My Christmas Secret....

Oh dear.  I have a small confession to make.

I don't know much about wine, but I have friends that do.  No, that's not the confession, I mean, lots of people have friends, it's not something one generally has to confess to. Unless one has friends of a Dubious Nature, which you don't usually confess to, so much as just pretend that you really believe their story of being given a car that someone didn't want any more.... Anyway. I have friends who Know About Wine.

One of those friends was kind enough to give me a bottle for Christmas.  I left it sitting on the worktop on Christmas Eve whilst I went to work...(no, you don't know where this is going; besides, it was red wine and nobody in my family really drinks red wine apart from me.  And I don't so much 'drink' it as...well, you've all seen sword-swallowers, you know how it goes).  So, anyway.  Picture the scene, if you will....

I headed off to work at quarter to eight on Christmas Eve morning, and returned, exhausted and with my cheeks aching from smiling at people, at quarter past five in the evening, to rush out and walk the dogs and start sorting food for Christmas Day.  Food, including a large joint of beef which had to be roasted over Christmas Eve because there wasn't room in the oven to cook it on Christmas Day.

It looked a bit like this. Before it was cooked, I mean, we didn't sit down to a large lump of pink meat on our plates.  So.  There I am, it's nearly six o clock on Christmas Eve and I have been at work for nine hours and my brain is fried (come to think of it,. we could have served my brain for Christmas dinner, it was already cooked and I would barely miss it at all). I have to cook the beef.

I think we can all see where this is going, can't we?

There was a bottle of £4.99 Merlot bought expressly for the purpose of cooking the beef in. This bottle was Somewhere.  My brain was not capable of searching for Somewhere, not when there was a bottle of red wine sitting right there on the worktop... Yes, I did wonder, when I had to hunt down a corkscrew (I mean, I haven't had to open a bottle of wine with a corkscrew since about 1990)...

Well, that beef was delicious.  I'm sure the wine - which turned out to be a really nice 2001 vintage - added immeasurably to that deliciousness.  I sometimes wonder what the wine would have tasted like had I drunk it?  Probably delicious too. But we will Never Know and neither will we Ever Tell the Person Who Gave It To Me...

It wasn't actually this wine, but I can't bear to google the one it really was.  My nerves, you know.

You all know how to keep a secret, right?  There's a glass of £4.99 Merlot in it for you, if we ever find it...