A Dog’s Life by Peter Mayle

Author:Peter Mayle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1995-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

17

THE TASTING

If, like me, you have a logical turn of mind, a self-indulgent nature, and a frequently dormant conscience, there is a certain aspect of human behavior that can put an immense strain on the patience. It’s spoken of, always in sanctimonious tones, as moderation—not too much of this, not too much of that, diet and abstinence and restraint, colonic irrigation, cold baths before breakfast, and regular readings of morally uplifting tracts. You must have come across all this and worse if you have any friends from California. Personally, I’m a great believer in the philosophy of live and let live, as long as you keep your proclivities to yourself. Follow the road of denial if that’s what you want, and all I’ll say is more fool you and spare me the details.

Unfortunately, you can’t avoid self-righteousness altogether, and this curious distrust of pleasure is nowhere more apparent than in the matter of drink. People like to drink. This became obvious to me very shortly after I arrived at the house of a thousand bottles (most of them empty). But it is rarely the simple, spontaneous process it should be, because there is always the question of the clock. I can’t tell you how often I’ve noticed it: When offered a drink, what is the first thing most people do? Look at their watches, as if the hour had anything to do with thirst. They invariably accept, but never before a token display of reluctance, usually dispelled by invoking the support of international time zones. Someone, somewhere in the world, is nursing a stiff one on the rocks. This apparently provides the necessary seal of approval.

Then there are the excuses, although I don’t know why they bother; I never need an excuse to jump in and make a beast of myself. But they do, and they’ll clutch at any straw. Birthdays, weddings and wakes, the arrival of a new year, the departure of the mother-in-law, the anniversary of the death of Napoleon’s favorite horse—the list is long and ingenious, and I’ve seen the bottles tumble for no other reason than the sighting of the first cuckoo. In my experience, however, there is no excuse quite as transparent as the wine tasting, a clear case of wretched excess thinly disguised as education, if you ask me. But you’d better read on and judge for yourself.

The hero of the occasion was a little fellow with bandy legs and a pocketful of corkscrews, who was known to his admirers as Gaston the Nose. I never need an excuse to plunge in.

He supphes many of the local residents with wine that he claims is grown on his family estate and available only to the privileged few. This always goes down well with the landed gentry, who tend to believe anything that flatters them, and they also like his accommodating habit of bringing supphes to the house, thus avoiding the unsteady drive back after a few liquid hours at the vineyard.

I’m not sure how Gaston

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