The ones with special days

 

         

The wine:  Salduba Garnacha 2008
The book: One Day, David Nicholls

TomAYto, tomAHto; potAYto, potAHto; grenache, garnacha, cannonau....

It took me a while to work out that grenache and garnacha were the same grape.* I have only just found out it's also called cannonau, in Sardinia. Life is for learning.

I mention this because today is International Grenache Day. That link points to a Decanter article explaining what the day is all about, but it was actually an email from the people at slurp.co.uk which first alerted me to the occasion. 

And what better excuse to buy a bottle of wine?  I popped into Waitrose** to see what they had in stock and once I'd ruled out any blends I was left with two choices; the Salduba, pictured above, and Peter Lehmann's Back To Back.  I nearly went with the Peter Lehmann, and now that I've read a few reviews am starting to wish I had. The Salduba is still perfectly drinkable though; a little rough and ready perhaps but nice and spicy with loads of jammy fruit on the nose.

Grenache tends to be used in blends more than on its own and has quite a high sugar content which makes it particularly good for fortified wines; the sugar develops because of how long it takes the grapes to ripen. The Salduba comes from the mountains in Aragon, Northern Spain, where the Garnacha grapes are thought to have originated, which makes me quite glad I chose it really.  Seems a fitting way to mark the occasion.

The occasion being marked in One Day is St Swithin's day.  We follow the story of Emma and Dexter for 20 years, starting with their first meeting on July 15th 1988 and dipping into their lives on every July 15th after that.  As they both grow up and navigate their 20s and 30s via the usual landmarks - jobs, relationships, babies - their friendship becomes every bit as complicated and unique as real life long-term friendships do. 

Unless you've been under a rock for the last six months you'll know the book has become a massive, massive hit; author David Nicholls was already fairly well known thanks to his Starter for 10 being the film which Mathew MacFadyen did just before Last King of Scotland launched him to stardom, but the success of One Day has cemented Nicholls' celebrity status.  You can hardly get on a tube or bus in London at the moment without seeing someone reading a copy; at the Firestation Bookswap (a fun and slightly chaotic book event I occasionally get to) it has acheived somewhat of a cult status as the book which someone will inevitably bring along.  Every single month.

I'm not convinced the book lives up to the hype. I liked it, but didn't love it as much as I thought it would; then again if it hadn't been for the hype I wouldn't have expected to love it as much as I did in the first place. That's the problem with hype.

When I was first formulating this post I was convinced I'd once read something about there being a special day for a particular book.  An international Pride and Prejudice or To Kill A Mockingbird or even Life-of-Bleeding-Pi Day.  As it turns out, I might have been making this up.  There are lots of days and events to commemorate certain authors (Roald Dahl day was a few weeks ago, and there's a Jane Austen festival in Bath every year) but I can't find anything for a specific book.  So to be honest, I'm cheating a little with One Day.

It sort of fits the bill though, and is quite topical what with the film still being shown in the cinemas and all. I went and saw it a few weeks ago and for a film adaptation it's not bad.  It's not great, either; large chunks of the story are condensed into short moments and significant events are diluted to the point where they barely matter;  I think I would have found it hard to appreciate the true depth of the story if I hadn't already read the book. The conversations I overheard on the way out of the cinema support this theory.

And everything you've heard about Anne Hathaway's meandering accent is true, by the way. I'm convinced that certain lines of dialouge were added just to give her the chance to prove that she really does know that 'bath' is supposed to rhyme with 'lass'.  But: bath, bARth, Grenache, Garn-ARcha.  Each to their own, really.

*see also: Shiraz and Syrrah. 

** Slurp.co.uk have all sorts of great offers on grenache at the moment, and I'm guessing that the email, which arrived at about 4.30 this afternoon, was supposed to get me to buy some of their wine.  Which might have worked, except for the fact that I wanted to drink some grenache TODAY - what with it being international grenache day and all - and not in a day or two, which is how long I'd have to wait if I ordered it from Slurp.co.uk.  So I went to Waitrose.  I am no expert, but I reckon the marketing people at Slurp.co.uk might need to re-think their strategy. 

