tasting and art

Thursday night, barely recovered from my high-speed trip down South, I rocked up to an ultra-exclusive hotel to drink my favourite champagne in the world with Pete C. It was a tasting organised by a company I don't really like and it wasn't all that well organised to be honest. Their food-wine matches weren't terribly inspired either. It was upsetting because these things can combine to overshadow truly great wines, which is exactly what happened. Then came a barrage of attempted sales. Ugh.

BUT... and this is quite cool, the hotel had this really funky modern art exhibit in the foyer. Organised on glass shelves it consisted of large and larger plastic bottles (the sort used for petrol and other industrial liquids) that had been coloured and organised into groups called families. The "French family" was a tricolour (one red, one white and one blue), there was a "white family" of all white bottles and so on and so forth. My favourite was the "hot family" where all the bottles were hot colours and some still bore their 'warning: highly flamable' labels. Oh, and the fat family, all very fat bottles. Brilliant. But Pete and I were the only ones showing any interest. Everyone else was schmoozing and being very, uh, wine-tradey. In fact, I'm pretty sure they thought we were quite strange for checking it out. But it could just have been Pete's waistcoat.

The fat family is on the bottom shelf, and I think the ones on top shelf were just called mother and father

Pete C strutting in artistic appreciation, bubbly in hand.

I took this on the walk home. Fine beers from the Fuller's Brewery, I assure you.