- Christina Pickard
Tasting Notebook Anyone?
I am a pack rat. A hoarder. A squirrel of sorts. I am not messy per say, but I am a piler. I’ll create a nests of clutter around the house which grow and grow until one day my husband, fed up with nagging me to clear a particular pile, threatens to throw everything in the bin. Today is one of those days. A Day of Reckoning. I stand before my pile, wondering how it got so big, and dreading the decisions that will have to be made regarding what goes and what stays (I’m also not good with decisions). And as usual, I am procrastinating.
My current nest of which I speak is a massive stack of notebooks and name badges from 10 months of trade tastings that has accumulated on the bookshelf, towering over most of the books and albums. My intention is always to have a ‘quick sort through’ which inevitably turns into half a day crossed-legged on the floor leafing through long forgotten notes. This time I was also distracted by the sheer scale of paper wasted at these trade tastings (it does all get thrown out eventually if not straight away). Surely there’s another less wasteful, more environmentally friendly way of giving us the info on the wines?! Or at least a way to condense these notebooks–some of them are the size of full length novels or textbooks!
I hate waste. Perhaps that goes along with being a hoarder (ie: not being able to throw anything away). So my notebooks now sit not in a pile but completely covering the kitchen table. And I’m still putting off having to sort through them. Maybe I secretly want my husband to come home and bin them all for me to save me having to make any decisions. Then the only choice I’ll have to make tonight is which bottle of vino to open…