Intoxicating. Max Allen

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      My introduction

      The wine looked like liquid sunshine in the glass. Golden, glinting, beautiful. It smelled and tasted even better. Sweet, grapey, like honey on my tongue. I gulped it down greedily.

      It was the mid-1980s. I was fifteen or sixteen. Maybe a little older. All these years later, I can still remember what that wine tasted like, what the bottle felt like in my hand, the sensations of smell and flavour and vision fused in the memory. I can see the buttercup-yellow label: Brown Brothers Spatlese Lexia.

      It came in a mixed case of Brown Brothers wines that a family friend had given us for Christmas. Mum wasn’t that interested in the red wines or sweeter wines, and my little sister was too young to drink, so I got to try them instead. Like most teenagers, I had been experimenting enthusiastically with alcohol for years. Furtive tastes of my grandparents’ sherry. A sip of Mum’s vermouth from the fridge. Cans of beer or quarter-bottles of vodka shared with mates in the park, bought by the oldest-looking one of us from the wine shop where we knew they didn’t care we were underage.

      But this Spatlese Lexia was different. It was delicious. It made me stop, it made me pay attention, it made me think about what I was drinking. And it made me curious to see what the other wines in the Brown Brothers box tasted like.

I was already fascinated by flavour. Always had been, since I was a kid. A couple of years earlier, I’d even conducted my own lemonade taste test. I’d seen one of those newspaper articles where they assemble a group of chefs and get them to taste and rate different brands of baked beans, or chocolate, or hot cross buns. It inspired me to go out and buy all the different kinds of lemonade I could find – I really liked lemonade – and taste them to see which one I preferred.^*

      This perhaps helps explain why, a decade later, I would start writing about wine and other drinks. And why still, today, every day, I’m driven by the same impulse to ask the same questions. What does this drink taste like? Why does it taste that way? And what’s the story behind it?