Everyday life with wine

I had planned to write a little meditation on the importance of everyday wine. Recently I’ve had a delicious South African Sauvignon Blanc from Jardin and a quite different Sauvignon de Saint Bris from Verget, more famous for his good value chardonnay. These were both priced in the teens, both racy and fun to drink (I’ll buy the Jardin again, probably not the Verget which is a little more expensive). My theme was to be a defense of mediocrity. I don’t especially like beer, so I have no trouble at all saying that I would rather have Chimay once a month than Bud every day. Wine fans like to advise one to drink good wine once a week rather than ordinary wine every day. Not me. I love wine. Give me honest clean wine every day. I love my friends. I’d have dinner with my friends every day rather than saving up for a banquet with John Roberts (Julia Roberts is in a different category, for obvious reasons). So I went to Lexis to find a celebrated example of the “life is too short to drink mediocre wine” quotation often attributed to Lady Pamela Harlech, second wife of the British ambassador to John Kennedy’s Court. As I recall, she served Barbaresco and Montrachet at cocktail parties. But the successive tragedies of the Harlech family took the wind out of my sails. Lord Harlech died in a traffic accident, as had his father. His older brother, who would otherwise have inherited the title, shot himself. His sister, who was once engaged to Eric Clapton, died impoverished and of an alcohol-drug interaction in a London bedsit. Lady Pamela herself was banned from driving because of alcohol-related charges. The eight-thousand acre estate had to be sold to pay the death duties, which I shall now think of as a Barbaresco tax. Perhaps the ultimate indignity, the Express wrote thus of the sixth Baron Harlech, facing drunk driving charges himself four years ago: "THE SMALL, dark figure in the dock of Dolgellau magistrates court in North Wales was a sorry sight. With his lambchop sideburns and his jetblack hair greased back behind his ears, he looked like a cross between Fred West and a reject from the Seventies band Showaddywaddy." Myself, I have a fifteen-dollar Vouvray, 2002 Chateau Gaudrelle, chilling for tomorrow night. Life is too long to drink great wine all the time, thank heaven.