Cork screw 11 July 2007

Whether you enjoy Jenny Ratcliffe-Wright's Spit or Swallow partly depends on your attitude to relentless sexual reference, says Tim James in his latest Noseweek article

Should a jaded wine debauchee be reviewing ‘a guide for the wine virgin’, I wonder? The book’s main title is Spit or Swallow, in which I refuse to wonder about erotic reference – despite the adolescent fervour with which the author pursues raunchy innuendo throughout, in the sadly probably justified belief that even some adults will regard it as fun rather than tedious. Or is my old age sourly revealing itself? But, hey, even those of us whose wine virginity is in the bibulous past have memories of sweet innocence….

I remember, for example, one of my most exciting wine purchases ever, when I was impecuniously living in London, uncaring that it was the wine capital of the world. I owed an expensive gift to someone who I knew enjoyed wine. So I spent happy hours in a Soho wine-shop, ignorantly and proudly choosing a mixed case of red. My basic principles were simple: the average price dictated the range of choice, and the labels had to be beautiful, interesting or grand. What did I care about vintage, or a possible difference between Rioja and Chianti? The same principles no doubt guide most wine-virgins’ purchases when they venture into unfamiliar territory –  and I’m not certain that they are not just as reliable as little gold stickers.

Around that time I also had an experience revealing how wonderful a simple match of food and wine can be. I’d bought (what prompted me I can’t remember) a bottle of modest German white. It was from Piesporter Michelsberg – a deceptively magniloquent name for what I later learnt is a dubious catch-all area. Mine must have been one of the better examples: it was at least made from riesling grapes. It was off-dry, fresh and lovely, and worked delectable magic with a wedge of ‘blue brie’. I’ve had many great German rieslings since – but, ah, there’s something specially sweet in the first time.

To help present-day virgins on the anxious threshhold of a lifetime of vinous concupiscence and wanting a little preparation, here comes (as it were) Jenny Ratcliffe-Wright. On the cover of her little book (it’s a bit over 100 small pages, costing not quite as many rands) she perches on the title’s T, showing a lot of blond hair and a lot of leg. Jenny herself (from a winegrowing family, and a Cape Wine Master)  is no blushing beginner. She knows the moves, the ins and outs, and offers a useful primer.

Whether or not someone will actually enjoy the book and be willing to learn from it might depend on whether they find its relentless sexual reference witty or vulgarly crass. I can’t help thinking that there might be better ways to present the subject attractively, and find little charm (or usefulness) in being told, for example, that a riesling wine ‘can be as tight as a virgin on her wedding night or as inviting as your latest, hottest lover’. But then, I learnt to relish riesling with the inspiration of the English writer Hugh Johnson, who described it as being, at its best, ‘aromatic and hauntingly subtle … clean as steel, with the evocative qualities of remembered scents or distant music’. Perhaps Jenny would call that nerdish.

For those who can’t even imagine what an uncool expression like ‘vulgarly crass’ might mean, there’s some really helpful stuff in over a dozen short chapters, from ‘Bare essentials: How wine is made’, through ‘Foreplay: tasting wine’ to ‘Pillow talk: wine terms’. The chapter on choosing wine (called ‘Fumbling in the dark’) is the vaguest and weakest, although the longest; sadly it’s probably the subject giving most anxiety to those who feel ignorant. It’s unclear, for example, whether the author does or doesn’t think that price indicates quality, and I can’t see why boxed wine must be better if the wine is mono-varietal rather than blended, or why a good wine merchant’s selection should change regularly. But wine stuff is, in actual fact, not always straightforward, and it can be patronising to pretend otherwise, while sneering at ‘wine geeks’ who have made ‘a simple subject … complicated and boring’.

There are aficianados who are occasionally driven to exclaim that some wine or other is ‘better than sex!’. Some, like Ms Ratcliffe-Wright, seem to regard them as much the same sort of thing. And there are the old wine debauchees with sweet memories and an awareness that tastebuds generally continue raging much longer than hormones; they are grateful for the reliability of, at least, their corkscrews.

• This article first appeared in Noseweek, 'South Africa's unique investigative magazine'