house rules
wine got weaponised by people who wanted it to be a class signal. it is fermented grape juice. here is how we do it.
- no tasting notes in this house. if I can't tell you what it's like in one sentence, that's my problem, not yours.
- glasses are optional. tumblers, mugs, whatever is clean. good wine does not require ceremony.
- you can leave a bottle unfinished. nobody is counting and nobody is offended.
- if you hate it, say so out loud. that's the most useful thing anyone at the table can do.
- the price is not the point, and I'm not telling you anyway.
why cryptid
I spent five months being a nuisance in a wine shop and it worked. that's the whole story, and it's also the whole method.
for about five months I walked into the same london wine merchant, week after week, and asked the same question. do you stock pet nat yet.
then one week I turned up and there it was, open on the tasting counter. I asked if he was going to stock it properly. he said he was considering whether it had a place.
so a serious wine merchant got moved by nothing except a irreverent fool turning up on a schedule asking for wine cider until it manifested. that's not a customer. that's a haunting.
hence the somerset wine cryptid. hence cryptid.wine.
the useful part of that story isn't the name, it's this: the merchants will listen to you. they will order things in. they are not gatekeepers unless you decide they are, and most of them are just people who like this stuff and would love it if you asked them something.
go and be a nuisance at your local. it works.
the log
what got poured, what worked, what the table actually said about it. every bottle, in the order it went round, with what we ended up calling it. written up while it's still messy.
if you were at one of these and you remember it differently, that's a write-up too; send it over.
where I buy
real shops with real humans behind the counter. ask them things, they like it. and if they haven't got something they will order it in, which is the single most useful thing I know about buying wine.