Water in Excelsis

A day of baking, cooking, teaching, meetings and kin keeping. Mike working on making skirting boards.

Capon, ch8, "Water in Excelsis", on wine - full of wisdom, humour and ranting against both religionists and secularists, plus advice on how to choose a corkscrew. Very hard to choose just one quote, but here goes, on thinking of wine as just another way of getting drunk:
With wine at hand, the good man concerns himself, not with getting drunk, but with drinking in all the natural delectabilities of wine: taste, color, bouquet; its manifold graces; the way it complements food and enhances conversation; and its sovereign power to turn evenings into occasions, to lift eating beyond nourishment to conviviality, and to bring the race, for a few hours at least, to that happy state where men are wise and women beautiful, and even one's children begin to look promising.


On a very different note, if you still support the war in Gaza, please read this Blip, and any others she has posted. I try hard to emphasise the positive, the beautiful, the admirable on my journal - but this is beyond bearability.