Libby’s Naked Wines diary this week: why I’m craving beer after wine, and why we travel
I first met Ashwin Bhardwaj in my living room 17 years ago. I had come through in the morning to make my shreddies and found a nearly naked chap in a tiny pair of pants, doing lunges. He had done a ski season with my then housemate and she had brought him back to crash on the sofa the night before – from this unconventional introduction a friendship was formed.
Bhardwaj is now an award-winning travel writer and recently published his acclaimed book Why We Travel (£12.99, Amazon). It is a thoughtful, funny, moving collection of stories from his own life and adventures interwoven with interviews and stats exploring why we travel – and how we can do it better. Frankly, it’s a fantastic read, and I’m not just saying that because I feature in it.
Bhardwaj also lectures at City University and sometimes asks me along to teach a segment on wine journalism, my own journey into this industry and the cross section of press and social media. I would love to say that my lectures are looked forward to for my scintillating tales and inspiring advice, but I suspect it is more to do with the fact I always bring some good wine and end on a tasting.
Libby’s Naked Wines Diary: the learning this week? Always carry wine when you travel
One chilly afternoon, I selected a warming Artelan Rioja Tempranillo 2023 from my case (Naked Wines, £12.99; Angel Price, £10.99) and purchased some paper cups on route. Not the ideal glassware but these are students, and I wasn’t going to be lugging 20-something long stemmed wine glasses across London. Upon opening the bottle, I was not disappointed.
“It smells like Christmas,” smiled Bhardwaj as we handed out cups to the class. A fresh, young Rioja, this was full of smooth, fruity juiciness, sprinklings of baking spices and, at a powerful 14%, it suddenly got a lot more raucous as we moved away from how to write pitches and into how to smell, taste and quality-test a wine.
As any wine professional will tell you, after a wine tasting there is nothing we crave more than a beer, so Bhardwaj and I headed to the pub on the corner for a cheeky half on the way home. Bhardwaj has always had an element of Blackadder’s Lord Flashheart to him; a roguish, high-energy explorer. But now we joked he was becoming more Indiana Jones; the adventuring is still there but with the gravitas of teaching and becoming a published author.
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“My whole life has had travel at its centre,” he told me. “I chose my career deliberately to do that. But it changed significantly with covid, my mother having cancer and my daughter being born. I realised that if I was travelling less, I wanted to make sure what travelling I did would be rewarding. The book started with me trying to answer that question”.
Did he find the answer? How is one to make travel ultimately rewarding? “Distance and expense have no bearing on satisfaction. We’ve all had disappointing travel, been somewhere on holiday where everyone has enjoyed themselves but us, and that is when the trip hasn’t aligned with our motivation. So, understand your motivation first – why are you leaving home? And leave time for accidental joy.
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“Because of time and money, it is the biggest temptation to pack a trip full and then it can feel like a job dashing from one thing to the next. When I look back on a trip, the moments I remember aren’t the Michelin starred restaurants booked months in advance, it’s the person who served me coffee on the beach, who I got talking to and recommended this little local place that does the best crab”.
So work out why you are travelling, what you want or need from it, and then leave some space in your itinerary for discoveries and spontaneous moments. Advice imparted; Bhardwaj popped the remainder of the stoppered Rioja into his rucksack. It seems another lesson this explorer learned is that is always pays to have some wine with you as you travel.
Libby’s Naked Wines diary runs every week in City AM