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Insanity of the wine industry
"Mark Lipton" in ...
> Dale Williams wrote:
> > In article >,
> > (Bill Spohn) writes:
> >
> >>As we are talking about wine stories, I find Roald Dahl a wry writer,
and his
> >>"A Matter of Taste" is (IMHO anyway) a minor masterpiece - do you know
it?
> >
> > I'm not Max, but I love that story. I think of it every time at a blind
tasting
> > I find myself trying to catch a glimpse of the cork, or looking where
the cover
> > is loose 
>
> For my part, I think of Dorothy Sayers' "The Bibulous Business of a
> Matter of Taste," another very amusing short story.
>
I recently arrived on this computer, a little tired, and what follows below
is from memory. (You've only mere integrity on that.)
Is Dahl's "Matter of Taste" the story where the phony drawing-room expert,
under an important wager he has contrived,"discerns" the Bordeaux (very
slowly and Hitchcockianly with a river and a bridge etc.) from what turns
out ultimately to be a good look at the b*ttle (don't want to spoil it for
anyone)? If not then I don't know it. (Though the one I do remember is not
without parallels in the contemporary US, if i may say). (Other and wiser
lands, of course, lack such defects. :-)
Did you read Dahl's interview in (I think it's called) Bin Ends at the end
of _Decanter,_ about 1990? Very articulate on the changes in the UK
consumer wine market since the 1950s. I have it readily on file (on paper)
and could quote.
I don't recognize the Sayers story by title, though I do appreciate Sayers
much and read most of her stories with much pleasure, she was surely the
most scholarly of the entre-deux-guerres British detective fiction writers
and thy mention hath earned thee less yet, less even yet, than Pavlov's dogs
got: A quotation!
--
Knowing that in country places it is always considered proper to see the
church, Lord Peter expressed his eagerness to do so. "It's always open
nowadays," said the magistrate, leading the way to the west entrance. ... He
pushed the door open. A curious, stuffy waft of stale incense, damp, and
stoves rushed out at them as they entered -- a kind of concentrated extract
of Church of England.
-- Dorothy Sayers, "The undignified melodrama of the bone of contention," in
_Lord Peter,_ Harper & Row, 1987 (ISBN 0060913800). Not from online.
("Arf!")
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