WINE TIME
or
The gentle art of wine tasting and
the making of a natural wine
by
Nicholas Dekker

Wine Time, why I wrote this wee book

Dear reader, you have already read about my book ‘Sink The Birkenhead’, maybe you even read it. I have explained why I wanted that story to be known but before a story is known it has to be written first. While I did my research after the diving part, I wondered if I should contact a professional writer as I had never written a book before. It didn´t take me long, however, to consider this a bad idea because whenever I read something nautical, the hack who had written it made a cockup. Books written about the sea are mostly rubbish, apart from Joseph Conrad, Jack London and Hornblower´s Forrester not much good can be found. Write it yourself, you bugger, I heard myself say, all very well but I´d never written a bloody book before and I wanted to make, possibly not an excellent but at least a good job of it. I know how to do quite a lot of things, shipwrighting, rigging, sinking shafts in goldmines, photography, etc but I had learned most of these things as an apprentice first.

So … who would have me as an apprentice writer? No one of course. University is out, copyists are made there. At last the idea dawned on me, I must write a small book about something I know well and is not too complicated. Some authors do that by describing how they make love, I still can´t believe it but the older the buggers become, the more they write about it. Wishful thinking? My love live is none of your business and I decided to write about the tasting and making of red wine. I´ve made wine for more than thirty years, in France and South Africa, and I now make pretty good stuff. It´s not difficult to do if you´ve learned the job properly and if you don´t let yourself be influenced by a crazy literature that abounds on this subject, particularly in South Africa. Blokes that have never made a litre of wine are carried away by an acid liquid in which they proclaim to taste a quantity of fruit you might find in a Durban market and while cheeks are pulled into molars by the harsh oak tannins from the vats in which this stuff has been kept, they waffle about soft, delightful tannins. I will come back on this subject in a future blog but this is just to tell you how I did my writing apprenticeship. I had to explain in plain terms with the least amount of words what you should know about red wine if you are an aficionado. A number of people who read my little book are now making pleasant wines, the writing can´t have been too bad.

Wine Time by Nicholas Dekker
ISBN: 0-620-32307-8
eBook [PDF 74 pages]
ZAR 60.00

Wine Time by Nicholas Dekker
ISBN: 0-620-32307-8
Paperback [77 pages]
ZAR 120.00 [Price includes packaging and postage]