The mechanics of tasting

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You may (or may well not) wonder about the mechanics of our going to an external tasting and getting the tasting notes on to this site as efficiently as possible.

More and more we take our laptops to professional wine tastings so as to NewWaveSpainLavoid laborious transcription, but you can imagine that this is an exercise fraught with practical problems. Julia's Mac has a usefully powerful battery but that of my Dell Latitude lasts a couple of hours at best, so I have to take a spare and/or a power cord, which can involve some very unseemly rooting around looking for sockets and, occasionally, some rather perilous potential tripping points (see pictures).

It is rare that there is enough room for a laptop on the table on which the bottles are presented, and even when the bottles are not too close together, the table is usually punishingly low for a human back, so I tend to go scouting for an empty wine box to lean on.

NewWaveSpainCUPWhen I got to the New Wave Spain tasting described in Best of Spain's New Wave? last week, I found that the organisers had very kindly already organised a trolley for me and my laptop, which was extremely convenient – although I still needed a box to avoid backache (see left). And unfortunately the tasting was held in The Worx, Parson's Green, which is a photographic studio so there was a power point only at one end of the long, white room.

Again, the organisers were extremely co-operative and managed to connect me to that power source via a massive extension lead. I'm sure I was a thorough nuisance for my long-suffering fellow tasters. Any moment now I feel I will be moving towards a wheelchair and an amanuensis, but in the meantime I thought you might be amused by these pictures of your correspondent at work last week.

You can find what I wrote on the trolley and box in New Wave Spanish tasting notes.