The month I went off wine

I’ve never been a fan of Dry January and had no intention of being a convert this year. January is the busiest month in London’s crammed professional wine-tasting calendar. In one week alone, there are at least 21 showings of the latest available vintage of burgundy (2022 this year), and the week afterwards is a three-day blind tasting of all the important wines from the four-year-old bordeaux vintage (2020). Quite apart from that, there’s the usual plethora of merchants’ portfolio and regional showings.

So when an old friend invited us to a sumptuous-looking villa in Marrakech for a week last month, I showed her my diary and pointed out regretfully that dégustation oblige.

I was to come to bitterly regret that decision. On January 9, I took to my bed with a debilitating cough that seems to have settled like a wheezy frog on my chest. (I have tested negative for whooping cough and Covid.) I had to ask my fellow Master of Wine Andrew Howard to cover all the burgundy tastings I was due to attend, sharing the responsibility for JancisRobinson.com coverage with Julia Harding MW, who also nobly stepped in to blind-taste all the 2020 bordeaux the following week.

I’ve always said that the one wine that seems to bring cheer even when one is ill is champagne. So I tried a glass in the early stages of the cough — and found it wanting. Every evening at the beginning of this horrible sick period I’d try another sort of wine, and every evening it would seem less and less alluring.

Not that I lost my sense of smell. Far from it. I’ve become extremely picky. I just lost any desire for the fermented grape juice that has been my nightly friend for decades. There was admittedly one evening when I welcomed a mouthful or two of 10-year-old madeira, but I think that was more as a linctus than a taste treat.

My tastes have changed completely. What a liquid does to my throat has become more important than any effect on the tasting equipment in my nose. Ice-cold water seems like nectar and is, unexpectedly, preferable to any hot drink. (Why is ice-cold liquid a balm but ice-cold air a painful assault?) And for the first time I’ve fallen in love with fresh orange juice and Innocent’s cloudy apple juice. Each has the fruitiness and acidity that I usually so appreciate in wine, and are currently infinitely preferable.

When on day eight of all this I finally snagged a doctor’s appointment (UK readers will understand) and the doctor told me cheerily that this state of affairs could persist for “four to six weeks”, I snapped. Enough of every icy, damp breath being a pain. How about some warm, dry air? There was nothing useful I could do in London anyway.

My first ever job was in marketing for Thomson Holidays, and I remain a thwarted travel agent who writes about wine as an excuse to make travel plans. I started to compare the climates of possible destinations. Tenerife in the Canary Islands, a four-hour fight away, seemed the most alluring as its temperature is a reliably low 20s during the day and no colder than about 17C overnight. Plus we had been before so knew what we were letting ourselves in for. A further incentive came in the form of two wine professional friends able to make informed restaurant recommendations.

Which reminds me, I have forgotten to mention one important consequence of this pesky cough. Around day two, I completely lost my appetite. I could manage the odd grape or small tangerine but nothing more substantial. I have lost 4kg. The hope was that a bit of exotically Canarian cuisine might titillate my taste buds.

Just after booking the flights and a sedate hotel pretty close to the airport, I made a major discovery about my condition. Two of my most respected fellow Masters of Wine had experienced exactly the same thing, including going off wine and losing their appetites. Both are at last back on the wiggly and narrow.

Mark Savage MW of Gloucestershire wine merchant Savage Selection, blessed with one of the most respected palates in the UK, reported the mould-breaking news, “I did not open a bottle of wine this year until about 14 January.”

Sebastian Payne, formerly long-standing head wine buyer for The Wine Society, had even more shocking news. He’d been invited to a wine weekend in Sussex in November and emailed that even though the organiser had “offered Latour 1945 for lunch, and there was a magnum of Montrachet that evening, I could not face either and drove home feeling absolutely lousy and wheezed and coughed for weeks. Oddly as you say, no loss of smell, but complete loss of appetite for wine, for the first time for about 40 years.”

What is almost more worrying for me is that my current condition seems to encompass a distaste for wine but not a distaste for alcohol. On the long and exhausting flight to Tenerife, I was quite happy to sip a weak Bloody Mary (while not entirely convinced that every one of the 21 ingredients in the mixer can was essential).

And on my first night here in Tenerife, desperate for something really cool and fizzy from a minibar void of sparkling water, I actually sipped some . . . beer.

Other effects of this disturbing condition are breathlessness and general feebleness. Going from zero steps for 11 days to 4,000 on the day we flew was a bit of a shock, but worth it for the uninterrupted sunshine and lung-friendly air. I write on day four of our five-night stay. I still slightly resent how far our room is from the breakfast terrace (such problems!) and have to make the journey slowly.

The first time I shuffled out to dinner, at the family’s request for photographic proof of recovery, I ordered the local Trenzado white from Suertes del Marqués, the producer that put Tenerife on the international wine map, and almost finished the glass. Still, I have a way to go before the cough removes its talons and I really look forward to a glass of wine again. My verdict on Tenerife? Weather glorious, cough remorseless.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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