A hangover waiting to happen

"Would you like to join me in some wine tasting?" asked Jon, an old friend whose convivial company I have enjoyed during many a post and pre-match drinking session when England have been playing at Twickenham.

"Do I have to spit it out?" I asked.

"Not if you don't want to."

So we went along to the London International Wine and Spirits Fair at ExCel, the giant exhibition centre in Docklands.

This place is a hangover waiting to happen. We started on the New Zealand whites where Jon did the business, nose first, a bit of a swill, a sip, a slosh round the mouth, then out in to the spittoon. It seemed an awful waste but I couldn't see any other way of getting through the afternoon.

"What did it taste of?" he says.

"Wine?"

"Didn't you catch the vanilla and the tinge of marmalade?"

It's wine, not breakfast, I'm thinking. It reminds me of that Monty Python sketch where John Cleese says: "I don't know much about art but I know what I like."

The best commentary I seem to be capable of is pretty banal. My descriptions alternate between "heavy" and "light" with an occasional "fruity" slotted somewhere in between.

Meanwhile the spittoon is becoming underused, particularly when we try some classy French and Australian reds. Then there were the Hungarian pudding wines, a few whiskys, some rather good cognac, port and finally the champagne.

Some counters have a plate of crackers to help you restore your palette but, since I'd missed lunch I was grabbing them by the fistful.

Among the more esoteric choices we taste some Japanese whisky (not great), some Welsh whisky (I prefer their lamb) and some Lebanese wine from the Bekaa Valley. Imagine trying to make wine in the Bekaa Valley. We also sip some McNab biodynamic wine.

Biodynamic wine might be described as organic wine with frills. The frills, like the name, were created by an Austrian scientist called Rudolf Steiner. They include treating the soil in which the vine is growing with manure that has spent the winter buried in a cow horn. I kid you not.

Better still, you must include some flower heads of yarrow fermented in a stag's bladder and dandy lion heads fermented in cow mesentery (look it up. I did). Oh and don't forget the lunar rhythms. They're important although the wine dealer referred to this preparation as the "voodoo bit". I don't think they include eye of newt, but don't hold me to that.

So how did it taste? Not bad. But if I had gone to all that trouble preparing my vines I'd want to hear something a bit better than "not bad."

Among the best of the reds that we tasted I would pick out the Jaboulet Rhone Crozes-Hermitage. You wouldn't want to send that one back (or spit it out). The champagne we tried and liked was Duval-Leroy. The Cuvee Femme is excellent and so it should be since the grapes are harvested from the best bits of the best plots among the Grand Cru villages. Like John West salmon then.

I make a note: must remember to spit more at wine tastings. I'm beginning to slur my speech as Jon suggests we go for a beer.Well it had been a tough afternoon in one way or another. I think we'd earned it.