Karin Leeuwenhoek is a theologian, vinologist and communications scholar. She has ninety Italian olive trees, but mostly loves wine - and philosophising about it. See also her wine blog vinoblogie.co.uk. She writes a column in every issue of WINELIFE Magazine.
Blimey! What people – myself included – can do to themselves when it comes to taste. A poor-quality wine, Schnapps, substandard non-alcoholic rubbish, bitterly burnt instant coffee, pu-erh tea, and to top it all off: Tibetan butter tea. A salty, greasy, broth-like tea with a huge lump of yak butter in it. A yak is a sort of bison or long-haired cow. But enough about tea; let’s get back to wine. Unusual, strange wines.
I’ve written before about ancient Greek wine that was mixed with seawater. This was done to improve its shelf life and to clarify it. The Romans even copied this method for a while. Salty wine, yuck! In Greece, it seems they carried on doing this right up until the 1950s – on a small scale, I hope. And what about their retsina? White wine with a resinous flavour. I deliberately bought a bottle of it once whilst on my wine course, because I wanted to have tasted it. What a nightmare; as if that white swill had been left to mature for a year in a pine forest or a sauna cubicle.
What I find much more appealing, though, are the centuries-old bottles of Madeira that are sometimes fished out of shipwrecks.
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