Sediment

Was that wine expensive? – Lanciola Chianti 2007

2012-03-15T10:40:00.000Z

We do suffer difficult questions about wine from our nearest and dearest. And we’re not talking vintage comparisons, or the merits of Bordeaux vs Burgundy. If only. The most challenging wine question from my own spouse is, “Are you going to drink all of that?”

My oppo CJ recently had to deal with the particularly loaded marital query, “Is it something to do with Sediment?” I, too, have encountered this particular question, when discovered one Sunday morning drinking wine with my breakfast.

“Is that a Sediment wine?” is one of the most awkward queries at my own dining table, as well as CJ’s, implying that I might be about to accompany our supper with some utterly undrinkable joke product.

But perhaps the most difficult wine question I get asked is “Was it expensive?” For at that moment, the lid comes off the can, and worms are all over the dining table.

“Expensive” is, of course, a completely subjective notion. One man’s expensive is another man’s cheap, etc. However, bear with me me when I say that this man’s expensive is your expensive, too.

The other man, who’s cheap, is, of course, CJ, who once baulked at a wine which cost “a brace of cinema tickets”. Don’t let this mislead you, however, into thinking that he knows any more about cinema tickets than he does about wine. Ask him how come we missed the start of Frost/Nixon because we were sitting in the wrong screen…

My wife is not blind to the cost of good wine. In fact, thanks to Sediment, she is only too painfully aware of the relationship between quality and price. Offered a glass of sherry, Mrs K now asks cautiously, “Is it the nice one, or the cheap one?”

Hence her understandable caution over Sediment wines, and the subsequent notion that if a wine’s nice, it’s expensive. So, is it? Well – and this, to me, is the key thing – the answer is always that it’s not as expensive as it could have been.

It was reduced. It was on 3 for 2. It’s three times that price in a restaurant. I got a case discount. It costs a lot more now than when I bought it. It costs a lot more at the posh wine merchants on the High Road.

So trust me to be lured in by a bargain. Uncorked is an excellent wine merchant, based in the City, and really aimed at customers with deeper pockets than mine. They got a bit upset when I suggested this once before, but let me give you an example of their customers’ suggested lifestyle from their list. A rather nice claret, Chateau Lanessan 2001 is just over £14 if you buy it from them by the case, but £17.95 by the bottle. And here is how they describe it: “This 2001 is for drinking: don't squirrel it away, but keep a couple of cases in the utility room for kitchen suppers and weekend lunches.”

Well, sorry chaps, but £18 for a kitchen supper wine is expensive in my book. That’s a dinner party wine. Mrs K would throw a justifiable wobbly if our midweek spag bol was accompanied by even a £14 wine. Quite apart from complaining about “a couple of cases” (don’t you love the insouciance?) in the utility room blocking the route to the tumble dryer.

However, Uncorked do have sales, and in early February I spotted this Lanciola Chianti 2007 on offer for £8.76. And it was terrific, an extraordinarily well-balanced wine; rich and resonant but without being heavy, soft yet bright and with a long aftertaste reflecting its buoyant nose. It’s light enough to drink with white meat, yet clever enough to enjoy on its own. Brilliant.

By the time I had realised just how nice and yet inexpensive it was, the sale was over. But, I thought, at £116.05 a case, that’s £9.67 a bottle, and still not expensive. A bargain, I’d say. Maybe not a couple of cases, but one case alone would merit the effort of getting it into my racks while avoiding the question of cost. (It’s an exercise like the Great Escape in reverse – how to get things into a cellar undetected…)

But no. I went back, and they now have 0 cases, 0 bottles, 0 available stock. I bought the last remaining bottle for my cellar, at the single bottle price of £10.96. 25% more than I first paid. Damn.

So is my bottle expensive? Cheap? Frankly, I’ve lost track. All I do know is that the single unrepeatably delicious bottle in my cellar is now like bloody gold dust…

Amnesia: Cowrie Bay New Zealand Chardonnay

2012-03-08T16:15:00.000Z

I'm sitting at the kitchen table, gloomily unscrewing a bottle of Cowrie Bay New Zealand Chardonnay, and my wife says, 'Didn't you drink that the other day?'

'Well, yes,' I say, defensively. She has her head angled in such a way as to let me know that I'm doing something wrong.

'I thought you didn't like it.'

'No, I didn't,' I reply, quite truthfully. It looked all right at the time, in a dully corporate sort of style (which was, naturally, why I bought it) but it tasted of bananas and chewing gum and gave me a headache.

'So why are you drinking it again? Is it something to do with Sediment?'

This hasn't occurred to me as a reason why I might be tackling a second bottle of something I didn't enjoy the first time round, so I say, 'Yes. That's why I'm drinking it again'. She ratchets up the disapproval by narrowing her eyes. This takes us to a new level of threat, after which she can start asking questions like Is that the second bottle today and Have you made a start on the bathroom? Luckily, the phone rings and she goes off to answer it, shooting me a parting glance heavy with incredulity. I now have to find something to say about it, or look like a man who doesn't know why he's sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a wine he doesn't like.

I stare at the Cowrie Bay. It occurs to me that I might be drinking so much these days that I can't remember any more what I'm drinking, that the whole week has become a Lost Weekend in which I experiment repeatedly with already over-familiar wines in a completely senile and circular fashion before forgetting whatever it was I might just have learnt and going out and re-acquiring the wine I have only recently consumed and reached an unfavourable judgement upon. It's possible. I have recently started reading novels while burdened by a chimerical sense of familiarity, only to discover (usually with my wife's assistance) that I have actually been re-reading them.

