Editors - Angels or Devils?

When you encounter an editor for the first time, you (author) do not know what to expect. You let an editor get away with messing up your work because you want to be published. You know perfectly well that the story you wrote was better before the editor got his hands on it, but because you are afraid of not being published, you grin and bear it. No, it’s not you, it’s me. Sorry.

Then you will come across a fantastic editor who has ideas that can actually improve your work. There are some of these out there. At the very least, they will ask questions like, “Does the protagonist really have to be an Air Force reservist?” Hell, yeah!

At best, they will say, “Why does MacAndrew give the time-travellers his watch?” That was a brilliant question, as I instantly recognized, and my rewrite made the story publishable.

And then you may be unfortunate enough to encounter the editor who wishes he had written the story himself and proceeds to attempt to do so, line by line. By this time, we hope you have found enough spine to be able to say, “My name at the top; my words underneath. Write your own story.” Of course, you lose the sale. It depends on you whether you think it was worth it.

Ageing Wines

I think we should distinguish between changes in quality that occur naturally over time, even if a wine is correctly bottled and stored, and changes that occur because a wine is incorrectly bottled and / or stored. The former is meant to happen; the latter isn’t.

The initial reactive change after bottling is mostly due to the oxygen present in the headspace, which is the air between the wine and the cork. When that oxygen is used up, only very small amounts will be able to seep through a cork in a bottle that is stored correctly, on its side. Change will now be gradual.

More air will get in if a synthetic cork is used, which is why you don’t see such corks in expensive wines that are meant to be laid down for ageing.

None will get past a screw top, which is why you see screw tops on wines sold young which rely on retaining their initial fruitiness rather than being allowed to develop character by ageing.

“Gone bad” may, however, be the result of excessive ageing. I once laid down a case of an already very nice Vouvray (white) that was expected to be perfect in another four years. I then forgot, and left it eight. The result was considerably worse than I’d started with – vin très ordinaire indeed!

Had it been a half-decent red (the only kind I can afford) I might have got away with it because the best drinking age for these is significantly older than whites. It is however a matter of taste, since the character of the wine is changing all the time and you need to discover the character that you like best, or rely on experts to tell you what you ought to like best. Of course, if you don’t have a cellar, you can only buy the wine at an age when somebody else has decided it’s satisfactory for sale anyway.

If an old red looks brown it may well be on its way to vinegar, but it may still have value to people who like to look at old bottles rater than drink their contents.

Only marginally relevant, but single malt whisky is usually aged in the cask, not in the bottle. Hence when it is bottled, they stick on a label saying “12 years old” rather than “2012” because its still considered 12 years old, even if it takes you a couple of years to drink it. This is not to say it won’t change in the bottle, but that’s not meant to be the object of the exercise. If people find some Islay single malts undrinkable, it’s most likely because they bought a heavily-peated variety when they didn’t mean to. All such bottles should be donated to someone who is more likely to appreciate them.

Me, for instance.