Wine

Roger Scruton, philosopher, fox-hunter, conservative and wine drinker, has written a book called "I Drink Therefore I am". Good title. I have not read the book and, after reading a review of it by Anthony Quinn, I'm not going. For Scruton treats wine seriously, I don't. The reason is pretty obvious: he drinks fine wines, I don't.
Whenever I read the info. on the back of wine bottles that I buy I can never understand what they mean. It may say something about "plum flavour" or "a trace of blackcurrents" and so on; well, I can never taste them. I just taste red wine (don't drink much white). Some of it is good red wine, some of it not so good (I think my leaning towards socialism was finally halted when I downed a bottle of Maltese State wine; OK it was cheap but it wasn't worth the hangover and it tasted awful).
I began drinking wine seriously as a young man in Dijon. I was there for five weeks working at a teachers' training place, a chateaux that had been taken over by the education department. It had to do with a scheme which tried to bring people of Europe together. Some hope. But never mind that - we had wine with every meal - maybe not breakfast. It wasn't bought wine but it was made locally, served in jugs and label-less bottles. We drank gallons of the stuff washing down each course merrily. And there were a lot of courses because when you had a meal there it came in bits: you'd have a plate with meat on it which you ate with bread - and washed down with wine; then you'd have beans which you ate with bread and washed down etc etc; then a plate of chips which.... and so on.
So I suppose I got a taste for cheap wine; and I still have it. Not too cheap of course. Somewhere around a fiver.
I am not therefore an oenophile like Roger Scruton (until I saw what that word meant in the review of his book I thought it had something to do with the intenstines). In fact I don't think I am anything like Scruton. I'm not a drinker of fine wines, I don't go fox-hunting, I'm not a conservative (nor a socialist after my Maltese experience). Nor, as he does, do I eat squirrels or hedgehogs which he says go well with certain wines.