On the other hand, living like a goldfish has its advantages, especially if I can pare my sensory and intellectual experiences down to about five items, never have to go in search of anything new and never get bored. Except that on this occasion, now my memory has been jogged, I can recall that Cowrie Bay tastes of bananas and gum. So what amnesia overwhelmed me at the point of purchase? Dr. Freud tells us that there are no mistakes, only the promptings of the unconscious mind, so what was my unconscious trying to tell me when I involuntarily grabbed a bottle of wine I didn't like, at a price I did?

'It can't have been very good, otherwise you'd have remembered,' says my wife, suddenly close by again.

Years ago, in the late twentieth century, I did try and keep a wine diary, presumably in anticipation of this dreadful day, but I never wrote anything more revealing in it than Red: rough; or Red: extremely rough and soon gave it up. A friend of mine - I don't think it was PK, although I may be wrong about that, too - told me once about finding someone else's wine diary, which turned out to be as inconsequential and uninformative as mine was, and this did cheer me a bit. Unless he'd found my wine diary and forgotten it was mine when he told me about finding it, which is also possible.

Anyway, the Cowrie Bay Chardonnay is sitting there in front of me, so I pour a slug, bracing myself for the worst, only to find - to my amazement - it tastes quite different from the way I think I remember it. Yes, there are some horrible grace notes of custard and melon and artificial sweetener, but there is also a bit of bite underneath, a bit of steeliness, which makes the whole experience really quite appealing.

'You know, this isn't bad', I say. My wife shoots me another glance, then the phone starts ringing again.

C J

Fine wine & footwear: Domaines des Pierres Blanches Faugères 2008

2012-02-29T12:50:00.000Z

Bear with me. I’m going to compare a wine to a pair of socks. But that's not a tasting note.

My colleague CJ has occasionally purchased a repellent bottle of sub-£5 wine which actually tastes like a pair of old socks. But not me. Oh no.

I was back at the wine shelves of my local Mace. It’s been a long time since my last desperate visit, but it was one of those nights; Mrs K was out, I couldn’t justify opening a decent bottle from the cellar, and the bright lights of the High Road beckoned.

For those who do not know (Good morning, America!), Mace is a franchised convenience store business in the UK, something akin to a 7-Eleven. And along with the usual groceries, they also sell alcohol, their window sticker promoting themselves for “When you want a bottle of the good stuff.”

Thank goodness for the licensing regulations in the UK which mean that a corner shop can sell wine. It’s just the notion of “good stuff” which might be a little contentious. For I later discovered their handy online “guide to selling more wine”, where they observe that “You don’t have to be a master of wine to be the master of a profitable wine range in a convenience store.”

And sure enough, neither of my assistants had the air of an MW about them. One, behind the counter, was having a lively and clearly uninterruptable conversation on his mobile phone; I couldn’t identify the language, but the word ‘passeport’ featured frequently and urgently. The ability to simultaneously conduct a sale and a phone conversation is nowadays a key skill of London’s convenience store assistants. The ability to assist is not.

The other ‘assistant’ is sweeping the floor. Given that he is wearing a taqiyah prayer cap, he is also unlikely to be an MW. When it comes to the wine, I’m clearly on my own.

The store has a surprising number of wines on display, over some half-dozen shelves. I can easily spot the branded, blended rubbish to avoid – the Echo Falls, First Cape, Falling Leaf and Kumala, all coming in at under five or six quid. But the strange thing is that every other bottle I pick up seems to cost £8.99.

Bordeaux? £8.99. New World Cabernet Sauvignon? £8.99. Burgundy? Burgundy?? Go on, hazard a guess - £8.99.

Now perhaps there is some brilliantly astute purchasing going on here. Or, they know that we locals will pay £8.99 for a late-night bottle of red wine and that’s it, regardless. Perhaps they really are all of an identical quality. Or perhaps the price-labelling gun got stuck.

But actually, £8.99 is not that cheap. (Just ask CJ…) For nine quid I expect a decent bottle of wine. And, drawing upon all my encyclopaedic knowledge of wine (hem, hem), there is nothing here which I recognise as decent – let alone “a bottle of the good stuff”.

So the strategy I adopted was this. Forget “the good stuff”, forget the appellations you usually desire, and pick the most modest type of wine possible. Nothing with aspirations of grandeur, nothing trading off a grand heritage, nothing hanging on the coattails of big names and Grand Crus. God knows I trawl the wine merchants of the UK hoping to find decent Bordeaux for under £10, let alone Burgundy, and it’s pretty unlikely to have materialised here, opposite the Pot Noodles. So a minor appellation must be a better bet.

Faugères is a small Languedoc appellation, only created in 1982. Its wine is founded upon the Carignan grape, which can be a bit stern and unforgiving; but Domaine des Pierres Blanches declared itself as a blend with three other varieties.

And then, given it was all I had to go on, there was the label. Obviously not trading on ‘heritage’, if dangerously reminiscent of an IKEA print. Was it naïve to think that, with an image of the wine’s stony origins on the label – and the word schist on the back to describe it – this was a contemporary winemaker who rated their terroir as significant?

Back home, the Carignan nose was rather threateningly light industrial, but after sitting in the glass for a bit, this settled into a soft, fleshy wine; still with rigour around the edges, slightly grippy and chewy, but with some dried fruit notes to add interest. I wouldn’t have drunk it eagerly on its own, but it went perfectly well with my dull, feed-yourself food. A well-made lesser wine, as opposed to a poor imitation of something great; and having seen that UK wine merchant prices are all around £8 a bottle, I don’t think a further 99p was too much extra to pay for the convenience.

