An alarm clock in every bottle

Did you know they can grow grapes with alarm clocks in them?

Or maybe they’ve found a way to make liquid clocks, which they mix into the wine.

So far, though, they’ve only perfected this technique with red grapes, or red wine, and they can only set the alarms for 3am.

I know this because it’s one of the universal laws of the nature that if you drink red wine you will wake up at 3am. I’ve stopped being amazed by this. I accept it as one of the cruel contradictions that fate mocks us with, like the pleasures of sex being balanced with sleepless nights, teenagers and the wet patch.

You can drink the wine, enjoy the evening, embrace your friends – but you’d better be ready to mow the lawn when 3am arrives, because you won’t be going back to sleep.

When I first observed this phenomenon I thought, hastily, that it was just the effect of alcohol on my aging organs. But if that were true it would happen with white wine and spirits. Beer, too. But it doesn’t!

True, beer will wake me up every half hour from 11pm onwards, but that’s because there’s so much of it and my bladder can no longer cope. But by 2am the problem’s over and I don’t wake again until the crows start hobnailing across the roof.

But no matter if I start drinking at 6pm or 9pm or 8am – at three in the morning the red-wine fairy is prising my brain open with a tyre lever.

Nor does this mean I am hung over. I don’t have to drink the whole bottle (although it’s been known); one glass will do it.

I have deliberately drunk bottles of the stuff in the hope that I can render myself so comprehensively unconscious that nothing will wake me for several days, but it doesn’t work. I still wake at 3am – and then I really do have a hangover.

I have compared notes with other people, some of them 50 years younger than I. Same result.

Is it the same in France, or Italy, or anywhere that wine is produced?

I hope not, for their sake. The French drink practically nothing else and the thought of a whole nation waking in a bad temper at 3am and berating their spouses in French doesn’t bear thinking about.

I suspect not, though. I suspect the red wine alarm clock doesn’t recognise time zones, which means that in Paris it will be clattering away on the bedside table of the French brain at 5pm, when they’re all too busy to notice.

Look, I am not complaining. I like red wine and I’ve grown used to being woken at 3am. I’ve adjusted my habits to accommodate very early mornings. And if I ever need to be anywhere at 5am in the morning then a red wine nightcap will give me a guaranteed two hours to brush my teeth, shave, and find a pair of socks with no holes.

I have an ordinary alarm clock, of course. But I don’t trust it. It has let me down in the past. True, user error has had a hand in its failure, but that’s my point, you can set the hands, but forget to arm the alarm. And it wakes me in much the same way a horse galloping through the kitchen cupboards would wake me.

Red wine, on the other hand, is foolproof. There is a certain quietness in the call of the red wine alarm, as if a bird is perched somewhere in your brain, tuning up in preparation for the dawn.

If the bloody thing would stop treating my mouth like the bottom of the birdcage it would almost be a pleasure.