The Wine Adventurer's blog
Francis Gimblett
20 July - Going underground...
The next trip and book are planned for january 2011. The first episode of Wine Adventurer TV is edited and ready, but instead of going live on the site and YouTube, I've been encouraged to submit it as a pilot programme for TV. A new app. for iphone is ready for launch in the autumn, and the other project, about which I must remain tight lipped (according to my business advisor), will only come to fruition in the new year too.
So in the meantime...
This morning
I woke, showered then wrote. Breakfasted (banana, satsuma and a cup of tea). Wrote. Another cup of tea. Waved to the postman. Lunch (cheese sandwich, pickle).
This afternoon
Wrote. Went to the loo (not for the first time, but wanted to save noting it, to add variety here). Short walk. Wrote. Supper. Bed.
Not the sort of thing I fel a good blog should be made of, so whilst I finish the next book (a wine based historical thriller), things will be a little quieter on this page until later in the year.
30 May - Up and running
Computer up and running... but a raft of events, work on a new wine app and a top secret project so exciting (and time consuming) that the launch of the Wine Adventurer TV has again suffered a set back. All good things come to those who wait, etc. Actually, I've always thought that was codswallop. Better things come to those who pull their finger out and get the footage edited...
19 May - Maybe not...
My computer man told me I’d killed it myself. Apparently editing video on my old PC was akin to forcing an asthmatic octogenarian smoker with one leg to scale the north face of the Eiger with no clothes on.
18 May - Beginning physical dump
These are not words you wish to read anywhere, especially on a blue screen displayed by your film editing computer when it unilaterally decides that it wishes to erase everything on your hard drive and end its own life in a form of technological hari kari. Whilst this makes me want to ritually disembowel it with my sabrage sword myself, it also leaves me without the final edit for the first instalment of Wine Adventurer TV. Perhaps I should console myself that it is trying to save me from myself (could some of the footage get me into trouble?), or maybe it's irrefutable evidence of a conspiracy theory... Is someone hacking into my system?
11 May 2010 - Supermarket slice
‘May I ask what is happening here?’
From the constrained look on the store manager’s face I could tell he really wanted to ask a question along the lines of: ‘Just what the hell do you think you’re doing in my car park?’
My answer would have to be good to fool him as it was quite apparent that I was handing out glasses of wine to shoppers. My task was made trickier by a small camera crew, a makeshift chart scrawled across the bonnet of the Land Rover, and one last, riskier, item.
For Wine Adventurer TV I’d wanted to find a way of objectively judging a special offer wine’s true value and had hit upon the idea of conducting a random blind tasting with shoppers at Tesco - against, it has to be said, the better advice of David and Jonathan who were along to do the filming.
All went well to begin with. I’d chosen the top five half price wines in store and opened them in the car park. We had tested them on over thirty shoppers by the time we felt we had a good enough sample.
As the last of the results were being marked up, I decided to celebrate with a bottle of buy-one-get-one-free house champagne. Maybe I had consumed a little too much wine already myself, or perhaps it was simply the euphoria at having got away with it that tempted me to show off with an impromptu demonstration of ‘sabrage’: the art of opening a bottle of champagne with a sword.
It could have been the cheer that accompanied the flight of the cork as it soared across a crowded car park, or possibly the CCTV footage showing a man wielding a lethal weapon in public that drew the disconcerted store representatives out, but now I know the line beyond which you shouldn’t cross when filming in a supermarket car park.
When edited, I’ll be releasing the full story on YouTube. Thankfully, an explanation concocted in the nick of time allowed me not to have to write here: ‘When released, I hope to edit the rest of this story…’
Watch this space.
30 April 2010 - A marauder from a strange land
Aware of its reputation, I eyed the monster with a sense of awe. Its strength was apparent at first glance, the thick legs and sturdy body telling me this was no lightweight. A brooding hulk, it radiated power. I hesitated before the first encounter, one I’d been anticipating with trepidation, and with hindsight rightly so.
I approached with caution, but I knew I would be overcome. It would be an uneven contest with only one clear winner. Any observer could see that the pale long-haired Englishman was no match for this adversary.
From the first contact I was trapped, the persistent grip and strength leaving me powerless. The beast’s attack was relentless. My senses were enveloped and my resistance was diminishing by the second. Perhaps I should have struggled more, but I knew it was futile. Entrapped, I was a slave to its potency.
I knew I could take only another glass of this before I’d be demanding dancing music from my dinner hosts.
The encounter, though now three days past, has left its mark. No doubt the discarded bottles will have been collected up and the stack of CDs tidied away, and the cat may again have dared to cross the dining room floor unscathed, chancing that the dangerously flailing bodies had left. But, back at home, I am still in bed with a slipped disk, testament to the fact that I’m no match for a fifteen percent Aussie Shiraz.
23 April – That's why mum's stuck in Iceland
Tranquility at Jeroboam House this week. No gigs, a becalmed office and empty skies above the Surrey Hills. That wasn’t the way it was meant to be.
As I swipe at the gathering dust on the dormant company van, I wonder if Iceland is responsible for that too. Not content with giving us Vikings, rogue banks and Bjork (the latter unforgivable) a nation with a smaller population than a Robbie Williams concert chose to wreak havoc once more and send us a cloud of volcanic ash. The result was that, although I could make my planned gigs by road, my audience couldn’t due to the flight ban, so they had to be cancelled.
