I’m devastated. Distraught. Bereft. Less than three weeks after I purchased a brand new MacBook Pro, the poor machine is now lying dormant, unable to power up, utterly f*cked. And it’s all the fault of a Malbec from Concha Y Toro.

Here’s the sequence of events:

2008-2009 - I pontificate, procrastinate and ruminate about buying a MacBook Pro. I really want one but they’re expensive right?
08/07/2009 – An unplanned visit to the Apple Store in London’s Regent Street results in a purchase of my first mac. I’ve finally done it!
08/07/2009 – 29/07/2009 – Love blossoms. I transfer my itunes library to its new home, download Handbrake and start a project to convert all my movies to a digital library. I download Evernote and Omnifocus for work based notetaking and project management. I give my first Keynote presentation with some awesome embedded video – in short I fall in love with everything Mac. What is a PC anyway?
1.30am 30/0-7/2009 – Lying on the couch, watching series 3 of The Wire, I hear the notification sound of a text arriving on my wife’s iPhone. The sound is muffled, so I  lift up a couple of cushions, searching, and then… OH NOOO!!! The cushion in my left hand barely touches the glass of Malbec on the coffee table, but the force is still enough to send the Reidel glass of red crashing on to the keyboard of the MacBook Pro. Sh*t!! Panic. Fear. Impotence. And yes, the eyes started to moisten.

I turn the power off. I wipe away as much of the wine as I can. I’m frantic, I feel ill. Meanwhile McNulty is out on a dinner date with the Campaign Strategist in uptown Baltimore. Christ McNulty, you’re always thinking of yourself!

I go to bed. Everything will be fine if I believe it to be so.

08.30am 30/07/2009 – I’m awake. I take the Mac into the garden and power up. It’s working…but wait. I have a working trackpad but no typing capability – the keyboard has shorted. Bloody hell. So I turn my poor Mac off in the vain hope that if I re-boot everything will be ok. Except now the machine won’t even turn on! Oh God, say it ain’t so Joe?

So that’s it. The Apple store say that it’s not covered under AppleCare as my carelessness is classed as “accidental damage”. The repair bill is going to be at least £600 and likely to be more if the wine has touched the hard drive.

I am utterly gutted. After two years of dreaming of a MacBook Pro, I’ve managed to kill mine within three weeks of finally purchasing it.

And the wine? A Winemakers Lot Malbec from Concha Y Toro that I picked up from Oddbins on the way home from work. The wine was pretty average – how cruel that such mediocrity could be responsible for the death of something so great.

It’s all in the hands of the insurers now.

There are some images in life so disturbing that, even though you may avert your eyes from the source, the imprint remains burned into your retina before sweeping up the capillaries into your very nightmares. I’m thinking of the visuals of war, famine, animal cruelty, clowns on bicycles and Anthony Perkins dressed as his dead mother at the end of Psycho. 

And then there is this image of Diego Maradona and Carlos Tevez. I can’t recall a time when I’ve seen something as equally comical as it is grotesque. And thoroughly, thoroughly sinister.

The Maradona circus is in town as Argentina take on Scotland at Hampden and the air hangs fat with all the controversy that surrounds the greatest footballer of any generation. Most amusing has been the press coverage given to Terry Butcher over his assertion that he would refuse to shake Maradona’s hand if offered it. 

Still smarting from the 20 year old “Hand of God” wound, Butcher (one of the least talented ballplayers England has ever seen) still regards Maradona as a cheat. Butcher is one of those little Englanders (albeit a quite tall one) who believes that England will win any tournament they enter on sheer will power alone. 

A practitioner of the old “up and at ‘em” game, Butcher goes to bed in Captain Mannering pyjamas with a signed photo of John Le Mesurier by his bed light. Terry forgets that England were as poor in 1986 as they have been at any tournament since 1966 (with the exception of 1990, but that aberration was purely down to the John Barnes Rap). 

He also forgets that in the very same game that Maradona caressed the ball with his hand, he also scored the greatest goal in the history of the game. Where were you when that one was hitting the onion bag, eh Terry? And just in case you’ve forgotten…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rW-lK9F6TU]

So, if Diego were to offer the hand of friendship what better way to do it than with a bottle of Argentina’s finest contribution to wine – the full throttle Malbec.

Malbec is the grape of many names – known as Auxerrois in Cahors, Cot in the Loire and Malbeck in Argentina,

Our growing interest in South American Wines over the past 20 years provided an opportunity for the Argentinean manifestation of this variety to establish itself in the UK but it also has an interesting past in mainland Europe too.

It used to be a main constituent in the famous Bordeaux blends but fell victim to the vicious 1956 French frost from which it never recovered. Nervous growers replaced it with more fashionable and more durable grapes. C’est la vie.

Exported to Argentina the grape is widely grown and is established there in a stronger way than say Carmenere is in Chile (another European Export rarely grown in its homeland). The grapes tend to produces deep coloured wines with generous black fruit characteristics, balanced acidity and smooth tannins.  It’s also good fortune that the wine is the perfect match for Argentina’s abundant supply of thick, succulent red steak. 

My Malbec of choice is the Salentein Reserve Malbec, which I stumbled upon through a recommendation from Tom Cannavan at WinePages. Tom had just been on a trip to Argentina when I spoke to him last year and recommended the wine which, by the grace of the pricing gods, was on offer at Tesco. I got myself a case and it’s been a favourite since.  

Is Malbec the Terry Butcher of wine? Nope. The grape may be full on but it has balance, can display finesse when asked to and plays well abroad.

Butcher on the other hand is a donkey. Or should that be ass?