"My wine merchant has no nose." "How does he smell?"

Sorry there hasn’t been any posts this week, I’ve had a cold for the past two days and I have noticed that the reactions from people have been interesting. Most men have immediately jumped to making jokes of me having chicken or swine flu, whereas most women have told me to get over it, basically attributing my illness to being man flu and therefore I'm exaggerating my symptoms! Either way, whatever I have, it has resulted in me not being able to smell or taste a damn thing, and my hearing has taken a severe battering too.

But the taste and smell loss is what really bugged me. I had the opportunity to try a bunch of Rhone wines yesterday and all of them tasted bitter and made me feel ill. I went out for dinner and had what I think was an excellent steak, but couldn’t taste much and that resulted me feeling I’d wasted the money I spent on it.

But then this morning, I had breakfast cooked for me and realised that my taste is coming back. Not only did I taste the strongly flavoured smoked bacon, but the scrambled eggs were amazing! I knew that they contained a little chilli, I could taste the heat creaping through the creamy eggs, and I even noticed they needed a little more salt than they had! I have never been happier eating scrambled eggs in my life, I had my senses back!

And this got me thinking. We wine folk are often mocked for coming up with flowery language and ‘overthinking’ the wine they are tasting, and sometimes it is justified. We can be a bit too pompous, the sucking air over the wine in your mouth really does look stupid and the endless over swirling of wine in the glass, that we all do, even annoys me! But what we winey people have, is worth all the ridicule and teasing. We have a gift of smell and taste, that everyone has, but they rarely use it to it’s full potential. We experience more flavours, aromas and get more pleasure from a sip of wine than most do from a case, and it is only when that joy has gone do we miss it.

Thank God I’m getting better and strange that it was bacon and eggs that showed me I was on the route to recovery, as they come from the same animals that gave me the damn flu in the first place.