Book Review: Life's too Short to Drink Bad Wine

Brendan O’Connor’s hymn to his Nespresso coffee maker in the Sunday Independent ‘Life’ Magazine a few weeks ago intrigued me sufficiently to want to draw parallels with wine. Let me first state my position; I am a coffee fanatic, a fundamentalist worshipper of the small brown bean. I have, at home, a semi-commercial espresso machine, plumbed into the mains. I roast my own coffee, buying beans in the green state from a variety of sources from England to West Coast USA. Many of these are, like great wines, the produce of a single small estate. I receive small bags of ‘greens’ from all over the world from fellow enthusiasts. After one such arrived bearing the postmark ‘Medellin, Colombia’ my postman holds me in deep suspicion.

Brendan is dead right when he intimates that Nespresso is miles better than much of the coffee you get in Dublin cafes or from a Foxrock housewife equipped with a puny domestic espresso machine. In the same way that, say, Wyndham Estate, to take but one example, is far better than mucky, rustic wine made a small producer with little understanding of winemaking techniques and, maybe, dodgy hygiene practices. Nevertheless, I’d back my home roasted Nicaraguan ‘Finca la Fany’ single origin bourbon to bloody the nose of any capsule in the Nespresso range when it comes to aroma, flavour and texture. When the little guy gets it spot on, there are subtleties and nuances the big producers just can’t achieve, try as they might. And it’s exactly the same with wine. All that said, if, for you, the purpose of drinking coffee is just to get that ‘wakey-wakey!’ caffeine hit you probably won’t care about quality. The same can be said about the person who drinks wine simply to gain enough confidence to chat up the opposite sex. Most of us, however, want to drink decently.

Which is why I’m  enjoying hugely a new book called ‘Life’s Too Short to Drink Bad Wine. It’s written by Simon Hoggart who made his name as the parliamentary sketch writer for The Guardian but who also runs the Spectator Wine Club. Simon is a great writer, a man with penetrating insight and a keen, acerbic wit. The book is aimed at the wine lover who drinks frequently and who is prepared to pay a little bit more than supermarket prices to get something special. He has a sharp eye for a bargain – buy St.Aubin he says, instead of the more fashionable names if you want white Burgundy.

Simon’s obviously been around and I imagine his eminence as a parliamentary pundit gets him into more than a few choice cellars. But there’s no snobbery and no bullshit here. And, mercifully, no ‘let’s run this up the flagpole and see who salutes’ spurious food pairings, of which I’ve been treated to a surfeit recently. No elitism either. Simon, like me, is a fan of Montus madiran and Morellino di Scansano, good wines both, neither costing a fortune.

There are some gorgeous anecdotes – “Anthony Mitchell of El Vino’s (a famous Fleet Street wine bar) once told me he had a customer who complained about his pinotage. ‘Haven’t you got anything muddier?’ he asked, in the manner of someone in a grubby raincoat asking for something stronger in a Soho porn store.” Classic!

A rattling good read and a ‘must add’ to any wine lover’s bookshelf, ‘Life’s Too Short to Drink Bad Wine’ is published  by Quadrille, €18 in hardback.