Run 42 kilometers in over four hours, while tasting 26 glasses of wine. Impossible? Not for a British wine connoisseur. He did it last weekend during the London Marathon. And he raised a large amount of money for charity.
You’ve probably heard of it. Runners who run a marathon dressed up, or come up with an extra challenge to keep the long running race a bit fun. Tom Gilbey is such a person. The Englishman, a buyer and seller of wines, came up with the idea of blindly tasting a glass of wine for every mile he ran during the London Marathon last weekend.
He posted a video of his adventure on social media, showing him drinking a glass of red before the race. For every mile (about 1.6 kilometers) he runs, friends and family are waiting with another bottle of unlabeled wine.
Grape variety, origin and year
Gilbey, who kept a wine glass with him throughout the marathon, then drank a long drink of grape juice and tried to guess the grape variety, place of origin, and year. That didn’t go well for him. He answered those three questions correctly seven times. Fourteen times he was partially right. He was completely wrong only four times.
“Everything was organized by my son,” Gilbey told the British news site LBC. “He arranged flags and printed T-shirts so that I could see where on the route I had to be for the tasting. He did a fantastic job.”
Even though he stopped many times to taste the wine, he still completed the race in less than five hours. After a total of 26 glasses, none of which he drank, Gilbey crossed the finish line with a time of four hours and 41 minutes. A great achievement, especially since it was almost 30 years ago that he last participated in a marathon.
Charity
Gilbey, a fairly well-known ‘wine influencer’ with thousands of followers on social media, raised money with his campaign for the Sobell House Hospice Charity in Oxfordshire, the hospice where his mother Caroline was nursed during the last days of her life. At the time of writing, the counter stands at 15,000 pounds (about 17,500 euros) for charity.
Gilbey looks back on the marathon with mixed feelings. “I started off pretty well and was really enjoying it until I got a particular wine after seven miles,” he says. In his video, which has now been viewed millions of times, he shows his disgust at the glass of Shiraz wine. “This tastes like piss!”
Despite his success, the wine connoisseur has no plans to participate again next year. “I actually wanted to participate last year, but then I got injured. This year I went for the resit. But next year I won’t do it. I’m still in pain now.”
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