And just like that....

And just like that I stopped writing. I always find it strange how it happens, as if there is magic switch that has been flipped. One I don't have access to. I'm fine, pootling along, working a lot, seeing very few birds. Two exciting things happened since I last stopped by here. 

One, I went to Latvia. You may or may not remember a post from last year about Latvia and how I'd seen no birds there and wanted to put that right. In that post I mentioned I was going to Latvia in April. I didn't, it got cancelled. The airline mucked about with flight times so much that I think it ended up being a four hour trip. So instead I went last weekend. The weather was a bit pants, other than one brief period of sunshire just after I arrived on Saturday afternoon it then turned excessively windy and quite wet which is not ideal for birding. But I still managed to see a fair bit in my quick visit, and have got a bit of a feel for it. A write up will follow in due course, I don't have the capacity just now.

Two, I took a day off work to go and taste wine. I would normally never take time off to go drinking, but this was too good to miss. My name was drawn out of hat to attend The Wine Society's autumn press tasting. As the name suggests this is where their new list for the second half of the year is presented to wine journalists, critics, writers, bloggers, influencers and.....me. I attended not in any of these capacities but as a lucky member of TWS (as it is known). I got to chat to wine buyers and members of the organisation, something that in retrospect I wish I'd done more of, and generally just immerse myself in a side of the wine and spirits business that I would never normally see. And, if I so chose, to taste through 120 different wines. I saw this a challenge.

Spot the famous wine journo...

I taste wine all the time, as in I drink it all the time. I go to wine-themed dinners, I go to small tasting events based around a grape variety or a country, or even a vintage. I have been known to travel to wine regions and visit producers. But this was the first professional tasting I'd been to and I had no idea what to expect. One thing I did know was that I wanted to taste as many as possible, all of them if I could. To see if I could manage it, to see if this is something I enjoyed, to try and see things from a different point of view to how I normally interact with wine.

It does not take a genius to work out that even a tiny sip of 120 wines will get you absolutely sozzled. I spat everything out and walked out stone cold sober - that's what the professionals will do and that's what I did too - an iron will is needed. An iron palate is also needed, it is amazing what swilling so much wine around your mouth does to your taste buds. It destroys them is what it does, or in my case it made me extraordinarily sensitive to sweetness, such that by the end even dry red wines felt ridiculously sweet. But I did manage to taste everything, and I also managed to write notes on every single one that actually made sense the next day when I started typing them up. I won't subject you to them, it ended up being a 5000 word piece, the length of a mini dissertation. 

Overall a very educational day indeed, I have no ideas how the pros do it, it was exhausting. A marathon - four hours means two minutes per wine. Think about that the next time you read something from Jancis in the FT!