Drinking with The Chemist – and God

The closest I get to a social life these days is when I sneak off into town for an hour or so to buy red wine, trying not to get caught by my wife and six children. I have found a place that sells a fantastic Sangiovese at €2.60 a litre which is dispensed like petrol from a cask behind the counter into one-and-a-half litre plastic bottles that once contained mineral water.

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I buy four bottles each time I go. Once home I smuggle them through my study window, then I enter the house through the main door as if I had come back from a hard day’s work. The wine is simple peasant stuff so, unlike most bottled wine, it contains hardly any chemical additives such as sulphites. Regardless of the damage being done, at least there is no hangover.

The place I buy it from does not really have a name. It is not licensed to sell wine to drink on the premises, but tasting is perfectly acceptable. There are four or five chairs scattered about amid the casks and wine racks for those who like to linger.

It reminds me of the place Lawrence Durrell wrote about in Bitter Lemons, his hilarious but heartbreaking account of colonial Cyprus in the 1950s as it descended into the bloody war for independence. Fed up with ‘the Coca-Cola bars and pubs’ of Kyrenia, he went off the beaten track to ‘canvas its values at a humbler level’ and came across Clito’s Tavern: ‘But his was not really a tavern so much as a wholesale wine-shop with a few chairs for customers who became too argumentative or bibulous to leave: it was understood that before buying a litre of wine one had the right to sample the contents of each and every butt which lined the back wall of the cave.