A Layman's Wine Explorations 2

by William Powell

By now, I have a theory that teenage taste buds are simply overwhelmed by the many nuances wine can have - but that was no help to my 17-year-old self. Besides, white wine simply wasn't something you saw in films, at least not in the acceptable ones, with plenty of explosions, swords being brandished or bare breasts paraded across the screen (usually for no apparent reason). In those films, people drank red wine, or poured it over said breasts, but certainly not a cultured white wine.

The Crimson Pirate and Sandokan

The Crimson Pirate didn't ask for a Riesling, Sandokan didn't savour a Chardonnay, and if he had, everyone would probably have thought him a wimp. Of course, that casts a rather sad light on my prejudice-ridden youth … and on the fact that wimps have always had more style than me … but white wine was simply unacceptable at 17 in Bavaria's Lower Main region. Red was what a man of the world drank - and brandy! But I've never been able to handle drinks with an alcohol content above 20%. Just the smell of tequila still makes me feel sick today, and whisky gives me a headache just looking at it.

SchwippSchwapp and My Brother

My inner tough guy wasn't, and still isn't, quite that tough after all, and since it would be a few more years before I had enough self-confidence to drink Almdudler and SchwippSchwapp in public, it had to be red wine if I wanted to stand out a little rather than drink beer like everyone else. So we - my brother, our neighbour and I - set off to find the right wine for the occasional video night (with plenty of explosions, naturally) and the rather rare dates with supposed village beauties (a few glasses helped here, too).

Le Patron Makes for Embarrassing Hindsight

A lack of experience, a lack of taste and - above all - a lack of funds eventually led us to a grand master of red-wine-like yuck - to the boss himself: Le Patron! Looking back with mild embarrassment now feels a little like those moments we've probably all experienced: somehow you're having a good day, feeling light and carefree, and you run into your current (utterly wonderful and adorable) crush.

Sticking with the Patron

But hey, this is your day, so you sidle up, crack a few jokes and feel fantastic … until you see your reflection in a shop window and there's snot running out of your nose/one eyebrow missing/bits of food the size of Russia stuck between your teeth, or some other disaster that sends you down the drain faster than you can mutter “embarrassing mishap”. And yet we stuck with the Patron, believed in the down-to-earth magic of “decent but cheap” table wine, and spent almost two years unaware that this vinegar-like slurry was probably costing us larger chunks of our livers than all the painkillers we popped during that time combined.

The Basic Law and the Geneva Conventions

Amazingly, Le Patron is still available to buy today and seems not to have fallen foul of Article 1 of Germany's Basic Law or the Geneva Conventions. Still, it's no longer for me, because my education didn't end with petrol-station wine - thank God. Incidentally, I made my next great discoveries in oenology abroad … but that's another story.

Incidentally, I'm currently rather taken with the 2013 Merlot from Weingut Weinmann. They list it as an everyday wine. For me, it's something special.