Arrrrrrrrrrrrgggggghhhhh!!!

by Mark Deamer

I have honestly had to put a day between myself and the wines of Turkey tasting before posting to avoid the expletive count going through the roof.

Let me first go on record saying 'I am pretty excited by a lot of Turkish wines I have tried recently'. Last year, before all the hoohaa that the press has been drumming up recently I had a relaxing saunter around the Wines of Turkey tables at LIWF.  There was a noticable lack of hubbub, affording me the time to get to talk to the wine makers learn about Turkish wines and grapes. When I needed to spit I could find spitoons and not once was I pushed out of the way by some old french hag to didn't have the common decency to either wait her turn or at least try to excuse herself.

What a far cry from yesterday. I don't understand their logic of hiring out the (effectively two) large halls at Vinopolis and then squeezing all the wine makers into one quarter of the space, using half the space for a lecture room and leaving another quarter virtually empty save for two book stands.  Some tables had upto 25 wines on them and were only double manned. It was chaos, the usual spitoon hoggers and and the apparent over subscription had some tables with queues 5 deep. And with the great and the good of the wine press grabbing the attention of the people pouring the wine, it left a lot of us who are well mannered enough not to barge in,  waiting 10 to 15 minutes between each glass with absolutely no chance of gleaning any information from the befuddled pourers.

 I assume the idea behind sending out invitations is so that numbers of attendees can be gauged through the responses and those numbers can be regulated. This event was so obviously oversubscribed I think the organisers must have seen that as some sort of success. Yet in truth I was so frustrated with the free-for-all I couldn't be bothered to put myself through any more of it after an hour (that is about three wineries worth of white and Rose wines. About ten samples in all) and left. And I wasn't the only one who felt that way. Atleast if the organisers had spread out the tasting into the available space one could skirt round the tables and pour for ones self.

 I was planning to be writing about the joys of Narince today and a couple of the ones I did get to try were very good. however I think I'll wait til LIWF again, when the Johnnie -come- latelies have moved on to the next big thing or returned to their comfort zones. I guarrentee it won't be so busy then.