Glass half full, but it’s not wine
Isn’t this weather top shelf? It may only be the beginning of November but after the angst of the election process, all this sunshine showing up regularly makes the whole country feel as if it’s enjoying a post coital cigarette.
Sure there’s been the odd bit of rain, including the weekend just gone, but if the old cold currant bun keeps this up, we can forgive it for its non-appearance last summer, and forget the long big wet of a soggy winter.
The Sunday before last, a friend came round bearing the gift of a warm bottle of wine, apologising for not being able to locate a cold one in the supermarket fridges. Apparently so great was the guzzling of the nectar of the gods on the previous sun-drenched day, that staff couldn’t stock the fridges fast enough.
It would have been churlish to spurn the proffered refreshment, and after reading predictions of a worldwide downturn in vino, we dutifully knocked it back, savouring it in the warm glow of the back garden.
But brace yourself, swiggers. Apparently the International Organisation of Vine and Wine is expecting an eight per cent decrease in global wine production.
Extremes of weather in key wineproducing countries, such as France and Italy, are to blame, producing the worst global harvest since 1961.
Serious sniffers of the cork will be clearing space in the back of their wardrobes to stockpile and hide their Euro plonk after the fall in output, predicting there will 2.9 billion fewer botts coming out of 2017.
Back in June of this year, there was a predicted downturn in the New Zealand harvest of nine per cent and a smaller vintage of some 396,000 tonnes, so there’s no need for complacency at home either.
Wine is our fifth largest goods export, valued at $1.65 billion a year, so hopefully a few bottles will be put aside for the local market with enough to raise a glass over the Christmas turkey.
Seriously, folks, there’ll be plenty to see us through summer, but quelle horreur if we wine drinkers are reduced to drinking the ubiquitous craft beer swimming in its stray man-bun and beard-hair follicles.
This bog-brown beverage, plus the damp squib of non-snapping Christmas crackers, would be enough to rip anyone’s Yuletide yippy.
This time it isn’t ACC responsible for shutting the cracker down. I have searched the ACC list-of-shame freak accidents from slips and trips during the holiday period, but have seen no sign of PCAYS (Post-Christmas Arm Yank Syndrome) brought about by revellers pulling too vigorously on cracker ends to herald the required snap and pop.
A maker of craft crackers was shocked to discover at a craft outlet that strips-that-go-bang ‘‘novelty explosives’’ were now off limits due to hazardous substances regulations, which require special permits.
I seem to remember a couple of years back happily boarding a plane and storing my case in the overhead locker, oblivious to the fact that I had committed an unintentional putative terrorist act.
Secreted into my luggage was a sixpack of Christmas crackers inserted with the incendiary novelty explosives, which could have potentially blown my plane, and all of my fellow passengers, to sweet smithereens.
I apologise for mentioning the ‘C’ word so early in the late of the year. Normally Christmas and all who sale in her is a time of year I will not hear mention of in this bleak house, till the Eve of it.
I blame the hazy smoke of post coital lassitude and the suggestive sunny approach of the season for bringing it up.
While I object to the horrid bangs of Guy Fawkes crackers, I think it would be shameful if the pop of a Christmas cracker depended on a special permit the humble craft-maker would have to fill out in triplicate.
How did every little thing become so tracked and accounted for? Recently I drove the car into town during rush hour and had to undergo the humiliation of learning how to navigate the intricacies of the newish parking system.
Instead of feeding a meter with coins, one now has to memorise the parking number before tramping miles to a parking station to select from myriad methodology of payments.
Now one just about has to have a degree in parking to complete what once was a simple transaction, after which you are not entirely sure exactly how long you have been permitted to park. And you are now late, and very, very angry for once again having to jump through a new set of silly technological hoops.
The robots aren’t coming to take over our lives, they are here and we are meekly meeting their needs and requirements. At least for a few days of now-and-again good-weathered early summer, we can snatch a few brief moments of human happiness, before the next hurdle of interminable technological demands presents itself for us to ‘‘master’’.
Death to the terrors and great miseries of the rotten machine.
Serious sniffers of the cork will be clearing space in the back of their wardrobes to stockpile and hide their Euro plonk.