This creative entry to our 2024 wine writing competition, by Paul Shanley – whose entry on 'Anna Malgam' was the runner-up in the Judges' choice award in last year's competition – is a novel twist on the theme of unforgettable wine moments. See our competition guide for more fabulous wine writing.
Paul Shanley writes I was the co-owner of Prohibition Wines in Muswell Hill, North London from 2013 to 2018. I’m now a student on a one-year writing course and writing my first novel. All the names, characters and events in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Apart from the grey mullet.
A Horizontal Tasting
“And then he downed a pint of Au Bon Climat. In Kew Gardens!”
When the laughter died down, the host - a daytime TV presenter, his glory days long behind him - turned to his left.
“And what about you, Monsieur Dubois? What is the wine moment that you’ll never forget?”
The dinner party fell silent. Dubois wiped his chin. “Ah well. That involves a most heinous, not to say vinous, crime.”
“Which was?”
“A murder. Less a traditional locked room mystery, more a locked cabin affair. The last passenger boarded at six. We set sail at seven. By nine, the ship’s cook was as pickled as the grey mullet he’d had the audacity to serve. What a waste of a life.”
“The cook?”
“The mullet. To end its days served with a shiraz. On a tasting menu. Sadly, the fish was not the only innocent slain that evening.”
Dubois continued. A gathering at sea of ten wine professionals. Sixteen wines to be blind tasted, eight reds and eight whites. Each participant was presented with an empty wine glass by one of the waiting staff, to great fanfare. The contestant poured a tasting sample before passing the decanter, port-style, to their left. After everyone had tasted their wine and made notes, the decanter was replaced with the next wine in a further theatrical flourish.
“Why the drama of decanters and glasses, Dubois?” asked the host.
“Because the organiser, who ran a successful wine website, was promoting her own range of stemware.” Dubois’s right eye gave an involuntary twitch as he finished his sentence.
Contestant number one, a Sunday newspaper wine critic, had raced through the first wine. Hardly a sniff, a perfunctory roll around the mouth, the briefest of spits and a flurry of writing, his notes more spidery than usual owing to the loss of his reading glasses sometime between dessert and the start of the competition.
Ten minutes later, the third wine reached contestants four and five - both married, but not to each other - their attempts at conferring as obvious to their fellow contestants as the affair they had started at the London Wine Fair earlier that year.
Contestant seven, a celebrity chef whose sniffing and frequent trips to the bathroom had earned him the nickname ‘Champagne Charlie’, spent far too long deliberating on the sixth wine prompting cries of “foul” from contestant nine, a red-top journalist, always open to receiving a few bottles of something expensive in return for a favourable review.
The whites were cleared away, answer sheets submitted and the contestants stretched their legs while waiting for the reds to be produced.
The increasingly animated chef was arguing that the fourth wine, a Burgundy, was a Priorat. Contestant ten, a wine importer with a reputation for off-piste wines and off-books payments, queried whether the chef had ever tasted a Spanish wine before, citing recent press allegations of cultural appropriation over the chef’s ‘Tex-Mex Paella'.
But the loudest voices were those of the Sunday newspaper wine critic and of contestant two, the youngest person to qualify as a Master of Wine in recent history. The critic had argued at the table that there were too many tartrate crystals in the fifth wine, a Valencian Merseguera. The MW had demurred saying the crystallization was minimal. Their argument continued.
The colour of the critic’s bloodshot eyes and bulbous nose were matched by a red mist descending. He leaned into the MW shouting “What gives you the right to lecture me on wine, you acned upstart? Do they even teach wine at your primary school, you pimple-faced, short-trousered little bastard?”
Before the MW could respond, the critic let out a final roar and collapsed, his head smashing into a decanter of López de Heredia Tondonia 2004, sending the organiser’s precious stemware to all corners of the ship’s boardroom.
“A heart attack, Dubois?” asked the host.
“Hardly. The cause was no more natural than the heavily sulphured wine served before dinner. No, this was foul play. The ship’s doctor was called. As was I, when they learned that a retired detective was on board.”
“How fortunate.”
“Not for me. The episode interrupted a most entertaining hand of canasta. Nonetheless, the doctor and I discussed possible cause. The distorted look on the departed’s face, coupled with his agitated behaviour in his last moments suggested poisoning.”
“But not food poisoning?”
“We ruled out the unfortunate mullet which was shared by eight of the contestants, including the deceased. The party all ate a woeful beef wellington. The late wine critic ate nothing that was not eaten by any of the other contestants. Apart from the oloroso-soaked Tarta de Santiago, that is. No one else at the table had that.”
“Why did you rule that out?” asked the host.
“I had some in my cabin not thirty minutes earlier. It was most agreeable. No, the poison was administered during the wine tasting.”
“But all contestants had the same wine.”
“All contestants had the same wine which they themselves poured out of the same decanters. Each had their own glasses.”
“So how was the poison administered?”
“Let me test you. What was odd about the wine tasting?” asked Dubois.
“All the contestants were narcissists?”
“Not entirely unusual in the wine trade. No, what was odd was the format. And?”
“The wine wasn’t poisoned! The glasses were!”
“Quite so. The Master of Wine was spot on. There were tartrate crystals in the Merseguera but not excessively. The extra crystals that the critic spotted were due to the addition of odourless and colourless strychnine, administered to his empty glass by one of the serving staff - the same waitress who had pocketed the critic’s reading glasses earlier.”
“So the waitress was the murderer?”
“In cahoots with the organiser. Some long ago feud involving a 99-point Meursault, apparently.”
“I guess the moral of the story is always check your glass before pouring wine into it.”
”Exactly that,“ said Dubois. “And always trust an MW - your life may depend on it.”
Image by Constantine Johnny via Getty Images.