The body language of wine
Experts define body language as any non-verbal communication and they claim body language accounts for over 80% of all communication. I first stumbled across body language when a young lady once accepted a bite of food from my fork across the table at dinner in a restaurant. Actually, it was later that evening that I discovered her meaning but there is no denying body language is a powerful means of communication even if we don?t always pay much attention to it at the time.
Q:? I have old red wine stains on the inside of my decanter but nothing I do gets rid of them. Any suggestions?
Being human it seems to be our nature to make things unnecessarily complicated, falling into the trap of splitting hairs over what wine will work with what food. Instead of rules to obey I prefer to follow my intuition, supported by some simple and logic anyone can understand, remember and relate to when pairing wine and food.
You cannot taste if you cannot smell; the two are linked together and its one reason why our appetite is so dull when we suffer from a bad cold and cannot taste. Smell is also a very powerful memory trigger. I once drove through the smoke of a sugar cane farmer?s fire and the smoky smell instantly transported my mind back to my tenth birthday party at the beach in California. Long forgotten memories including the kind of cake I got and even the clothes people were wearing vividly returned with just one whiff of the smell of the smoke.
Just back from Patong. Is this place ever going to join the rest of the world in the trend towards drinking less but better? From wealthy Thai to refuge European, it appears that the majority of people drawn to the hospitality business in Patong are hostile to hospitality. The cheapest, nastiest wines you can imagine seem to find their way to this quarter as if by some perverse law of physics.
Not a day goes by I don?t get at least one solicitation for a wine or spirits producer to sell their products in Thailand. Usually, its some atrocious wine from a far away place like Moldova that no one in their right mind would drink and these e-mails normally are filled with the most unbelievable and far-fetched boasts about the product?s quality, history and pedigree you could imagine.
They call economics the dismal science and they are right; it is dismal. Nothing could be more far removed from the enjoyment of wine than economics. Nonetheless, given the huge amounts of money changing hands over wine one cannot escape economics when studying or trying to understand wine.