I’m pondering if it’s part of a cunning attempt by our bankrupt northern neighbours to drum up a little tourism. It’ll probably work if so, as when I took a peek at the Wikipedia article on the Eyjafjallajökull volcano (pronounced ei:jafjatlajœ:kytl according to the site - thanks for clearing that up), it struck me what a stunning country it is.
So, a few million tonnes of volcanic ash will probably be why I’ll have gone to Iceland next year.
16 April – Seeing red
Yesterday there was a man in my office shouting obscenities. He scared my children who happened to drop by, still on their school's leisurely Easter holiday break. (In the time they’ve been off, Christ could have arisen, righted the world’s wrongs, saw we were all doing nicely and set up a successful florist shop in Godalming). The man was threatening to throw a PC out of the window unless it would ‘f****** do what it should be doing’. Frustrated, he finally stomped off to the adjacent kitchen and helped himself to a large glass of wine.
The glass calmed me somewhat. The last time I got like this was some years ago; the last time I tried to learn new software without reading a manual. I, like most men, consider it somewhat effete to refer to any form of printed help, and instead waste the sort of time that sees significant changes in tectonic plates trying to go it alone. Even after then I prefer to phone a friend than submit to instructions.
I was trying to work out how to use my new editing suite and was beginning to realise why some people actually go about getting a degree in doing it.
This is a thinly veiled excuse as to why nothing of Wine Adventurer TV has yet appeared, but things are now progressing and once I’ve lured the children down from the treetops and found Spielberg’s mobile number, I’ll be there!
7 April – A stitch in wine
‘So, you’ll be ready by 5pm?’ My client eyed me incredulously as I entered the vast ballroom, empty save for a few milling hotel staff and the sparkle of chandeliers.
‘Surely you mean 7pm?’ I thought, but as 5pm was only 30 minutes away, time precluded me the luxury of such dalliances or any wonder at where the blame for such a discrepancy lay. In that time Jonathan (co-wine expert, cameraman and chum) and I would have to set the room for a wine tasting for 150 guests, decant 40 bottles and get staff to pour, because our assistants had yet to arrive.
‘Naturally,’ I replied more glibly than my internal state of panic should have allowed. This seemed to be the nightmare to end all nightmares that I used to have when I first started doing wine tasting gigs: the one where I would unsuccessfully struggle to set up as guests swarmed into an empty room, demanding fine wine in the manner of Richard E Grant in Withnail and I.
Gathering unsuspecting hotel staff in a manner that would shame Spanish trawlers, we had a team within a minute, briefed within two, the room set within twenty, and the wine poured and ready as the room began to fill moments later.
As I walked to the stage I surveyed the room with a sense of euphoric anticipation. I hadn’t experienced such an adrenaline rush since performing my first events.
‘Sorry I didn’t send an e-mail re the timings change,’ my client apologised as I passed.
‘Really, it was fun!’ I replied. Little realising I wasn't being magnanimous.
1 April 2010 – The Winegate footage
“Can I help you, sir?” The member of staff eyed me with what I took (in my paranoid state) to be a degree of suspicion, but which may have just been bemusement at seeing a slightly scruffy man pretending to be talking into his telephone whilst secretly filming the stack of half price rosé at the end of the aisle. I wondered if my cover had been blown and my nightmare was unfolding for real.
I had planned to be calm. Simply drop in, pick out a couple of bottles, pay and leave. But I was in a state of excited agitation. This was to be my first foray for Wine Adventurer TV and I felt I’d hit the investigative reporters’ Holy Grail. Forget Watergate, MPs’ expenses and The Chuckle Brothers’ crack den (maybe that one hasn’t hit yet) - I’d just found something that really needed exposing.
“Is this a popular wine?” I asked, trying to adopt the manner of a genuinely interested shopper.
“One of our best sellers,” the man replied, still unsure. He had me marked. Maybe I should have prepared myself better and observed the behaviour of a typical shopper who would be taken in by the large stack of bright pink bottles under the day-glow half price banner. What I should look like I wasn’t sure, as it seemed all were being lured by the prospect of saving six pounds a bottle.
In some alternative dimension, a world where we all have the bank balance of Elton John, or where the currency has been deflated to levels that would make Zimbabwe look stable, this wine had supposedly been sold by the supermarket for £12, but had now been oh-so-generously discounted to half that. Had the banner simply stated £5.99, I’m sure most punters would have done the right thing and steered clear of the violent fuchsia label, instead spending their cash on cut price Vodka and painkillers. At least that way you’d get the hit together with the antidote, the 14% alcohol in the rosé suggesting a remedy would be necessary.
I’m a sucker for offers myself, especially when I haven’t got a clue what I’m buying. I know about as much about cars as Jeremy Clarkson knows about global warming, and I bought a half price Holden pickup in Australia that within ten minutes of leaving the showroom was spouting steam like the Old Faithful. I’ve purchased special offer computer add-ons that I didn’t need, on the recommendation of an expert whose likely qualification was reaching level three with Lara Croft on the Xbox; and I’m drawn to a ‘buy-one–get-one-free’ promotion like a drooling automaton, despite (like most typical men, I’d imagine) not having a clue what the item should cost normally.
But I do know about wine, and I can conclude that here we are being conned! There were some perfectly decent wines on the shelves nearby that were true value for money, but they no doubt would not make as much profit for the store as the special offer wine (which, having now tasted it, shouldn’t be on sale for more than £4.50).
“Would you recommend it?” I asked.
“Certainly, it’s half price!”
I obediently bought the bottle, which seemed to throw him off the scent. But little did he know that this was to be used in evidence: my Nixon cassette tape, Duck House expenses receipt and Barry Chuckle drug running footage all rolled into one…
