Merrick Watts: an idiot’s guide to wine volume two provided more idiocy than guidance

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Merrick Watts is back at The Garden of Unearthly Delights with an idiot’s guide to wine volume two. We saw the first instalment at Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2023 and loved it, but volume two proves that not every vintage is better than the last.

The format is the same: wines, wine tasting, a fun fact about the wine, a suggested pairing and some jokes. As at the first show, there are 6 wine tastings already poured when you take your seat and Merrick Watts guides the audience through each of them after asking the audience to guess which varietal each one is. Unfortunately, he immediately raised our eyebrows when he asked the audience to guess the varietal of the first wine, and then told us it was prosecco. Prosecco isn’t a varietal! It is the old name for the Glera grape so Glera is the varietal, Prosecco is the style of wine.

There was a strong Italian focus to the majority of the wines that Merrick Watts selected for his volume two show. Having gotten his information about prosecco completely wrong, we were a little dubious about the wine facts Merrick Watts gave throughout the show. That said, it’s nice to hear anecdotes about the places the wines originated from such as the wine windows in Florence where people could get a glass of wine.

Some of Merrick’s jokes hit the mark – orange wines being made by the tears of those who will never own a home, and making fun of people who like sauvignon blanc. Others completely missed the mark, such as Merrick going into unnecessary detail in his unnecessary story about a centennial woman in a nursing home vomiting on live TV. It just made the audience uncomfortable. Similarly, when he was talking about “Karens” to a mostly female crowd, we started to question whether Merrick wasn’t capable of reading the room. An idiot’s guide to wine volume two is not a carefully balanced barrel of laughs when compared to volume one.

Merrick Watts: an idiot’s guide to wine volume two offers an enjoyable tasting and Merrick Watts chose some wonderful wines for us to try. However, apart from pairing a wine with a Bunnings sausage aka “Tradie’s tapas”, most of the pairing suggestions were unoriginal – steak or lamb with a cabernet sauvignon for example. We remember last time around he had inventive pairings such as twisties.

An idiot’s guide to wine volume two is more plonk than premier cru but just like a cheap prosecco, it can be bubbly and fun, even if not necessarily refined.