Heard on the Grapevine

“Do let’s!” he said. “It will be fun!” he further encouraged me. I nodded and smiled, as he knew I would.

He lobbed a heavy tome, a printout of the “Wine Tourism in Spain” website, at me. “Wine? What’s wine?” I asked, intrigued by the sight of so many funny misshapen trees (“vines” he said) all planted neatly in orderly rows, in one place, rather than growing haphazardly, as they do here on Melita.

“You’ll find out soon enough…” he said. Oh, yes. We were, after all, the Ambassadors for our Planet, and we were due to leave in… ten planet-turns and counting. As for myself, though, I could never see the point in not eating fruits and vegetables fresh-raw.

I riffled through the pages, and frankly, I was disgusted. I never ate pickles or dried fruit – so how could I be expected to like preserved (“fermented” he said) grapes that, moreover, would have been squeezed and squashed into gloop (“pulp” he said)?

All this had started as a joke. I had been asked to invent a new beverage to celebrate the fact that our Astrology Department had beat the Astronomy Department in the Twenty Questions Finals.

It was supposed to be easy as pie (he said) - but of course I never eat pie. So it might turn out to be a tad difficult for me.

I opened my cooler-box, and I saw jabuticaba and pitaya and safou and marula, freshly picked from my garden that morning. I was going to make kebabs, to go with the snake steaks I was marinating in my Secret Sauce.

I was still ruminating on the squeezed and squashed grape pulp thingy, so I had this brilliant idea to pulverise a pawful of each fruit to make something new. I tasted the resulting concoction and it sort of lacked zing, so I added a pinch of purple pepper, and flew with a pitcher of it, to the Staffroom, to get Beta Opinions, as I always do when I come up with a new recipe.  

They made me take out a patent immediately. They raved over it, though I say so myself. I am already in talks with the Marketing Department, because, apparently, it’s that good.

I said that, judging by their reaction, it must be the best drink in the Multiverse, and that is where it became an All Systems Go thing, because The Boss called, pronto, the Engineering Department so they could invent packaging that would withstand the test of time (relatively speaking) and distance (astronomical). It wouldn’t do to arrive on Earth with slushie dribbling from the ceiling of the Ship, would it now?

Time warps make travel easier and faster – but they wreak havoc with my digestive system… and with my hair. But I reckoned the experience was worth it – and it would look good in my memoirs.

We had a brilliant send-off. Everybody who was anybody was at the launch – and they all asked me to bring back photos of people and animals, so that they could compare and contrast… they didn’t quite believe what they saw on the Intranetworks, because they assumed that each planet put out a false front so that tourists would be eager to go and visit. This was in the days before Covid-19, and Penta-28, you understand, where interplanetary travel was just the thing to cure ennui. 

I told them that if this were the case, the Interplanetary Council would sue for Fake Advertising, but they just shrugged.

To make a long story short, after six months’ earth-time travel, we landed at the Aeropuerto de Málaga-Costa del Sol.

The formalities over, we were finally able to take a shower in water that was weirdly transparent, and nothing like the delicate pastel pink of Melita. We had a lot of time to kill, because the first Conference was on the morning of the morrow. So obviously we expressed the wish to go on the tour that had mentioned Verdejo white, rosé, oak-aged young wine, “and many others”.

A proverb oft quoted on Melita says “Some drink deeply from the well of knowledge – others just gargle and spit.” I had never seen it happen literally, but here I saw it happen with the wines… and I did it myself. It was patiently explained to me that if we downed all the wine samples presented to us, we would end up sozzled (“drunk” he said, but I was none the wiser). We didn’t, at that stage, have alcohol on Melita, so I had to take their word for it.

So, I learned a whole new lexicon; words like almacenista, blanco, bodega, crianza, granvas, mistela, reserva and many words that now roll mellifluously off the forks of my tongue…

I discovered that I liked best the sparkling wines with high acidity, but I could not decide which I preferred – Champagne, Prosecco, Cava or Lambrusco. I did ask whether I could take samples home with me, but I was told that the gas would expand and the glass would burst into smithereens, and get into the warp drives of the computers, and we might end up in a parallel universe. I wasn’t taking any chances.

Unbeknownst to us, our hosts had arranged a treat – fish & chips (my first time ever eating a cooked vegetable, and I quite liked the combination of crunchy outside and soft inside) and bubbly (which is what they call this expensive wine, how weird) on tap, on a visit to La Mancha and the windmills of Don Quixote, who I thought was called Donkey Shot, the way our hosts said it… and then I saw it etched on a plaque, (“a prophet” he said).

I bought a couple of books on oenology to take back with me to Melita. Whatever happens with the mining treaties and space exploration enterprises, I am going to make sure that the wine industry will flourish in Melita, my beautiful home Planet. 

If we talk chalk, our soil is similar to that of Pouilly and Sancerre in the Loire Valley, Chablis in Burgundy and Aube in Champagne.

And humans will be human, after all. I sold them the formula for my slushie at a tidy profit, and they threw in a package of some prime vine cuttings and cultivars for my own use.

The flavour of my fizz will be out of this world. Bu I will never say from where I got the vines and stuff. Can you keep a secret?