Читать книгу I Bought It, So I'll Drink It - The Joys (Or Not) Of Drinking Wine - Charles Jennings & Paul Keers - Страница 4

A lot has happened since we wrote the pages you’re about to read. It was some years ago when we first came up with the frankly ridiculous notion of writing a blog about real-life wine drinking. At the time, we thought about how much fun we were going to have; and how much free wine people were going to give us. Our motives were no more noble than the rot we drank.

So Sediment was born: a blog about worryingly affordable wines, wines in boxes and bags and screwtop bottles, wines that really ought to be better than they are. Plus all the business of what to drink the wine out of, how to drink it before it turns to vinegar, where to drink it without embarrassing yourself, how to acquire it in bulk, and how to get it into the house without your wife noticing.

As it turned out, we got almost no free wine. Nor did PK in any way advance his social standing by association with wine. Nor did CJ find a way to improve the quality of the bargain-basement muck he normally consumes.

And yet success beckoned, although not quite as we’d expected. We found that we’d been nominated and shortlisted for quite a few wine bloggers’ awards (without ever actually winning any). We got invited to some posh tastings (where we embarrassed ourselves repeatedly in front of more serious wine writers). We’ve even appeared in the pages of Decanter magazine, the wine aficionado’s vade mecum. We may, in fact, have been doing something right – we’ve certainly been doing something different.

Finally, our favourite writings were turned into a book (called, appropriately enough, Sediment). And what do you know? It was not only among the Drinks Books of the Year in both the Independent and the Evening Standard – it actually won the prestigious John Avery Award at the André Simon Food and Drink Awards. And it was described as ‘the funniest wine-book I’ve read in a long time’ by the judge, the esteemed novelist Julian Barnes.

I’ve Bought It, So I’ll Drink It takes all the goodness of the original Sediment hardback and refashions it into a handy yet glamorous paperback. The new title has been our motto since day one of the blog (and was dreamed up, incidentally, by CJ’s wife, Susie, who reckoned it said everything that needed to be said), and is now getting its own chance to shine.

So our words are now roughly at the price point of a bottle of cheap wine. And look at it this way: they should last a bit longer, and are less likely to make you ill. Unless that is, like Julian Barnes, you find it ‘choke-on-your-cornflakes funny’. Which we sort of hope you do.

CJ AND PK, JUNE 2017