In splendid seclusion, wine tasting helps while away the time better than sudoku
If you’re reading this, chances are that you are working in isolation. Social distancing — the euphemism that may become the word of the year for 2020 — is a lot lonelier that just keeping a safe distance from fellow human beings. It is an inversion of our natural instinct (most of us anyway) to engage with people.
Only hermits are unfazed by the health guidelines. In the internet age our most readily available substitute for human company is the online connection with the minds of others. The web has become a type of second home. Our phones have been filled with witty trash — even more so now as bored but imaginative selfisolators spend their time finding innovative ways of describing our predicament.
Being healthy but underworked feeds another type of viral environment.
Next to our screen and keyboard, however, our refrigerator becomes our next best friend. For those unaccustomed to spending long stretches at home, ennui has a strange way of making the fridge door handle even more magnetic than its seal.
It’s probably only a matter of time before the bottles of wine “ageing” in your wine racks start looking ever more attractive. If you’re able to wait for the return of a “significant other” you’ll think of deferring that assault on the slumbering bottle.
But if you are both selfisolating at the same time, or if there’s no point in delaying the inevitable, you’ll quickly start talking yourself into the sanityinducing merits of drawing the cork. Probably the greatest impediment will be the adage about the dangers of drinking alone: those who drink alone die alone. Hopefully, you’ll reach for your keyboard for some assistance at overcoming the obstruction. Since we know that for every maxim there’s an equal and opposite maxim, you won’t have to look far: “I never drink alone: somewhere someone else is drinking too”; and “It’s not drinking ‘alone’ if there are screaming children outside the closet door.”
Once you’ve managed to talk yourself all the way to the rack, and you have the bottle in one hand and the corkscrew in the other, you’re 90% there. Now it’s about the difference between a slow, steady decline into bad behaviour, or turning the inability to resist temptation into something more useful: enter here the do-it-yourself wine tasting (singing and dancing).
Research conducted by Yale neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd has established that serious (sampling to savour) wine tasting is probably the best mental exercise you can undertake, better than solving complicated maths problems or listening to music (both of which engage fewer parts of the brain). In fact, if you play sudoku to delay or prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s or senile dementia, you could achieve a better result and have a lot more fun by tasting wine.
To appreciate a wine fully — to taste, smell, note the colour, feel the texture and tannins and integrate all this information — different parts of your brain have to be engaged simultaneously. In Shepherd’s words “a tremendous range of sensory, motor and central brain systems [are] involved in wine tasting”.
For people whose relationship with a chosen bottle is aesthetic — tasting to appreciate rather than to get intoxicated — the process of doing so entails more varied mental exercise than almost any other single activity. If you’re going to pass time in relative isolation and you don’t want to disengage completely, if you want to keep your brain alive and you’re not going to be unnecessarily prudish about consuming alcohol alone, perhaps you should try out your wine-tasting skills.
There are several apps you can download if you feel you need guidance on the way.
Mostly they deal with international wines (you may wish to look at Decanter’s Know your Wine app, which is only on the App Store for iPhone and iPad). Locally your best bet would be International Wine Centre or The Cape Wine Academy — assuming there’s someone there to respond.
Looking for something worth home sampling but not priced as if the apocalypse is imminent? For a wine that bears the hallmarks of traditional Cape reds but is still refined and savoury, the appallingly named Pardonnezmoi Cinsault 2019 from the Old Road Wine Company fits the bill. It’s distributed by national wholesaler DGB so it should be available pretty much anywhere that affordable (but not mainstream) wines are to be found.
As a companion white I’d seek out a modern classic, the Backsberg John Martin 2018. It’s a thoughtfully oaked sauvignon blanc, so it will also appeal to chardonnay drinkers. Both are priced between R100 and R140, leaving your bank account with a prospect of recovery after Covid-19.