Can wine ever be funny?
Wine and humour collide in two new books ‘Corker’ by Hannah Crosbie and ‘Eastern Promise’ by Peter Stafford-Bow.
Think of the words wine and humour and what comes to mind? I tend to think of those signs you see in gift shops: ‘caution mummies drinking Prosecco’, that sort of thing. Or memes on the internet featuring an amusingly large glass of wine. Ho ho!
Reading the wine press and you’ll find that humour is largely absent. You’d never guess that most people drink wine to have fun. I’m not asking for Decanter panel tastings to degenerate into drunken bacchanalia - though wouldn’t that be fun to read about? - but the disconnect between how most people approach wine and how it is written about is vast. You’d never guess that in real life wine people can be enormous fun when they’re not obsessing about which glasses to use. Or complaining that the cheese trolly is affecting their olfactory system.
Why so serious? I think the danger is that one snigger and the whole pomposity around wine, the rituals, the decanting, the gurgling, and right glasses, suddenly seems ridiculous. It’s a bit like opera or MIck Jagger pouting and dancing like a chicken - they’re simultaneously magnificent and ludicrous. Laugh and the whole elaborate spectacle comes crashing down.
The other danger with not taking wine too seriously is the danger that people won’t realise you are joking and think you’re just an idiot which has been the curse of my uneven career as a drinks writer. Sometimes I’ve been tempted to put an asterisk into my articles to designate when I’m joking*.
But this doesn’t mean that some brave writers haven’t managed to combine wine and humour. Just think of the greats like Auberon Waugh, Evelyn Waugh, writer of perhaps the funniest ever descriptions of a wine tasting in the English language, and Kingsley Amis, the bard of the hangover. Or more recently until 2020 a couple of old buffers ran a blog called Sediment. It began as middle-aged carping about wine marketing but blossomed into something really rather wonderful. The high point for me was a Sainsbury’s Nero d’Avola reviewed in the style of Bruce Chatwin. So while a recently published book by Hannah Crosbie called Corker might not be doing anything revolutionary, it’s still unusual.
Corker is billed as an ‘a deeply unserious book about wine’. Crosbie, who is only 17*, has seemingly come from nowhere to ubiquity in the wine world with slots on Sunday Brunch on Channel 4, articles in the FT, Guardian and Noble Rot and before long her own series on Netflix, probably. She was even described by Vogue as ‘the Nigella of wine’. There aren’t many wine writers who make it into Vogue.
The book is based on finding the right wine for the right occasion. It includes categories such as wine to drink when you’re being dumped (barbaresco) or what to drink when you’re hungover (moscato - very clever). I’m pretty sure I had this exact idea for a book about 10 years ago but annoyingly Crosbie has done it much better than I would. My own pairing would have been over-specific: wine to drink when you’ve just fallen out spectacularly with your brother’s fiance (the answer is port, obviously.) Or what to drink when your old Mercedes has broken down at Folkestone just as you were about to board Le Shuttle to France (a cold beer.)
I’m particularly pleased that she picked a wine to go with cigarettes (pinot noir) because though I haven’t smoked for years, it’s reassuring in these turbulent times that some people still do. Some of the references went over my head, I think it’s probably aimed at people younger than me but it was a pleasure to read a wine book with such a sense of fun. As well as being witty the book is also a useful way of learning about wine because despite the book’s subtitle, Crosbie knows quite a lot about her subject, she began her career at Berry Bros & Rudd, don’t cha know? I’d go as far to say that she reminds me a little of Les Dawson whose brilliance at the piano enabled him to play the clown. There’s one for the paperback ‘Hannah Crosbie is the Les Dawson of wine.’
There’s another funny book just out about wine, it’s by Peter Stafford-Bow who is unlikely to be featured in the pages of Vogue. Mainly because he doesn’t exist, the name is a pseudonym to disguise the identity of a prominent member of the wine trade. Like Crosbie, PSB knows his stuff but wears his learning lightly. Eastern Promise is the fourth novel in a series featuring charming rogue Felix Hart - the Flashman of the wine trade. It centres around the rich topics of wine forgery and the booming east Asian market for fine wines especially Burgundy.
While the previous book Firing Blancs was fun but uneven, this is a huge leap forward in terms of quality. There’s a richness in terms of character and imagination which at times is almost Harry Potter-esque particularly with the institution of the Minstrels of Wine with their incredible clubhouse in London. The book is intricately plotted, funny and at times quite quite mad: it includes a showdown between Hart and an angry alpha male elephant seal in a skyscraper in Shanghai.
Both Eastern Promises and Corker are great fun. I hope they encourage other wine writers to let their hair down a bit. Actually on second thought, let’s leave the jokes to those who are good at it.
*This is a joke.