                             

The ones which are bonkers (but brilliant)

 

The book:  The Raw Shark Texts by Steve Hall

The wine: Le Vin Des Amis 2010, Mas Coutelou

Before we go any further, let's stop for a moment and take a closer look at that wine label.  How many bottles do you see with pictures of naked men on them?  And how often are those men involved in what appears to be some sort of Greco-Roman wrestling? 

No, I didn’t think so.

There’s a distinct lack of Greco-Roman wrestling in The Raw Shark Texts but that didn’t prevent it from becoming one of my favourite books of last year.  I keep trying to explain the story to various people and always end up failing miserably; the best I can come up with is that it’s a bit like film Inception. Which only helps if you’ve seen Inception, and even then it doesn’t help very much because The Raw Shark Texts is nothing like Inception, except for the fact that the plot is completely insane.  Clever and creative and very unique, but still bonkers.  I loved it.

The story opens with a man waking up with no memory of who or where he is; not the most original premise perhaps, but that’s the only  unoriginal thing about this book.  I'm willing to bet that what unfolds will be unlike anything else you've ever read. 

The writing itself is sharp and clever and just a joy to read.  Character descriptions, for instance, don’t come much better than this:

"Maybe there should be types of gardener who visit bookish old men to trim and prune and generally tidy them up occasionally, because the real and actual XXX was as overgrown and tangled as an abandoned allotment. His thick salt-and-pepper hair had grown beyond Einstein-esque into a sort of mad rogue plume. A pen between his teeth, two tucked between his ears and several others tucked and knotted and sticking out of his wild hair, made his head look like one of those deceptively fluffy cacti. Blue, black, red and green biro writing covered the backs of his hands, creeper-vined its way up around wrists and forearms, and towards his rolled-up shirtsleeves, which themselves hadn't entirely been spared.  Scrumpled chunks of paper and collected pages bulged from the pockets of his black schoolboy trousers and patchy threadbare dressing gown.  He was smallish and probably somewhere in his late sixties.  The harsh light from the single bulb didn't make it down through his hair canopy too well and the effect was like looking at a man who was peering out at you from the depths of a wardrobe."

(XXX does have a name but I don't want to use it here in case that spoils your enjoyment of the book. You'll understand how this might happen if you read it.  I'm probably being unnecessarily careful about this, but there we have it.)

Parts of the novel are beautifully tender; there is a section of dialogue between two of the characters which captures the awkwardness of fledgling romance (those earliest moments when you've both realised you really quite like each other but don't have a clue what to do about it) absolutely perfectly.  Equally enchanting is the relationship between Eric, as he eventually discovers he is called, and the love-of-his-life Clio.
 
It's funny, too.  Eric has a cat called Ian: 

"He's a bit of an areshole," I said, thinking about it.
Scout nodded, smiling at this as she poured herself a cup of tea.
"Well, that's what you want in a cat."
I considered and nodded.  "Yeah, actually it is."

I didn’t have to think too hard when it came to finding a wine to match this book.  Even without the nude wrestlers, Le Vin Des Amis is the craziest wine I’ve tasted in a long time. Maybe ever.

 It’s a natural wine, so you’d expect it to be a  bit , um, different - to put things politely.  But in the words (almost) of Tom Jones, this wine is not just unusual, it’s properly weird.  It smells like a farm-yard filled with wet dogs and the flavours are really intense but quite hard to pin down; it’s almost as if there’s been some of that umami paste (the one which concentrates flavours without changing them) added to the bottle.  The flavours I can identify are all things that wine really isn’t supposed to taste like.  Raw meat, for a start.  And it’s quite, well........salty.  (Salty wine which tastes of meat and smells of wet dog.  Are you sold yet?) 

It’s good though.  Really good.  And I’m not the only one to think so; Decanter magazine recently gave it five stars, and make it sound a lot more appetising than I just have. 

