Friday

A while ago, K's sister bought tickets to Vinopolis - a fun-sounding wine tasting place near London Bridge. You're given vouchers to try a number of different wines and spirits from around the world, as well as a short introduction to how properly to taste wine. It's pretty much tailor made for a semi-classy outing catering to Hen dos and the like - as indeed it was for Ellie's hen do, which K arranged back in April. Then, however, as well as back when her sister bought tickets, K found herself too hungover on the day in question to be able to face drinking wine and spirits in an organised fashion - hence the tickets are left over for tonight.

I meet K at London Bridge tube at 7.30 and we walk through Borough Market towards Vinopolis. We queue for a while amidst the gathering, dressed-up 'rah' types; the kind, unlike me, you would expect to see around a wine bar. I feel happily, obviously under-dressed for the occassion, as is normal, and manage to please myself by failing to fit in at all.

After a while we're called through to a small amphitheatre which is packed with lots of people each clutching a glass of white wine. A young woman talks us through the various techniques to judging wine - looking at the colour from 45 degrees, detecting smells (something I've never really believed in; oh, so it smells like freshly cut grass, cinnamon and peanuts to you does it? Funny, because there were only grapes in the bloody barrel) and sucking air in through your lips to open up the flavour. This is all fine, and I would certainly like to be able to appreciate really good wine using these techniques. The only problem here is that the white wine they've given us tastes like your standard cornershop piss - and sucking air through it just seems...sarcastic.

Never mind - after the short talk we are let loose in a series of chambers built into the railway arches. Each chamber has a table of wines corresponding to a different part of the world - unsurprisingly the most prominent at the moment is the South African one - and you hand over one ticket to try one wine. My experience is hit and miss - no one's fault but my own, obviously - and manage to have about two decent ones (I think one was Californian) and three that were pretty nasty. I also try a 15-year old Glenlivett single malt whisky which is pretty serious stuff.

After an hour or so we leave, feeling a little unusual for having drunk such a strange mixture of drinks in a short time, and walk up through St. Pauls towards Holborn on our way home for dinner. We get back and cook a tasty fresh pizza and crack open a couple more drinks, while waiting for K's twin - who is up for the weekend - to arrive.