Oh yes, the socks. It all reminded me of the chap who, as a teenager, was sent up to town by his mother with money to buy a new pair of shoes. He came back instead with a pair of cashmere socks. His argument was that with the sum he had been given for footwear, he could either have bought a pair of inferior shoes, mere imitations of excellence – or the best socks that money could buy.

See what I mean?

Buying In Bulk: Shiraz, and plenty of it

2012-02-23T09:06:00.000Z

As a rule, whenever I buy wine, I march robotically over to the booze section of the supermarket, stand in front of hundreds of unknowable bottles and special offers and bargain disasters for about thirty seconds, then reach out as if in a trance and grab the first bottle that costs about £5. That's it. Everything after that is a matter of destiny.

There is, I know, a grown-up way of acquiring drink, which is to ascertain your preferences beforehand then buy in bulk, a couple of cases at a time, and work your way complacently through the contents. Well, I have two problems with this. First, I can never remember what I like, or if, indeed, I actually like anything. Second (and more pressing) is that even if I can think of something that might be worth drinking, whenever this household orders even the most pitiable caseful of wine, something goes wrong with the delivery.

Tesco are a case in point, with their four deliveries and three monumental cock-ups. But it's not just them. The wife rather daringly went to popular winesellers Laithwaites to order a case of my pa-in-law's favourite wine and have it sent direct to his address as a Christmas present. Fine, the stuff turned up. But the pa-in-law already had an account with Laithwaites, so they billed him for his own present, instead of billing my wife. She called them up, explained, they said of course, we'll sort it out. What happened? Next time my pa-in-law put in for an order of his own, my wife got billed for it and he didn't. This makes no sense. They don't have the same names, they don't live in the same part of the country, they don't share credit cards. How can this happen?

Buying in bulk in person doesn't work much better. The doomed Oddbins (now relaunched, may God save their souls) would sell you plenty of stuff in one go, but it tasted terrible. My most recent visit to a cave in the south of France was so frosty that I ended up buying nothing at all. And I can't be arsed to get down to the nearest Majestic (all of half a mile away) because the parking's rubbish.

Nevertheless, in a last throw of the dice, I have been tormenting myself with the thought of going to France on a day trip, buying a load of cheap grog and bringing it back in the car. Ever since the Pound collapsed against the Euro a few years ago, the idea of the booze cruise has rather tanked, but then my brother-in-law, who has an almost obsessional interest in doutbful bargains, started explaining about some outfit that covers the cost of your ferry ticket provided you buy £200 or more of booze, or at least they give you a voucher for the next time you cross.

Actually, just looking at it, now, in black and white, I can see what a terrible idea this is, involving the purchase of a huge amount of wine I can't afford, plus fuel expenditure, plus the certainty that when I get my £200 of drink back home, it will turn out to be every bit as awful as the stuff I habitually buy from the supermarket. And my car's falling to pieces, so I probably won't even make it as far as Dover.

There must be some way round this. Perhaps I should try and get PK in on the scheme, not least because he has a newish executive-style saloon which won't break down on the M20.

The drawback with that is that he'll insist on high-end purchases such as cellophane-wrapped ham rolls on the ferry. When we get to the outlet in Calais, he'll want bottles of wine that have dates on them. Plus one of those terrible, terrible bourgeois restaurant meals you get all over France where the food tastes of mud and the service is mediaevally bad and it costs a fortune: 'Thus losing a significant percentage of what you have just saved' as my bro-in-law (who used to be a finance director) observes.

Look: I just want enough everyday Shiraz, from almost any country, to be able to bathe in. Is that so unreasonable?

Getting aerated: Vidigal Dão D.O.C. 2008

2012-02-16T09:58:00.000Z

An evening at home alone; no better way of alleviating that than a nice bottle of red. Cheap, obviously – this was for me alone. But this is where a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

One of the most enjoyable wines I have ever come across is the deliciously supple, bright and beautifully balanced Quinta do Correio, a Dão red available from the Marylebone wine merchants and bar Vinoteca. I managed to get CJ to drink it there just before Christmas, by the ruse of buying a bottle before he arrived, and hence before he could complain about the price to drink it at a table (£21.75) – and even he was very happy with it. (Even happier when they offered it at the excellent takeaway price of £9.30 if we vacated our table, to somebody eating, and finished our drinking at the bar.) So I thought I knew something about Dão.

So when I saw this Dão, with its elegant, minimal label, reduced in a City wine merchant’s sale from £7.95 to £4.95. I fooled myself into thinking that it was not one of CJ’s sub-£5 gut-rot specials. Oh no, this was a bargain, spotted by my knowledgeable eye. Spotted, admittedly, in a bin of wines with a big sign saying “Under £5”, but nevertheless.

The assistant went on for a bit, saying that she’d tasted it, how it needed to rest for a bit before drinking, etc etc. The back label endearingly described it as “A Soft medium bodied Dão wine to your delight” (sic). And I uttered the fatal words, “Well, how far wrong can you go for £4.95?”

To which a suitable response might have been, “Have you got your passport?”

Because this was a wiry, thin wine, unpleasant bordering on undrinkable. It had to be forced down, with my cheeks contracting like salted slugs. Its bouquet – no, correction, its fumes – reminded me of bathroom cleanser; it was bitter on the palate, and even sat in my stomach like a large, cold stone.

But one of our mottos is “I’ve bought it, so I’ll drink it”; I had planned a cosy evening alone with this bottle, and I was damned if it was going to beat me.

