Rotten Hippopotamus

Long ago in a fever-induced state I declared that the medicine I had been forced to swallow tasted like rotten hippopotamus. My little sister agreed. We called it RHM. Whatever that medicine was has been lost to time and childish memories. (I am not even sure why we had to take it.)

Sissy called to tell me she had a bad head cold, needed a nose mitten and generally felt it was an accomplishment to get out of bed and lie on the couch. I asked her if she had taken anything. She said she had tried something new. You are supposed to dissolve it in liquid and then lick the spoon. When I asked her how it was, she said it tasted like RHM. Ah, good old RHM. I have not thought of that for years and years.

You know those medicines that are so foul-tasting that you have to take them leaning over the sink because you are not sure if they will stay down? The one that comes to mind, for me, is Nyquil (the green one not the red one. The red one is RHM with a cherry overlay-far worse. I have broken a sweat just thinking about it. shudder.) DayQuil does not work for me. Neither does the stuff in the capsules. Plus they changed the original formula for Nyquil so not only does it taste like RHM it doesn’t work either.

Sigh.

I hope my immune system is up to snuff this year. Excuse me; I gotta go wash my hands, again.

Wine tasting

I walked up to the door, a half an hour late to the party, hoping my offering was still cold enough. It had taken me over an hour to get there. We were 9 people gathered at a friend’s house to celebrate the last days of summer and taste wine. Planned months in advance we were to taste Sauvignon Blanc, a perfect summer sipper. (Never mind that the temperature was to dip into the 40s.) Everyone was to bring a bottle. I had dashed to the wine shop in the morning and agonized over the selection not knowing what to pick. I knew I wanted a NZ wine from Marlborough. In the end, I randomly picked. It had a funny label.

The host relieved me of the wine as soon as I came in and taped a piece of paper with a number to the bottle, covering the label. We were handed pencils and a scoring sheet. Our wine glasses had our names on paper skirts.

We tried the first wine and looked nervously at our score cards. We were to rate each wine according to color, nose, legs, 1st taste, finish and an overall rating. The scale was 1-5: 1 was rot gut and 5 was melt in your mouth. We peered, sniffed, swirled, swished and sipped. What we found was that everyone’s palate is different. Something that I found awful, someone else liked. It is totally subjective.

There were 6 wines. I’ll skip ahead.

The favorite wine was a NZ 2006 Monkey Bay (the one I brought-wahoo.). The 2nd was a Francis Coppola 2005 Yellow label. There were 2 Australian wines, another New Zealand, and a Chilean. Some people had read up and made their selection based on reviews, while others picked theirs because the host and hostess are movie buffs. As I mentioned I liked the label.
We talked about trying Rieslings next time or Syrahs. It was a fun evening and we all learned something, laughed a lot, bluffed our way through the herbaceous versus fruity nose and made jokes about stubble on the legs as they were not smooth enough.

Have you hosted a tasting? How did you do yours?