Bricks and starter

The starter courtesy of youngest, who invited us over for Mother's day and to share her mother's day. Prawns, avocado and Mango spaghettini with salad and *white truffle oil*. Ooh! It's really quite nice.
Bit of a history of the family wine drinking here. Mum and Dad loved a glass or ten in the evenings and since wine was very expensive (or very unpleasant) in those days, they used to make their own...you know the sort of thing, tea and parsnip or a bit of dandelion and potato peeling. (sadly the used teabag wine was a magnificent failure, the house stank of sulphur for a week and then they threw it away). They also used to buy cider from the farm down the road (by the barrel, flavoured with rats and drowned tramps of course) and the bar opened at 6.00 (pm). Occasionally they'd have some real wine and I would hear discussion about Nuits St George versus Medoc and Chateau Neuf v. St Emilion and stuff like that.
When I drank wine myself, I remembered these snippets and of course couldn't afford to buy them, so Me and Barney also made wine. Some impressively almost drinkable ones. Our best failure was the 3week grapefruit wine kit. It was dark brown and tasted strongly of cough medecine. Fortunately some friends professed to like it so we gave them the lot.
In later years after my love affair with guinness and cider wore out, and also when I wasn't smoking, I rediscovered wine. Could afford it too. Lovely!
Then youngest became restaurant manager at heaven's kitchen and Last night she produced a Chateau Neuf Du Pape which she claims is a particularly good year. (well she should know) and gave it to Gorgeous Babe to take to Barney and said, tell Grandad it's a bottle of Chateau Neuf du Pape.
Said Gorgeous Babe to Grandad, with aplomb and perfect diction, "Grandad, here's a bottle of Chateau Poop de Naff".
It's true, she really did.
Oh joy!