So, remembering the suggestion that it needed to rest for a bit, I thought I would try putting it through my recently-acquired Soirée aerator (as seen in the neck of the bottle above).

I already possess an aerator called a Magic Decanter, a gift from my offspring, about which I will write at length some day. But I am particularly proud of my new Soirée, because I won it in a competition on the excellent Blogyourwine site, with the kind of display of my wine knowledge which exasperates CJ, and leaves him glowering at me like a disgruntled Fred Emney.

I was determined not to be put off by the Soirée’s resemblance to an optic spirit measure, which suggested I might be intending to consume my wine by the shot. No, the wine swirls around in this little glass bowl as it leaves the bottle, and is thereby immediately aerated like a spell in a decanter.

And yes, the Soirée did soften the acridity of the wine quite considerably. Indeed, it could be said that the very name promises a softening of one’s drinking. Had I now embarked upon a soirée, with all its sophisticated undertones, and not just an evening of quite basic solo bottle-bashing?

Sadly not. Aeration cannot transform bad wine into good, and a softer bad wine is still…bad. I became steadily angrier at the stuff I was drinking, and the lengths to which I was going in order to try and render it drinkable. The effort/reward ratio was badly, badly skewed. Instead of returning to a relaxed and gently inebriated husband, Mrs K came home to find a fizzing ball of frustration, surrounded by half-finished glasses of wine; aerated, unaerated, poured, decanted and rested. And all, in their various ways, vile.

Mrs K will agree. There’s one thing that doesn’t benefit from getting aerated. Me.

Time for a drink? Miwok Ridge Shiraz (Again)

2012-02-09T15:40:00.004Z

The earliest I think I've started drinking wine was about eight in the morning. Not my suggestion, I should point out: we were staying with a friend of ours who lived in a converted pigshed near Barcelona, nicer than it sounds, the ground floor still indefinably murky but nevertheless good for somewhere that had recently housed animals. And for breakfast, on the penthouse floor, two stories up, our host cheerfully sliced up a beefsteak tomato, cut a round of bread, laid the the tomato on the bread, and poured a glass of rough red wine over the whole thing.

'Breakfast Catalan style,' he said. 'Do you want some?' I joined him for the sake of form, obviously, but the kids were a bit young at the time and the wife just stood there looking appalled.

When he next came over to our place to stay, he arrived from the airport with a vast wheelie suitcase which he hauled along our path and up our steps like a gun carriage. He was gasping for breath and fanning his armpits as it rumbled to a halt in the hallway.

'What's in it?' I said.

He opened it up: it contained four five-litre plastic carboys, like the one I used for my precious petrol-pump Ventoux, full of incredibly cheap red wine; plus a tiny brick of fresh socks and pants, wedged into the bottom.

'They put anti-freeze into it,' he said, gesturing at the red stuff in the carboys, 'and sugar. To make it more drinkable.'

He had it for breakfast, with some fried eggs.

The earliest I started spontaneously drinking, as opposed to merely joining in, was also around eight in the morning, at Marco Polo airport, near Venice. We had all formed a queue at the cafe bar for a breakfast cup of coffee, and some deviltry made me ask, not for a flabby cappuccino, but for a heart-starting caffé corretto, that (typically) brilliant Italian confection of an espresso with a shot of grappa in it - the espresso buzzing you up, the grappa mellowing you out, till you reach a state of god-like acuity and inner balance, a state in which no situation - like getting a bargain flight back to London - is too depressing to deal with.

'It's a bit early, isn't it?' a man behind me said, so I leered back at him, 'It's never too early for this.' He looked appalled.

And then there was the Calvados I was offered in the middle of the morning, in Normandy, to keep the cold out. Various ouvriers were supping away in this bar at Un p'tit Calva, also to keep the cold out, before going back to operating heavy machinery, handling explosives etc., but seemed unconcerned. This time it was my turn to look appalled but I had one anyway, before going out and nearly being run down by a man full of Calvados, driving a backhoe loader. It was about eleven a.m.

How early is too early for a drink, then? I only ask because it's not yet six o'clock – pm, I hasten to add, but no-one in our house is allowed a drink before six o'clock, on account of it being The Road To Ruin. Obviously if I'm going out on the lash with PK, this condition is capable of being modified, but normally nothing happens until we've reached that existential moment, that six o'clock, that philosophical sundown, but today it seems as if the existential moment is never quite going to realise itself, and I am filled with a sense of unease made worse somehow by the fact that I know what I'm going to be drinking - more of that Miwok Ridge stuff from Tesco, the Creosote's Revenge - and therefore it has no terrors, only the promise of an affordable homecoming and a slightly tarry sensation between the ears, and yet time stands still, and if I was our friend who lives in Spain and packs twenty litres of sewage-treatment red wine just to come to England, I'd already have made a start, but that's as it may be, and it's only just five o'clock! but the Calvados workmen, they'll have made a start, and so will some other lucky swines who knocked off early or enjoyed the advantages of living in a different time zone, I can't help but think to myself as the clock on the screen labours past the five-thirty mark...

Not quite forty minutes to go. And in Bucharest it's already half-past seven!

The great wine & game con trick – Les Garrigues Carignan 2010

2012-02-02T08:53:00.000Z

“Goes well with game” – how often do you read that about a wine? But how often do you actually eat game? Exactly.

Most people are ignorant of game. There are many for whom a partridge will only ever be a bird that spends its Christmas in a pear tree.

