Not drinking, but still blogging

Since I got back from Sicily in the early hours of Thursday morning, I've not been drinking any wine. I've got an annoying cold, made worse by flying - the pressure changes made my ears hurt and I still can't hear properly. Nor can I taste with any sort of precision. It's frustrating.

Simon Woods, one of the journos on the Sicily trip, came back to stay at our place on Wednesday night. He's based near Manchester (sadly, he follows United) and so it wasn't practical for him to get home from a Stansted flight that arrived just shy of midnight.

Ben Smith of Enotria, who was leading the trip, got his assistant to arrange for a cab to take us home; he was a little horrified to find out it was a black cab on the meter. So I can now tell you that a black cab from Stansted to west London costs in excess of £200! Olly Smith, the other journo on the trip, went by cab to Lewes, in Sussex. Do black cab meters go that high?

It's good to see that Simon's blog is back up and running again, with regular updates. At one stage it looked as if he'd abandon it. If you do a blog, little and often is the way to go. It just has to become a daily routine.

I'm looking forward to being able to taste again. I'm hoping this will be tomorrow. The fact that when you have a cold you don't feel as if you are 'getting' the wine suggests that there is something to be 'got' about a wine - that is, that wine tasting is in some senses an objective process. This point is a bit of a caveat to one of my favourite themes - that the taste of a wine is actually the result of an interaction between the taster and the liquid in the glass; that it is not solely the property of the wine.