I know colleagues whose favourite activity includes food tastings. Any event that means catering for a few hundred people is an excuse to ring up every caterer in town and ask for samples of hors d'oeuvres, cold and hot platters, bite-sized pizzas, imported cheese, stuffed sausages, bacon and ham quiches, tuna tarts and asparagus mousse. I concede that there is pleasure to be had from the crack teams arriving and setting up trays of degustation platters along with the appropriate crockery, cutlery and napery. The marketing teams have all the panache of luxury promoters with their appropriate courtesies and subservience, their splendid evocations of parma ham and Kobe beef, of truffles in season and rarer fruit, all making for splendid theatre.
Me, I'm not one for food tastings where each piece is first prodded and commented upon before being savoured. With so many people peeping at the samplers, it's difficult to simply pick up and enjoy the fare. The flans or the pies - I don't know, can I simply eat in privacy?
Wine, now, that's a totally different thing. You don't really do whisky tastings. Nobody sits down and says, "Let's try a dozen malts, shall we?" But wines call for some serious tasting, not just because of unfamiliarity with an Australian Merlot or French Chardonnay or Chilean Riesling, but because storage conditions might have rendered the pre-selected plonk undrinkable, turned to vinegar and enough to sour any party. So, you do the wise thing, you order up samples and have yourself a sassy party that's so much more fun before the actual party.
Which might be why I'm on a serious case of hiccups. The wines we'd ordered for a party in Mumbai turned out to be unavailable, so the office ordered in others to be tasted, to which we added some from the in-room hotel bar, making a half dozen in all. To make sure the palate wasn't soiled, but having to attend a party nonetheless, I'd made sure to stick with wine (none of which was the same as ours). At least I'd have comparison notes, I thought, while experimenting with the white and the rose and the red, which resulted in a slight tipsiness, nothing a little sea air wouldn't clear later.
Sitting down in the hotel room, pad in hand, pieces of bread to clear the palate between sips, the moon dancing in the distance over the waves - what could be better? Except, unlike professional tastings where you might admire the legs of a red, swivel the Pinot Noir in your mouth, even sip the tiniest bit for pleasure, but never, ever swallow it (gargling it out in an empty glass, presumably), our little group decided we'd rather enjoy than waste the wine. Did I write my tasting notes? I'm sure I did, only if I could find them. Could I remember the white I preferred - the one that wasn't too sweet but dry, or was I thinking of the one at the party that might or might not have been better? Perhaps a little more of the red would be nice, the tannins adding a quality you couldn't really expect in a chardonnay.
What did we pick for the party? I'm not sure I recollect, having finally settled on the age-old "Eenie, meenie, mina mo" for elimination, leaving the last bottles standing as our choice. Next time, though, I might opt for the food tastings and opt out of the wine ones, a stomachache being gentler than a hangover.
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