Jim Boyce, one of Beijing’s most notorious and elusive nightlife and wine bloggers, takes us from Tom Wolfe to Sanlitun and back again

Breakfast

9:05 a.m. Eat yogurt, granola, an apple and-just to be healthy-a homemade burrito. Clean kitchen, fold laundry. I am my own ayi.
9:50 Read Tom Wolfe’s 1968 piece “Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink” about overcrowding in New York: “We were already socked into one of those great, total traffic jams... humans, male and female, behind the glass of automobile windows, soundlessly going through the torture of their own adrenalin jolts.” Sounds like my taxi rides this week.
10:47 Look at Workers’ Stadium from my window: Ghana and Brazil will play soccer tonight to determine the final Olympic qualifier.
11:00 Check supplies for next home tasting of Chinese wine. Happy to find not only bottles from Yunnan, Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong and Xinjiang, but also more than 60 glasses survived the last tasting. Stemware of choice: 22 oz Stone Island glasses (￥10 in Lai Tai Flower Market).

Wine Tasting

12:40 p.m. Join six Chinese wine writers for an ASC lunch with Chateau Latour GM Frederic Engerer at the Grand Hyatt’s Made in China restaurant. Try 1995 and 2001 vintages with more than a half dozen dishes. Some are too spicy for Bordeaux, but the Beijing duck is OK. Sense Engerer’s blood pressure rise when we ask if he ever considered using screw tops instead of corks.

Sanlitun

3:05 Take a cab to Sanlitun. Gawk as I pass the nearly completed CCTV tower, known to my Chinese friends as “the pants.”
3:26 Stop in new Nali Studio for the opening of Pantry Magic. It’s a cornucopia of cast iron cookware.
3:37 Stop at the Saddle Cantina, check email and ask manager Chad Lager about the NBA playoff schedule at The Rickshaw.
3:40 Skype with Café St. Laurent Chef Billy Kawaja. It turns out he is at Aperitivo, so I walk over and ask about his new lunch menu. Le Bistrot Parisienne is packed out front.
4:05 Return to Saddle, add two posts to the blog, answer a dozen emails and wonder how to help a reader with 100 cases of Chateau Lafite to sell. (Sadly, I lack a 1,200-bottle fridge, not to mention the money to purchase the wine). Check blog traffic: This month is on record pace.
5:26 Visit Emma Entertainment on Gongti to get tickets for tonight’s football game. Grab sandwiches at Tour Les Jours on the walk home. The place has decent coffee, food and wireless, but is too noisy for working.

Metaphysics of Jam

5:52 Read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, who explains a study that found college students and professional food tasters pretty much agreed in blind taste tests about which strawberry jams taste best. The difference: The pros could explain their picks. “It’s that we [average consumers] simply don’t have any way of rationalizing our feelings about jam.” Briefly consider my jam feelings and then wonder whether the study has validity for wine tasting.

Go Ghana

6:30 Eat, shower, then iron my Ghana flag (two college friends hail from there).
7:15 Arrive at Alfa for a pre-game Coke with Kawaja and fellow chef Peter Burt, who moved to Beijing six hours earlier. A slightly intoxicated patron with a liberal definition of personal space wants to be our friend.
7:40 Arrive at Workers Stadium and realize I carry the lone Ghana flag among a sea of Brazil fans. Security is efficient, the stadium looks good (though the seats are dirty), the fans are fun and my team plays like it spent last night powering down racks of Jagermeister shots in Nanjie.

On the Town

10:20 Brazil’s 5-1 thrashing of Ghana requires a consolation prize: beer. The Den is packed, so we head to The Rickshaw for a pint of Stella.
11:10 We decide to try the new food menu at Q Bar. People are flank to shank inside, so we grab a table outside and order Alfonso Specials (gin, Grand Marnier, sweet and dry vermouth, bitters-a great starter drink).
12:20 a.m. We change our minds about food and decide newcomer Burt should try chuan’r. We head to Sanlitun North, but the street food vendors seem to have been evicted, so it’s burritos at Luga’s instead. Luga tells us he might expand again.
1:47 Get home, type in notes from the day and read a few more articles by Tom Wolfe.
2:25 Pack away the Ghana flag until the 2010 World Cup and retire.

What we think...

For as much as we like to hit the town, we have YET to go carousing with the man behind the infamous nightlife blog, beijingboyce.com and the wine blog http://grapewallofchina.com. So we did the next best thing and took ourselves on a Day in the Life journey. We salute anyone committed to drinking and drinking well. Have your say at www.cityweekend.com.cn/dayinthelifeBJ.