Gillette has just launched a gentleman's razor with five blades on it. It no doubt has a vibrating function, rubber fins to stretch your skin to get access to more hair and it probably has a moisturising strip that not only smooths your skin but injects botox into your face to make even the most wrinkly Sid James look like George Clooney.Why does a man need all this? My Grandfather shaved for seven decades with one blade, no moisture strip and the only fins in his life came from the fish he had for dinner. But there again, he was a proper man, not a preened metrosexual. The razor blade has been complicated for little or no reason but to sell new razors.
The same applies with HD television. I was wandering through Woolworths and saw that a high definition DVD cost twice as much as a regular DVD. Does the picture really need to be that sharp, and the sound so clear? If you watch the Italian Job, not the remake with Marky Mark in it but the original Caine and Coward movie, the sound is poor, the picture is that pale 1960's quality, yet it is still a bloody good film. I don't need to see a brace of Mini's running around Turin in Hi-Def on a twenty inch screen. Again, the complication of a TV screen doesn't mean that movies or TV programmes are better, it just means that terrible shows and films starring Angelina Jolie are in crisper quality.
Which is why I decided to drink Rauzan Segla 1999. I have been looking at wines from Italy, The Rhone, Germany, Alsace, America... any region really aside from my first love, Bordeaux. So, realising I had not tried a Margaux in a while, I opted to open up this wine.
Uncomplicated, simple but brilliant. This is a beautiful wine, perfumed with an abundance of cherries and a little mint and wild raspberries. The palate is soft with grippy tannin with a lovely pipe tobacco sweetness, whole peppercorns injecting a little spice, plum stones and a stunning clean finish. Certainly, it was a bit young, it was a bit tannic and not the best year, but it was a black and white movie with mono sound whilst shaving with a cut throat razor. Stunningly simple and all I could ever need.
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