is all too much.

Prob­a­bly, you’re read­ing this with sum­mer’s heat well un­der­way but I ac­tively re­sent the idea that most for­eign­ers have moved to Mediter­ranean coun­tries solely for solar de­light. Not true. Speak­ing only for my­self, there’s plenty of other rea­sons to live here long-term and I’ve writ­ten in de­tail about them in this col­umn over the years.

But yes, I admit, I don’t re­mem­ber a spring here in the last decade and a half that was so bloody gloomy. Ap­par­ently, March had the least num­ber of sun­light hours in 50 years and April/early May didn’t feel much bet­ter. I want my money back. I didn’t sign up for these re­lent­less, grim over­head con­di­tions and gen­eral damp.

Simon Winder in his book Ger­ma­nia, makes an ar­gu­ment (with Ger­many as the ex­cep­tion) that “one very odd as­pect of Eu­ro­pean coun­tries is that if you start in their north-wests they are gen­er­ally un­at­trac­tive, harsh places but if you head south-east life gets bet­ter.” He goes on to put this down to fairly ob­vi­ous fac­tors like the ex­is­tence of more sun, olives, mel­ons and an out­door life in­clud­ing wine and vine­yards.

Then the au­thor un­corks some wider his­tory, quot­ing a British wine-mer­chant who main­tains that for most peo­ple in Eng­land until the First World War, “wine meant drink­ing ‘hock’ (Ger­man Rhine/Mosel white) or [what was pop­u­larly called] ‘claret’ (French Bor­deaux red). Fol­low­ing this, post-war, the Ger­man drop “tasted too much of steel-hel­met” and apart from the sweeter “Blue Nun” it largely dis­ap­peared from many British ta­bles.

It seems to me that a lot of 21st-cen­tury Eu­ro­peans, in­clud­ing Cata­lans and Span­ish of course, take good wine slightly for granted. In some areas, the ge­og­ra­phy sup­ports that. Just travel [I al­most re­mem­ber what that verb means] down the roads or look out the train win­dow be­tween Mar­torell and down the line through the Penedès to near the coast at Sant Vicenç de Calders. The land­scape is a non-re­li­gious hymn to the grape.

That great truth-teller Ed­uardo Galeano wrote, “We are all mor­tal until the first kiss and the sec­ond glass of wine.” Per­son­ally, I can’t re­mem­ber ever hav­ing any­thing bet­ter than an ice-cold Chilean dry white called Con­cha y Toro in a Can­berra restau­rant called El Rin­con Latino.

With the re­cent scarcity of a pen­e­trat­ing heat and fur­ther east a war that must’ve taken any warmth out of any scat­ter­ing of sun, I hope that rays of nat­ural sero­tonin are soon seep­ing into our souls like “that first swal­low of wine… after you’ve just crossed the desert.”

Now I’m re­minded of the basic and es­sen­tial dif­fer­ence be­tween cli­mate and weather, though I doubt Leonard Cohen was think­ing about that when he wrote, “Spring­time starts and then it stops in the name of some­thing new.” What else is new apart from the sea­son? Any­thing? Some­thing?