But wine merchants clearly think that, by associating a wine with game, they are somehow imbuing that wine with posh, aristocratic qualities – qualities which would not accrue from an association with, say, sausages. Suddenly, they think, that wine will appeal to people who like to imagine themselves going out on a Downton Abbey shooting party.They may not actually eat game, or even know how it tastes – but they will buy a wine which they believe might, on some stately dining table, accompany it.

Such people might visit Berry Bros & Rudd, who, with their Royal appointments, are probably the most aristocratic of what I always describe as the Ampersand wine merchants. This is clearly the place to go if you’re looking for wine to accompany game; just Search various possible main courses, and see how many wines come up. On the day I did this it suggested:

Beef 22 wines

Fish 52

Lamb 27

Pork 9

and Game…53

Are we actually supposed to believe that the aristocracy need twice as many recommendations for game suppers as they do for beef or lamb? To meet that level of consumption, they’d have to be taking to the moors with sub-machine guns.

Or take Majestic, for example, a merchant surely more representative of the wider UK wine-buying public. Their Search pairs some 45 wines with lamb, 43 with fish and 17 with sausages. But they also pair 16 wines with game. Do Majestic customers really need as many wines to match game as they do to match sausages?

And ironically, Majestic seem completely confused about the style of wine which actually pairs with game. Because according to their own style descriptions, the wines they recommend are either: medium-bodied (6); rich, spicy (5); light, elegant (3); full and fruity (1); or powerful (1). You might just as well pick a wine blindfolded.

In any case, what is this blanket term, “game”? Game ranges from the delicate flavour of partridge, through the richness of venison and the darkness of hare to, say, snipe, a bird whose flavour is described as “a woody flavour similar to sweetly rotting wild mushrooms”. (That description is from Rules, a restaurant which I adore for its game, but which clearly has problems understanding the notion of “appetising”.)

There are too many wines, of too great a variety, being recommended to pair with game, for it to be anything other than a marketing exercise. Which is really a pain, when you actually do want a wine to go with game.

Which I did. For here is my supper of pheasant breasts. Now, I realise, because of the aforementioned associations, that this will only fuel CJ’s notion that I am some aspirational Lord Snooty. But in fact this was wire-basketed from Sainsbury’s, at a meagre £4 for two. Pheasant like this lies somewhere between the texture of pork and the taste of chicken, and is quite mild in flavour. (Remember that traditionally, game is hung for a week or so to decompose and give it that “gamey” flavour; in Sainsbury’s meat department, decomposition is not actively encouraged.)

Now, happy as I am to display my skills as plating up – are you watching, John Torode? – I could not begin to pretend that this is an inherently aristocratic meal. Believe me, I am not wearing white tie. Not even black tie. Not even a tie. The closest my supper got to a shooting party is this rogue piece of lead shot, which almost cracked a tooth.

So I thought I should pair it with a wine which (a) claimed on its back label to go with game, but which (b) an aristo would not touch with a shooting stick. Or, for that matter, his woodcock.

Les Garrigues Carignan 2010 was kindly sent to me by the nice people at lovethatwine.co.uk. It’s a wine from the Mont Tauch co-operative in the Languedoc, rapidly becoming a handy imprimatur for decent cheaper wines. Les Garrigues has a light, fruity nose with a burnt edge, and tastes of sharper fruits like plums and damsons. But with its tannins resolved, the result is slightly shallow; it’s alright with my fresh, supermarket pheasant, but definitely lacks the weight I would want to accompany serious game. A reasonable buy at its French price of €5.60, but nothing special at its UK price of £8.75 – and isn’t game supposed to be special?

This wine would be unlikely to find its way onto a stately dining table. Carignan is a grape historically associated with table and country wines; unlikely to appeal to an aristo trying to impress his chums. Especially when the wine comes from a co-operative, which sounds dashed close to Communism. And most old-school toffs want their chummies to think they paid more than a tenner for their vino, so even if it’s not terribly good, they tend towards tried and trusted B&B – Bordeaux and Burgundy.

No, this wine is more appropriate for those of you who think “beaters” are chaps who drink Stella.

So don’t believe the merchants. There is nothing inherently posh about wine which goes well with game. It’s a pretty arcane pairing, given the small amounts of game people actually consume; and pretty pointless, given the variety of game itself. It is a description simply trading upon our notion of class.

Which may, in itself, be misplaced. Peter Jay once memorably wrote in Oxford Today, “As for the aristocracy, are they not better left where PG Wodehouse safely bestowed them, as objects of derision?”

As for me, I shall return to a social position in which snipe and grouse are merely descriptions of my behaviour.

The Nation's Sweetheart: Blossom Hill Winemaker's Reserve Merlot

2012-01-27T10:29:00.001Z

So my Mum gave me this bottle of Blossom Hill Merlot for Christmas, and I think it's had long enough settling time in the wine rack, so out it comes, a quick inspection of the screw cap and the label to reassure myself of the provenance (California, via a bottling plant in Italy, thence to an importer's at Park Royal in north-west London, then to my Mum's in the Cotswolds and back to me in London) followed by a sigh over the almost lapis lazuli shades of blue on the packaging and…

Well, I'm not going to use this as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at the American genius for doing crappy things extremely professionally (McDonald's burgers, Avatar, Windows 98) because Blossom Hill is not specifically one of those things. It is in fact, an Anglo-American construct, and, according to the Blossom Hill website, is the UK's number one wine brand (both in volume and value). I will not be deterred by that either, nor by the feeling that its incredible ubiquity - you can buy it in petrol stations, corner shops, newsagents, post offices, rural pubs, department stores, on car ferries and at village fetes, to say nothing of in every supermarket in the land - must have something to do with its apparent popularity, nor by the fact that it is currently owned by the colossal British Diageo drinks combine, based at Park Royal, in north-west London. Nor am I going to wonder what the hell the phrase Winemaker's Reserve is doing on something that must be produced by the thousands of litres in industrial wineries and which must travel down kilometres of stainless steel piping before it reaches the table. Nor am I going to profess surprise that the name Blossom Hill is not an exclusively Californian brand but turns out to be a wide-spectrum packaging concept that takes in wines from Italy and France as well as the West Coast.

