Dialogue: Boozing not really a matter of taste

By JOE BENNETT

Did you read of the Brits who spent I forget how many thousand dollars on a restaurant meal for three? The food cost little but the wine cost mortgages.

I hope they had a nice time.

But we do not have to look abroad for such pretension. It is everywhere, even in the louche delights of the Lava Bar, where one night recently I spent two happy hours in conversation with a cynical doctor who wants to write books and a less cynical cameraman who wants to direct films. We had men's chat.

We spoke of things. We spoke of ideas. We didn't speak about sport. We didn't speak about ourselves, or not much, or at least the doctor and the cameraman didn't, and we hardly spoke at all about relationships.

We did not plot. We did not speculate on the endless merry-go-round of who is doing what with whom. Instead we spread wide into poetry and shaving, fish, God and atmospheric warming.

It was the sort of whirl of words that gives me joy. Not bluster, boast or bellow but a sense of narrowing the gaps that silence widens. We laughed a lot. And the booze seeped into our words and made them frank and terribly wise.

The barman was of our company. He had to be. Propped at the bar we made the sort of conversation that everyone delights to add his bit to. So when the barman wasn't pulling pints for other gentlemen, or mixing juice and sugars to conceal the horsepower of the vodka that the ladies seem to like, he would dump his elbows on the bar and join our minds.

He was young and bright and welcome. But I was mean to him. And here is how.

I called for more beer and he asked "what sort?" and I said "any" and he told me to choose and I said "a yellow one please" and pointed at a random grove of bottles in the fridge. He said "oh dear." He wrinkled his nose and he tutted.

I asked him what was wrong and he said it was bad beer and that the good beer was this beer here and he extracted a bottle and cradled it before me like a new-born and gently wiped the little tears of condensation from its label.

"Whatever," I said.

But he insisted in the manner of the young that beers were not just beers but could and should be graded on a scale from good to ghastly. "Pooh pooh," I felt obliged to say, all beer's the same and he said "hmmmph" and I said I was confident that blindfolded he could not tell one beer from another and he said he could so.

We used a dishcloth as a blindfold and a girl as referee. I poured four beers from the fridge and the taps and I told the blinded barman what they were and that I would feed them to him in random sequence under the eye of the kindly girl and that she would write down what he said they were. And he said "fine." As he raised the first glass I saw his hands were trembling.

He got all four wrong. Mathematically he could not have done worse. Guessing would have served him better. We laughed at him and I felt clever and mean.

The girl consoled him. Beer, she said, was hard. Wine, she said, was easier. I said it wasn't. I said there were only three types of wine - white, red and the jolly stuff with bubbles in it and even they could be hard to distinguish.

"Pooh pooh," she said. "Here we go again," I said. I offered to present her blindfold with four glasses of unidentified wine and I said that I would like to challenge her. I did not expect her to identify the vineyard, nor even the variety. I said I bet she simply could not tell the whites from the reds. She said she'd like to bet a hundred dollars. I said five.

While she untied the dishcloth from the disconsolate barman and wrapped it round her pleasing hair, I dispensed four gouts of wine, two red, two white.

The whites, taken straight from the fridge, I warmed a while in the cup of my eager little hands. And when she tasted I noted that her hands, like the barman's, were trembling. Doubt sets the nerves a-tingle.

She picked the reds as reds. She picked one white as white. The riesling she called red. Oh dear, oh dear.

And when the blindfold fell, her face fell with it and the doctor and the cameraman and I were nice to her because it was a cruel thing I'd done, to use her young and tender self and the innocent barman to expose a common pretension.