Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Wine is plonk

Something which always causes amusement in this household is the never ending steam of scientific pronouncements relating to diet and human health. I came upon the latest missal while trolling through the ABC's website. A transcript from yesterday morning's radio program AM made the claim that coffee drinkers are less likely, on the order of 60 per cent, to develop Type II diabetes. Well that's good news because I have three or four cups a day. The level teaspoon of Nescafe type with no sugar, and Coffee-mate whitener instead of milk.

Foe a couple of years now I haven't taken sugar with my tea, coffee or breakfast cereals. The only reason I stopped was because I believed sugar was weight inducing. Now I can detect instantly if someone has accidentally added sugar. I much prefer things without it. Believe it or not, stuff like tea, coffee and cereal actually has its own taste.

Chocolate is supposed to be good for you too, and there is an urban myth, probably spread by the chocolate makers, that it doesn't cause pimples on teenagers. But I've also lost my cravings for chocolate. If there is some being shared around I'll accept a bit, but I no longer buy it when I'm in supermarkets.

Same thing with red wine. Good for preventing cancer, someone once reckoned - but red wine with me in the evening induces reflux later when I'm asleep. Reflux is when the throat muscle relaxes too much and allows the acidy stomach contents to trickle back up towards the cake hole. The experience of suddenly being wakened by this leakage is pretty bad. Perhaps it might qualify as a near death experience because the breathing response switches into spasmodic reverse.

White wine doesn't have the same effect - I drink imitation champagne preferably. No reflux at all. So now I've got all this red wine going to waste in our wine rack. I'm too chicken to drink it - and sadly, there's not a single bottle of white wine. All gone.

Yesterday we were at the Phoenix Park shopping centre. It used to be shopping central for several low socioeconomic suburbs like Spearwood and Hilton. Things must be changing. The Coles Liquor store had a sign in the window advertising the latest vintage of Grange,
the premium red wine from Penfolds. $499 a bottle if you don't mind. Clear proof that there are Australians with more money than sense. The fine print on the poster said that if you bought any six bottles of wine they would knock ten percent off the total.

I would never have believed there were Grange customers living out that way, but it just shows how wrong one can be. I imagine a lot of purchasers don't actually drink it. Instead it goes on display as a status symbol. Maybe next to their Franklin Mint and Time-Life DVD collections? People collect the Grange vintages year by year. Their biggest fear must be that one day an unsophisticated burglar will get in and have a tipple.

The great thing for Penfolds is that once some dill gets it into their head that they want to collect Grange, they become afraid to stop collecting the new vintages.

I've never tasted Grange, but I would bet it would still give me reflux. I have tried Penfolds liqueur port, which is also very expensive has a similar vintage by vintage following. I went to a wine tasting run by Penfolds in Fremantle about 20 years ago. They were letting the local peasants have a taste. I thought it was not a lot different to the cheap tawny plonk I usually bought by the flagon in those days.

I had a look at Penfolds website yesterday. They're in South Australia. They'll allow you to taste Grange and some other premium wines if you cough up $150 for a one and a half hour tour.
Cheap!

All this thinking about red wine is starting to give me a headache.

© MMVI Paul R. Weaver.

About the writer

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write a couple of million words.

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