Le moment de vérité

Le moment de vérité (moment of truth) is a challenge-based game show on Radio-Canada (confusingly a television station), and it was the moment of truth for Dominick, Céline, Sandra and Pascal last night. Regular readers will have met Dominick and Céline before, whilst Pascal is Dominick's brother and Sandra is a former teaching colleague in Inukjuak.

The foursome tried out for the show earlier this year (or maybe late last year, I lose track of time so easily these days), and in the summer they got invited on and made their recording, which was finally broadcast light night. Sandra was selected to perform their challenge, which seemed to involve developing the ability to distinguish one red wine from another. I say seemed, because as the whole show was in French I wasn't 100% sure what was going on; Sandra certainly did a lot of smelling, swilling and spitting though, so she was either wine tasting or testing mouthwash.

From what I could make out, the group were given a few days, or possibly weeks (remember what I said about time?) before the show taped to 'train' Sandra for the task, and the training paid off because Sandra aced the challenge on the night, correctly identifying the five wines on display in the two minutes allowed and winning some very handy prizes for herself and the team. She and Pascal both walked away with a variety of computing and photography equipment, whilst it looked as though Dominick and Céline won a holiday to Scandinavia; either that or they won a photograph of a fjord, which wouldn't have been so impressive.

It was great to see my friends on TV, and even greater to see them emerge victorious. It's a good job they didn't have me on the team instead of Sandra though. The only time I've tried my hand at wine tasting was at a vineyard just outside of Cape Town a few years back, and after sampling a number of the local products all I was able to proclaim was, "yep, tastes like wine alright." My lack of a sense of smell would have reduced the challenge to guesswork, whilst my minimal grasp of French would most probably have led to a complete misunderstanding of the rules and seen me attempt to drink the entire contents of all five bottles in the allotted two minutes before collapsing in a drunken heap on the floor.

Now that would be a game show...