The grapes are a blend of Grenache, Syrah, Cinsault and Mouvedre – that last one is where the gamey, savoury notes come from – and at around ten pounds a bottle it’s terrific value.  Of course if money is a bit tight, you could always try challenging your local wine-merchant to wrestle for a bottle instead.

The ones which started it all.....

The wine:  Keerweder Estate Pentagram - 2003
The book:  The Poetry of Robert Frost (Vintage, edited by

                 Edward Connery Lathem)


Soft and smokey with hints of earth and cedar, this is the sort of wine which wraps itself around you like a warm cardigan and makes everything  seem right with the world.  Keerweder is a small winery in the Franschoek region of South Africa.  The Pentagram is a blend of five grapes (yes, the clue is in the name) which are a fairly even mix of Pinotage (23%), Shiraz (23%), Cabernet Sauvignon (20%) and Merlot(19%), with a dash of Petit Verdot thrown in for good measure. 

I first encountered it over a long Sunday lunch at Hardy's Brasserie in Marylebone - you can read more about that here - and fell in love. So much so that I went home and immediately ordered a case. Sadly it's not on the wine list at Hardy's any more, but last time I checked it can still be bought by the case from the lovely people at www.goodwineonline.co.uk/.

I fell in love the moment I met Robert Frost, too.  I was fifteen, his Stopping by Woods  turned up on my secondary school English curriculum, and the rest was history.  Ever since then, I've been searching for a decent collection of his poems.  I have to admit, this one doesn't *quite* match the image I had in my head as a fifteen year old.  That version was a secondhand, cloth-covered hardback with an embossed title, faded pages and the original owner's name written in the front in an elegant, old-fashioned script. In the teenage fantasy world I'd concocted, this would have been given to me as a present by a boy, obviously - one I was madly in love with and to whom I had once mentioned, in passing, how much I liked Robert Frost. 

Twenty-odd years later it occured to me that if I ever wanted to actually own a book of his poems, perhaps I should just go ahead and buy it myself, which is how I ended up with this volume.  It came from the lovely London Review Bookshop, where I also treated myself to a cup of tea and a piece of cake.  Quite a romantic date, if you think about it.

I'm really pleased with it.  It's his complete collected works, arranged in chronological order and with a comprehensive section of notes and detailed textual changes, if that's the sort of thing you're into (I imagine it would be a great student text.)  If you just want to enjoy the poems, it's perfect for that as well;  the perfect mix of old favourites and new treasures still waiting to be discovered. 

How it all began......

We were at Hardy's; a charming little brasserie tucked away in the back streets of Marylebone, and the perfect place to spend a dull and miserable February afternoon. It was one of those long, boozy Sunday lunches where the wine flows and the conversation rambles aimlessly from one trivial topic to the next.

As we contemplated dessert someone - and I ever remember who, I might just marry them - ordered another bottle of red. I tasted it and it reminded me of something I couldn't quite place. As the hours slipped by and the rain came down outside, I tried to work out what it was.  The wine had structure and depth, but there was a simple elegance about it as well.  I identified the smells and flavours - smoke and blackberries and damp earth, with an underlying hint of cedar, but I couldn't shake the feeling that all of those elements added up to something bigger, something else I recognised.

Finally, I realised what it was.  "This wine" I announced to my companions, "tastes just like a Robert Frost poem."  They all looked at me blankly, I tried to explain what on earth I was talking about and just like that, the idea for this blog was born.

 I'm convinced that there are all sorts of other wine and literature pairings which make sense.  Some wines are delicate and elegant, others are meaty and robust.  Some ought to be savoured and enjoyed, others are simply for quaffing.  A wine can be simple and straightforward or rich and full of complexities and occasionally, if you're lucky, you stumble across one which blows your socks off.  

And all of those things are true about books, too.  I tear through some books and linger over others. Sometimes I'm in the mood for something light and frothy, and other times I want something a bit deeper, which will make me think and which works on different levels.

So that's what this blog is all about.  Books which remind me of wine, and wines which remind me of books. Whether you're a lover of one or the other or, like me, an avid consumer of both - I hope you find something here you enjoy.