Real life starts to intervene

It was easy eating little and often in the aftermath of the New Year's festivities. I was based at home, with only Laszlo and my computer for company, but this week has seen the start of the tasting season.

There are two main tasting seasons in each year of a wine writer's life: Winter/Spring, which runs from the second week of January pretty much up until the London Wine and Spirits Fair, which is in mid-May. Then you get a breather for the summer holidays and by early September, the whole circus kicks off again, grinding to a halt earlyish in December.

Now as work goes, tasting wine isn't a bad way to spend your day, but contrary to the opinion of those of my friends who don't work in the wine trade, it really is work. This week, for instance, has seen most of the big wine merchants hold their Burgundy 2006 En Primeur tastings (all the En Primeur bit means is that it's the first chance anyone has had to taste and buy the wines from the 2006 vintage). There have been over a dozen tastings in London, each of which has featured at least 80 wines, both reds and whites.

By the end of today I will have been to about eight of these tastings over the course of four days, and will have tasted around 50 wines at each in order to write up some recommendations for www.wine-pages.com, a specialist wine website for which I write on a semi-regular basis. And wine tasting makes you hungry. Starving, in fact.

In the normal course of events, this wouldn't be a problem – I'd grab my lunch at whichever tasting I happen to be at round about lunchtime and that would be that. (Most of them generously provide sandwiches, at the very least, and sometimes a full three-course buffet, in the understanding that an army of wine tasters marches on its stomach.)

At the moment, though, I can't just chow down on a sarnie – the combination of mayo, white bread, rich fillings and an inappropriate balance of protein and complex carbs would scupper me. Nor can I count on being able to find a mid-morning or afternoon snack to keep my blood sugar levels from dipping dangerously low.

My solution is to take a bit more time about things so that I can stop somewhere and buy myself a lunchtime salad – I even went to a kaiten sushi place on Tuesday and had some salmon and tuna sashimi and a seaweed and cucumber salad. Alternatively, I pack a small tub of something nutritious and a plastic fork and find a convenient corner to sit and grab my lunch. I also take a couple of pieces of fruit or a small bag of raw, unsalted nuts along with me to fill the snack gap.

So far so good, but it's all taking a bit more planning and preparation than I'd otherwise have to put into my food. Other than that, the diet seems to be going quite well. I'm not feeling atrociously hungry in between meals, thanks to the snacks – although I have been peckish on the odd occasion. And I'm finding that the smaller portions that I'm eating seem to be satisfying enough – in fact I'm quite enjoying the fact that I get up from the table without feeling like I've stuffed myself. The question is – is it having any impact on my waistline or am I going to have to take more extreme steps? My weekly weigh-in isn't for another few days yet, so I can't really answer that yet.