Monday, 10 September 2012

1984 and all that

To tell you the truth, 1984 is a bad year for wine. Yet apart from the local Hong Kong population who have special reasons to remember 1997*, 1984 has become an infamous year because of George Orwell's novel, which ranks with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as two of the best known examples of dystopian novels of political satire. I use this picture of the cover of Nineteen Eighty-four to introduce the idea of certain special years, in this case, extra special vintages, which we will explore in this miniseries.

1984 is generally bad for most if not all of Europe. California, Oregon and Australia seems to have had good weather and grape harvests, which will be useful for those wanting to splash out on a bottle of their birthday vintage, but for the rest of us we can take the hint from those vintage chart in various websites (usually not included) and give it a miss.


* Actually 1984 is also significant for Hongkongers too, as the Sino-British Joint Declaration declaring the resumption of sovereignty of China over Hong Kong on 1st July 1997, was signed in December 1984.

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