Writing and drinking
Laurie Lee wrote that he wrote ‘on wine’, that is, in order to get the creative juices flowing he would get the grape juice flowing first and, somewhere between the sobriety and being drunk enough to think a tattoo is a good idea, he’d churn out literature.
Being a pissed author is nothing new, Hemmingway drank, as did Amis. Of course, there are many more people who are not writers who drink, and plenty of writers who are successful and don’t drink. Something tells me that part of Dan Brown’s recipe for success is not working his way through a crate of special brew, although that’s how many of his readers would be better spending their time.
Journalists are famously boozy and I think that the best job combining getting paid for writing must be resturant critic. The problem is, of course, that you can’t actually get hammered while doing it. This is because you will come to the next morning well fed, but with a clanging hangover, no memory of what the food was actually like and three pages of indecipherable scrawl that you thought at the time was pithy witty notes on the state of the soup.
I’m drinking while I’m writing this, a glass of red. It’s rather nice but I know that I lack the vocabulary and talent required to describe it.
This is a feature shared by wine writers funnily enough, that’s why they make up things like ‘hints of grass’. What in the name of greek buggery is a hint of grass? Either that or the wine has ‘chocolate notes’. They have invented a whole new form of describing things by associating terms that have nothing to do with the product, it’s like describing fence panels using terms normally employed to talk about fish.
Why can’t there be honesty in the profession. ‘This wine tasted okay for a fiver and is ideal for consumption when slumped in front of the telly trying to work out whether or not you’ve seen this episode of Morse.’
If I were a wine writer, instead of a review I’d write a short story that, I hope, would express how first a glass, then a bottle of the stuff being considered made me feel.
Many of my stories would be set in a circus, wintering somewhere rural. The petty jealousies and bickering among the acrobats and the sad lives of the clowns would feature strongly. How refreshing it would be to review a wine and conclude that overall the effect was to leave you feeling just as Bobo the Clown did, as he watched Clarissa the trapeze girl walk off, laughing arm in arm with Carlo the lion tamer. She would never know it had been Bobo, not Carlo, that had sent the flowers. Bobo gave a plaintive honk on his red nose and wandered back to the caravan he shared with three other clowns. He thought he would seek oblivion in drink and this red wine is just the tipple for a broken hearted clown. And a bargain at a fiver a litre.
Being a pissed author is nothing new, Hemmingway drank, as did Amis. Of course, there are many more people who are not writers who drink, and plenty of writers who are successful and don’t drink. Something tells me that part of Dan Brown’s recipe for success is not working his way through a crate of special brew, although that’s how many of his readers would be better spending their time.
Journalists are famously boozy and I think that the best job combining getting paid for writing must be resturant critic. The problem is, of course, that you can’t actually get hammered while doing it. This is because you will come to the next morning well fed, but with a clanging hangover, no memory of what the food was actually like and three pages of indecipherable scrawl that you thought at the time was pithy witty notes on the state of the soup.
I’m drinking while I’m writing this, a glass of red. It’s rather nice but I know that I lack the vocabulary and talent required to describe it.
This is a feature shared by wine writers funnily enough, that’s why they make up things like ‘hints of grass’. What in the name of greek buggery is a hint of grass? Either that or the wine has ‘chocolate notes’. They have invented a whole new form of describing things by associating terms that have nothing to do with the product, it’s like describing fence panels using terms normally employed to talk about fish.
Why can’t there be honesty in the profession. ‘This wine tasted okay for a fiver and is ideal for consumption when slumped in front of the telly trying to work out whether or not you’ve seen this episode of Morse.’
If I were a wine writer, instead of a review I’d write a short story that, I hope, would express how first a glass, then a bottle of the stuff being considered made me feel.
Many of my stories would be set in a circus, wintering somewhere rural. The petty jealousies and bickering among the acrobats and the sad lives of the clowns would feature strongly. How refreshing it would be to review a wine and conclude that overall the effect was to leave you feeling just as Bobo the Clown did, as he watched Clarissa the trapeze girl walk off, laughing arm in arm with Carlo the lion tamer. She would never know it had been Bobo, not Carlo, that had sent the flowers. Bobo gave a plaintive honk on his red nose and wandered back to the caravan he shared with three other clowns. He thought he would seek oblivion in drink and this red wine is just the tipple for a broken hearted clown. And a bargain at a fiver a litre.
1 Comments:
I drink (a lot of) wine and know nothing about "a hint of oak" or berries or whatever the hell people care about. I simply ask "what is the alcohol content?"....There is one particular place here that has a bazillion (yes, that's a number) different beers which are described in a similarly snooty way. Luckily, they have the alcohol content posted right on the menu. If it's at least 10%, it's a winner in my book. I'm not a drunk, it's called being economical. The higher the alcohol content, the fewer I have to purchase. Makes sense to me.
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