In fact, I am not going to bring any bigotries to this party, not least because a quick trawl of what wine drinkers like on the internet reveals that Blossom Hill really is the people's choice: 'I have no idea what makes a good or bad wine,' writes an amateur reviewer, 'but the Blossom Hill Soft and Fruity is a lovely light red wine'; also, from another source, 'One of my favourite red wines, made even better by the fact that it is also one of the cheapest'; and, 'Blossom Hill wines go down lovely with a warm pasta dish'; and, 'At a price of £5.99 a bottle, the Vineyard Collection isn't a bad choice for a weekend tipple'; and, 'You can never go wrong with big brand wines like Blossom Hill'; and so on. All right, some of those love-ins may have been planted by Diageo employees, but I'm going to infer from their tender illiteracies, grammatical solecisms and general heartfeltness that they're not all shills.

Better yet: I am going to bathe in its outreach, because your Blossom Hill gives you plenty of hand-holding and gentle instruction to help make your encounter a friendly one, unlike flash French wines which try to maintain their cachet by telling you almost nothing about themselves (I know this because PK and I were recently at a chi-chi Burgundy tasting, where some of the grog was £124 per virtually anonymous bottle, and where Oz Clarke looked at us, appalled, and said You bad boys, I suspect because we were marginally lit up on account of swallowing too much and hardly ever spitting, not least because the wines were fantastically tasty as well as sadistically expensive).

I mean, on the front, Blossom Hill tells you what it is, where it came from, who made it, and has a précis of the flavour: Velvety soft with ripe red cherry & dark berry aromas, just so there's no confusion in your mind that you might be getting a stringy white, smelling of gas. On the back, there are messages about pregnancy, recycling, responsible drinking, sharing Blossom Hill with friends (advised) and a Consumer Careline. This is a wine with its own Consumer Careline! Can it get any better?

Yes: when you drink it. My tasting notes read: Interesting tannins, followed by whoof, liquorice, tar and interminable finish. Which so far as I'm concerned, is a result. It didn't taste an awful lot like Merlot (I'll be brutal) until I'd given it a fair breather and served up some warm pasta as an accompaniment. After that? A glow of complacency. It got a bit velvety, in a loon-pants kind of way, and there were dark aromas. The new ad campaign claims that Blossom Hill wines are Award-winning, although I can't see anywhere which awards, but still. This stuff may be commonplace, but it's not contemptible. My plan from here? To get PK round for dinner, decant a bottle of BH into the groovy decanter he gave me in an effort to raise my standards, and not tell him what he's drinking. I predict hilarity will ensue.

Back to Basics – Clos La Coutale Cahors

2012-01-18T14:26:00.000Z

My brother-in-law Nick knows his wine, and enjoys Cru Classé clarets and vintage ports when he can. But he has a particular thing about simpler, more fundamental French wines. What he likes about them is that you somehow feel closer to the soil and the vines. There’s an authenticity about certain French wines, which is almost literally ‘down to earth’. Nick once baffled CJ by talking about how you could ‘taste the stems’. I baffled CJ myself (it’s really not hard…) trying to explain this, by making gestures which were meant to evoke the horny hands of a son of toil, but which unfortunately looked more like an arthritic groper.

Let’s just say that great wines may be like symphonies – but there is a different merit in folk music.

At Christmas, Nick kindly left gifts for Mrs K and I; unlabelled, but I ventured a guess that mine was the one shaped like a bottle. Indeed it was; a bottle of Clos La Coutale 2009 – a Cahors, one of his favourite wines from the South-West of France.

Now, Cahors has a noble heritage. Among the first vineyards planted by the conquering Romans 2000 years ago, their wine was loved by the Russian Tsars, served at Henry II’s wedding to Eleanor of Aquitaine and known as “black wine”, because… well, guess. It’s very dark.

To me, Cahors is a proper peasant’s wine. I have an image of a gnarled old chap in a blue cotton jacket, his face lined and etched by the sun. The sort of chap you look at and think, “If that’s his face, imagine what his scrotum must look like.”

Cahors is, effectively, Malbec – although they call the grape by a different local name (Auxerrois) – and in many cases, it’s softened by blending it, in this case with Merlot. There’s a fierce punchiness about this wine; it’s sharp and light, with an aggressive bouquet and a taut, green flavour. It’s austere, tannic but warm.

This is a bottle to stand upon a red gingham-checked tablecloth, to pour into Duralex tumblers, to recork and carry to a corner of a field for a lunch of bread and cheese. The label even has an aged, brownish hue, as if it’s been cured with tobacco smoke, like the ceiling in one of those French rural bars. (Just a step down and a door in a stone wall, and where, once the silence that would greet your entrance had dissolved, you imagine having to defend yourself like a scene out of Straw Dogs…)

So, on a white linen tablecloth, for educated dinner guests?

