These are the words of Australian feminist Germaine Greer, uttered on the day that another great promotor of (naked) women, Hugh Hefner, arrived in Britain. Hefner is a product of a bygone era, where it was ok to nip a waitresses bum as she walked past you in a restaurant. Germaine has campaigned for and liberated women so they are considered equal to men. Hefner is the past, Greer is the present. So how come the world seems to love Hef and despise Greer?
The answer is simple, we don't like being lectured to. Sure, Hefner's Playboy bunnies may not be to everyone's taste, but they are paid £30,000 a year (more than a graduated lawyer will get in his first few years work) and work in a safe environment with security seconds away, which is more than a home help, being paid £13k per year has. Greer has campaigned for years for equality, and the woman's right to choose, and that is admirable, but she has done it by lecturing, informing people that they are living their life wrong and waggling a lot of fingers in people's faces and getting angry. Today her cause is the preservation of bluebells at the expense of dogs, next week it will be the abolition of cobbled streets and in a month she will consider street lamps to be a waste of energy and environmentally unfriendly. Greer wants to fix things and Hefner just gets on and enjoys his life!
Which got me thinking about wine and how I am so obsessed with criticising it. I, like many critics, am so convinced in my abilities to analyse wine that I feel a need to tell people that this wine is great and that wine is terrible. I am the Germaine Greer of the wine world and that shocked me as that is the last thing I would ever want to be! I want to worry less about rating and reviewing wines and care more about drinking them. I want to embrace the vinous Hefner within and enjoy my wine life more. So today, rather than reviewing a wine, I'm going to tell you a different story, one of my enjoyment of wine.
It has been the warmest day of the year so far, I was working in my wine shop, doing deliveries and having meetings. I was shattered, so I sat down to dinner with the boats bobbing about in the harbour outside. I noticed that there was some wine left over from last night, that I had bunged the cork back into, so I grabbed a tumbler, I couldn't be bothered getting up to get a wine glass, and poured myself some 2009 Beaujolais Villages from Louis Jadot. It was exactly what I wanted, a simple, easy to drink wine that I didn't have to think about, and I just sat back and enjoyed it after a hot, sticky day at work.
Today this mediocre wine was perfect.
Comments
Thanks for your kind words, they are most appreciated!
Peter