If you were a wine, what wine would you be?

It’s an immensely silly question, but a fun one.

It’s actually even more fun to ask a friend: what wine am I? And then you get to reciprocate. I did this with a friend recently, and it turns out I am cru Beaujolais. It could have been better: we all secretly fancy ourselves as Grand Cru Burgundy, don’t we? But it could have been much worse – Beaujolais Nouveau rather than cru, or Apothic red, or a Pays d’Oc Merlot.

But is it so silly to think of describing wines in ways other than just as a list of flavours and smells? I think it is quite useful to think of wine in more global, more abstract ways. Is this a happy wine or a sad wine? What sort of emotion does it elicit in you? Does it remind you of a season or time of year? Can you relate it to a particular time in the day?

After all, we usually describe people in global rather than reductionist terms. So describing wines as people, or vice versa, is quite fun, and definitely appropriate.

I have a proposal for a fun wine dinner. Gather a small number of wine-loving friends – say 6-10. And get each to bring a bottle that they think matches with one of their fellow guests. Then it is everyone’s job at the dinner to decide who is represented by each of the wines. You might have to assign each person to another in some sort of secret way, so that everyone is represented by a wine. It would be highly amusing if anyone were to be able to match wine and person successfully.

There is obviously the possibility that this could go horridly wrong, so those taking part would have to be good natured and of robust psychology. But do you think it could work?