The danger here lies in a kind of inverse snobbery, like paying a fortune for peasant cooking in posh restaurants. Are we in the social guilt-making territory of slumming, by enjoying a degree of crude, a bit of rough? I’m reminded of a cartoon of American tourists abroad, buying handmade indigenous artefacts to take back home, with a local craftsman pointing out that “This one, senor, has even more flaws…!”

Then, thanks to Liberty Wines, who kindly invited Sediment to their 15^th anniversary portfolio tasting, I was able to compare two “better” versions of this wine.

Chateau de Chambert Cahors Grand Vin 2007 at £16.97, is almost double the price of my traditional Cahors. It’s clearly aiming for greater status, greater finesse and elegance – look at its modern label – look at its price! – and despite being 100% Malbec it’s a more relaxed wine altogether, with the additional smoky richness of a couple of years’ aging. But that also means more sleepy, less alert somehow; that tight, green simple taste has softened into something lazier, more comfortable, more…decadent. Perhaps a Cahors Grand Vin is something of an oxymoron – like a gourmet Cornish pasty.

And then there’s Argentina, who have made the Malbec grape their own. Vista Flores, a single vineyard Malbec from one of the top five Argentinian producers, has a price of £42.50, a significant sum for any peasant, and which would send CJ into cardiac arrest. But oh, this is a glorious wine, rich, heavy and more substantial – 100% Malbec again, and in a way, more palatable, easier and certainly more impressive drinking than its blended peasant alternative. (The Valle de Uco Malbec, from the same producer, is slightly sweeter but less grand, and great value at £10.63).

But these cleverly created wines are also less…discursive. They have less to say. A wine like Cahors has character, a simple authenticity, which is enormously enjoyable. It is Fourme d’Ambert to their Lymeswold.

And here’s a final irony. In London, Clos La Coutale is sold for £8.95 by Berry Bros & Rudd, one of our most aristocratic wine merchants, by Royal appointment to both HM The Queen and HRH The Prince of Wales.

But then, our aristocracy always were better than the French at dealing with the peasantry. As that great English historian GM Trevelyan pointed out, “If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.”

Festive Drinking - Miwok Ridge Shiraz

2012-01-12T11:28:00.002Z

So Christmas came and went with the usual Cava cock-up from Tesco: they delivered the order (some Cordoniu 1551, rather a step up for us, very tasty when it finally arrived) ten days late and then delivered it again, five days after that, minus one bottle, a second, uninvited case of eleven bottles. The courier blamed Tesco, Tesco sighed with exasperation down the phone about the couriers. This makes three out of four Tesco deliveries that have gone cranky on us. I'm sure our house is on a ley line but everyone else can manage it.

Things improved when my brother-in-law came round with his partner for supper on the 23rd, with a properly uncompromising bottle of JackTone Ranch Pinot Noir, while on Christmas Day, my Ma gave me a nice bottle of Blossom Hill Merlot which she bought at the Post Office. I've laid it down until next week, looking forward to drinking it.

After this it was on to my Pa-in-law's. He has a kink for something called Pilastro, fruity, shouty, which one gets to quite like, not as much as he likes it, but enough all the same, and that was going okay until he produced a magnum of - I can't remember what, exactly, a Cabernet Sauvignon it might have said on the label, but either way it was unashamedly perverse, tasting of treacle and earwax and wood glue. And a magnum: since we were the only two people drinking it, it seemed to last forever, but what can you do? He was savouring it as if it might have been a three-figure Margaux. 'This certainly packs a punch,' I managed to say. I mean it would have been churlish to bitch about this endless bottle of wine, but two days went by and I don't think we managed to finish it, despite our best efforts, my bowels slowly turning into tyre compound. And while, as it turned out, PK was doing his impersonation of Lord Snooty and his Pals, drinking a drink with two K's in its name, several hundred miles away, which I'm glad I didn't know at the time.

Which is churlish of me because the same Pa-in-law had already sent me a case of Miwok Ridge Californian Shiraz (2010 vintage), and this is an assertive, alarmingly candid wine, a wine with, frankly, pubic hair; but in a way that causes surprisingly little offence. According to the instructions, the drink takes its name from the Miwok Indians (they're still around) and is 'Soft and supple'. This latter is not true. The first glassful I poured was so volcanic I had to leave it on the table for an hour while it fizzed and burped in the glass, but once I'd got used to the gusts coming out, I found myself rather liking it: peppery, tarry, all that - and with incredible staying power. It doesn't seem to matter how long you leave an already-opened bottle before you return to it, the flavour only softens and becomes more obliging. Three and a half days is the most I've had one bottle on the go so far, but I'm tempted to try for the full week.

In fact, I may use this experience to take a proper, or at least half-arsed, interest in Shiraz/Syrah wherever it occurs. As far as I can see, wine made from this grape almost always delivers something, and quite probably what I want. I can't count the number of Cabernet Sauvignon mixtures I've drunk which have been like old fountain pen ink or rusty rainwater, whereas the most bolted-together Mediterranean supermarket Shiraz/Syrah has usually managed to entertain, even it meant drinking it with oven gloves. My tiny moment of revelation for 2012, and I have the Pa-in-law to thank for it.

So how was it for you?

A case of social aspiration – Kopke 1983 Vintage Port

2012-01-04T09:16:00.002Z

There is this gentlemanly thing surrounding vintage port. The great port houses were founded by English merchants, who established a unique relationship with the English aristocracy. When the ladies left a dining room, it was port which emerged to lubricate an Englishman’s serious discussions. And like any English social activity, there are a whole set of rules and rituals surrounding the “proper’ drinking of port. Just the sort of historical baggage to lure someone like myself.

