Wine buffs need to put a cork in it

IT was once a grape. Or several to be precise. And just a few years before they had, in all likelihood, hung in a sunlit Italian vineyard before being lovingly plucked from the vine by an autumn harvest crew.

For all I know, though, the golden orbs had hailed from the wine-growing regions of France where swarthy workers had transported their wares down a picturesque hillside after working from dawn till dusk in a sweetly-scented vineyard.

Either way, the end product ended up in my wine glass last Saturday night and because I didn't ask I was none the wiser about just how it had got there and where it came from.

When handed my glass of pinot grigio, I cared more about the drinking, and also, in all honesty, the intoxicating effect, than about the vintage or land of origin. Drinking after all is what wine was invented for – or so I'd always thought.

As I drained the dregs of my perfectly lovely large glass of white wine – yes, I realise white wine probably doesn't have dregs – I was subjected to a long rant from a guy I'd just met about how much he loathed pinot grigio.

On and on he went, with insult after insult regarding my vino of choice until I felt like bundling all of the wonderful bottles of pinot grigio that were left in the pub in my arms and getting the number 23 home.

There's nothing like a wine bore to take the shine off an evening. Not only do they take themselves far too seriously, but they spoil it for the rest of us too.

At present, there are no rules of wine etiquette, but there should definitely be an unwritten code of behaviour, with the most important commandment being that you don't bore others to the point of tears.

Being knowledgeable about stuff is all well and good, but not if it's going to cause a scene in the pub.

In my book, wine isn't something to be mastered, it's something to be enjoyed.

But wine bores seem to feel the need to dress their fondness for the wet stuff up, imbuing it with some kind of inherent cleverness so just so they can feel superior.

They reach a certain age – it seems to be around the mid-thirties – and they realise that they aren't going to jump out of a plane or get a tattoo and instead hanker after different kinds of thrills.

Becoming a wine expert seems to be up there with running off with a teenage mail order bride in terms of popular mid-life crisis choices. And that never did anyone any good. Well not much anyway – and it's a slippery slope. One day they are perfectly happy, opting for the house option in restaurants, and the next they've started scrutinising the wine list.

This happened to a friend of mine when she was out for a meal with her boyfriend recently.

There they were, in an ordinary Italian restaurant at the end of their street, that they'd been going to every Thursday for the last three years, when suddenly her boyfriend asked the waiter, with, to his credit, an embarrassed cough, if there were any other wines on the menu. The waiter was apparently as taken aback as my friend was, but probably used to the phenomenon of the thirty-something wine snob, he rushed for the extended list.

Fifteen minutes later, with all eyes upon him, the boyfriend plumped for a £30 bottle of Merlot.

And that should have been that. But it wasn't. Now they had exposed themselves as wine connoisseurs – while pondering his choice, my friend's boyfriend, much to her surprise, had been dropping clever wine jargon left right and centre – there was the whole tasting ritual to endure.

He decided to do the honours, thank the lord, as my friend wouldn't have known her Merlot from her Ribena. All three watched transfixed as he swirled the glass in an expert manner round and round, until a bit slopped over the side, and he decided to give it a long sniff.

Finally, his wine of choice was given the OK and the waiter left them to their meal, and my friend's boyfriend to an earful about what he thought he was doing spending so much money on wine, and when had he become such an expert anyway?

It turns out he'd learnt his new skills on-line and, armed with his smattering of knowledge and a new found enthusiasm, he was thinking of taking one of the many wine classes that are springing up around the Capital to further his knowledge.

Yikes, he could get worse then. One moment he's doing a simple taste test, the next he'll be going on about the wine being corked and making a big fat scene about the suspected corking.

I don't want to seem like a kill-joy, but after my experience on Saturday night and others like it, I plan to resist all attempts to take wine seriously.

Quite frankly, I'd rather enjoy a cheap bottle of plonk, even if it means ending up singing Wichita Lineman in a dodgy karaoke bar, with a bad case of alcophrenia (white wine-enduced madness), than become a wine bore.

You don't need to know anything about wine to have a good time after all.