Tom Gilbey, a London wine connoisseur, swapped electrolyte and carb drinks for glasses of pinot, shiraz and Chardonnay (among many other varieties) during the 2024 London Marathon.
Armed with two wine glasses in his running belt, Gilbey, 52, was challenged to blind taste test a different wine at every mile of the race. Gilbey would try to guess each wine’s producer, vintage, and grape.
And to be fair, he didn’t do too badly, especially considering he was running a marathon.
<,confused as to why this man isn’t on every morning news segment going pic.twitter.com/k7JjWcUXDu
— Josh Barrie (@joshbythesea) April 23, 2024
He started off strong, correctly identifying a 2018 Burgundy Pinot Noir. He then went on to identify “mostly correctly” another 21 wines, getting only four wrong.
We can’t deny, however, that as the video goes on, his answers get a bit hazier.
How did he manage to keep running after so many glasses of wine?
Well, he didn’t actually drink that many glasses of wine.
To avoid feeling too tipsy, Gilbey would only drink a sip or two, or if the offering was, as he so many times called it, “piss,” he wouldn’t even swallow it.
“If they were good, I might swallow it, and if they were bad, they went on the road,” he said.
“The wheels came off near the Isle of Dogs,” he told BBC News. “[The wines] weren’t good ones”.
The vino marathon was organized by Gilbey’s son Freddie, who works with Gilbey in the world of wine as a marketing manager.
“He somehow managed to stash quite a few of the good wines in at the beginning, which lulled me into a false sense of security.”
“There was a real trio of bad ‘uns, and then around a similar point, I was overtaken by a fridge. So that was sad”.
In Gilbey’s defense, his longest training run prior to the London Marathon was a marathon he ran in 1996.
“There was no strategy for anything,” he said.
“I suppose my recovery strategy was a glass of fizz at the end. And I also had some water in between the Chardonnay and Sangiovese.”
With Gilbey’s video going viral, he far exceeded his fundraising target of £2,000, raising more than £14,000 for Sobell House Hospice.
