May 17, 2012 at 5:47 am
I suspect that almost everyone (other than those who eschew alcohol absolutely) will have had an occasion where they partook of some new (to them) alcoholic drink, loved it, and forgot it and never tasted it again for years.
So the idea here is for everyone to tell of us such an occasion (which they can only do, of course, if the lapse of memory mentioned above has miraculously [or otherwise] unlapsed). Ideally, the occasions related should have some connection (perhaps a remote, or vague, or drunken one) with relational databases, but an adequately loose connection with SQL instead would be acceptable despite the forum's title.
Here's my own story.
A couple of decades ago, a number of people got together for a week at a hotel in St Pierre (not far from Grenoble) to talk about massively parallel databases and how we would move forward. Weekdays in the conference room, weekends on the hills (much ice, much snow). In the conference room we drank water and soft drinks, of course, but we were in France so lunch and dinner were accompanied by wine; and some (most) of the evenings were spent in the bar. As we were in St Pierre, only a few miles from the Chartreuse monastery, the bar had a good range of chartreuse, both green and yellow, in strengths from 40% up to (if I remember correctly) something over 70%. My wife, who dislikes big hills and intensely hates ice-covered hills as anything other than a backdrop to the scenery and wasn't with me on this business trip, is a green chartreuse since her teens, so I was familiar with that, but I hadn't tasted yellow chartreuse before. I discovered that I like the yellow as well as the green. Naturally I brought some of both home with me; but it didn't last long, and with the price of chartreuse in the UK (and three expensive children living at home and a vast debt on our house) it was pretty rare that we could afford to buy any, so we dropped it from our drinking. So until yesterday I hadn't touched chartreuse for 18 or 19 years.
Last night, on returning home from a reunion of local former ICL High Performance Systems people, I was looking for something to drink before going to bed. That was probably a mistake, after the reunion, which had taken place in a hostelry with excellent beers at fairly low prices, but I failed to realise that at the time. I couldn't find anything I felt like drinking until I discovered, at the back of a cupboard, an unopened bottle of yellow chartreuse. I don't know how it got there - the cupboard has existed only for six years, we acquired it (definitely empty) just after we moved house, and I don't recall the bottle moving with us. I decided a small glass of that might be just the thing. It was. I had quite forgotten how good the stuff was. I don't think that bottle will last very long now, but with all the children now doing their own thing, all debts cleared, and the big fall in the euro, I can maybe afford to start buying the stuff again.
Tom
May 17, 2012 at 6:42 am
The nearest I can get to that is a coffee stain on my copy of "SQL Server Execution Plans"! Great story Tom.
Having said that, Galicia's wines were amazing when the better half and I stayed here a couple of years ago. The imported Galician wines are disappointing.
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May 17, 2012 at 6:43 am
I tasted homemade grape schnapps one summer when I was in Austria. Delicious! I need to go find a good recipe for it to see if I can make it myself.
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