Indeed, we have our own historical baggage, port and I. The blame lies with a long-gone place called Champagne Charlie’s, a faux Victorian establishment on the Essex Road in the 1980s. Its artificiality was highlighted by its location on the edge of a modern housing estate, its wood panelling and sawdust floor entirely failing to disguise a construction alien to Victorian builders.

In an effort to appear historic, and recreate the quaffing culture on which I have had cause to comment before, Champagne Charlie’s sold pints of port. Pints. In fact, their full quaffing experience, of which I foolishly partook in my late twenties with a friend, involved a copper jug, and two pewter pint tankards.

As a fortified wine, port actually contains within itself the very combination of wine and spirits which supposedly leads to the worse type of hangover. So I drank it with a kind of bravado, in much the same way as the Japanese eat fugu.

I clearly thought of myself as a successor to John ‘Mad Jack’ Mytton, the legendary 19^th century squire who could drink eight bottles of port a day, starting the first while shaving. However, what actually accompanied my own depilation next morning was the most painful, blinding headache which I have ever experienced. That morning explained to me why Norwegians refer to a hangover as jeg har tommermenn – "I have carpenters in my head".

Having decided that I was not Squire Mytton, nor was meant to be, I returned to a single glass after formal dinners. Port remains a stranger to my shaving routine.

But after Christmas dinner that year, I told this story as a tale of alcoholic braggadocio. “A pint, eh?” said a relative, “Well, if you like your port, I can get some rather good value vintage Kopke at the moment.” The 1983 vintage had just been declared. Kopke is the oldest of all the port houses, and a bottle of vintage port seemed the sort of thing I should show an eagerness to acquire. So of course, I agreed.

A few weeks later, I was at work when he rang. “Just to let you know,” he said, “that I’ve got that case of port for you.”

Case. Not a bottle, a case. Twelve bottles…

As someone with gentlemanly aspirations, I should have understood the quantities in which one orders one’s port. The mistake was clearly mine. In which case, like a chap accidentally shooting a beater, one simply shut up, and paid up.

I wrote the cost on the case itself, to remind me - £108.68. It was a significant sum to someone in their late twenties back then. Particularly because it was invested in an entire case of port, which was not to be drunk for many years, and which would last me for a further twelve years after that, barring an unlikely increase in the frequency of Christmas.

So began years of toting this case around. It went from flat to house, from furniture storage facility to sister-in-law’s garage. Yes, I could have paid to keep it in proper wine storage – but by now, I would have spent more in storage fees than I spent on the port. (£10 a year storage sounds like nothing, until you think about storing a case for 25 years…)

And then, a quarter-century later, it all came good. I now have not only a case of seriously mature port, worth about £50 a bottle today, but have acquired more relatives who would appreciate it. Sharing your port is perhaps the best way to drink it without a hangover, since it both limits your own consumption yet multiplies the pleasure. And, dare I imagine that it imparts a certain gentlemanly quality to one’s dining table? It was time to broach the case.

The bottles are sealed with hard, brittle wax – literally sealing wax – which shatters all over the option when you start to remove it. Beneath are corks which have clearly suffered over the last 28 years. Some have leaked slightly, and below the first centimetre have the consistency of muesli. They disintegrate even when handled with the caution of a bomb disposal operative. But that’s okay, since the sediment in vintage port requires that it’s decanted. Even the label suggests it should be served with care, which makes a change from serving it with Stilton.

Some people expect vintage port to be unctuous and syrupy, like a dessert wine. In fact, this is light and pale brick-coloured. It has a raisiny bouquet, sharpened by the alcohol, and in the mouth it’s rich and aromatic, a soft, dried-fruit and burnt toffee flavour with enormous complexity, which resonates around the palate and nose and is immensely warming. It is delicious.

Why at Christmas? Well, that feels like a time for Victorian traditions. It brings a lot of people together around a dining table. And it’s an occasion. This is proper, vintage port, not one of the lesser variations which my father-in-law dismisses as “grocer’s port”. Having gone to all this trouble, over such a long time, I shall not be opening a bottle after a TV dinner.

And I want it to last. Because, by the time of the final bottle, I may still not be a gentleman - but I will certainly be too old to go through the whole of this 40-year process again.

Great Wine Moments In Movie History II - The Philadelphia Story (1940)

2011-12-21T19:55:00.002Z

There are plenty of movies with heavy drinking in them - The Lost Weekend (potential attempted suicide) and Leaving Las Vegas (chronically protracted suicide) spring to mind - but let's be candid: you come out of Weekend or Vegas sweatily vowing thenceforward never to consume anything stronger than shandy. They are both poor advertisements for drink.

So at this traditionally difficult time of year, you need something a bit more sanguine, a movie that's not afraid to look booze in the face and still act unconcerned. And in The Philadelphia Story we have a film which is not only incandescent with stardust, witty in a way that no movie has managed since the 1940's, luminously shot and sparklingly acted, but also steeped in alcohol. This is your film.

Does it apologise for drinking to excess? Does it promote it as a pastime? No. It disapproves. But it disapproves so seductively that it's not always easy to tell quite where The Phildelphia Story's personal ideology is located. C. K. Dexter Haven, for instance, a well-heeled yacht designer (played with impeccable generosity by Cary Grant) has previously been married to beautiful, chilly, heiress Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn, radiant and terribly funny), but the experience turned him into an alcoholic. Now acceptably dry, he looks on as she attempts to marry for the second time: the proposed husband a worthy goob called Kittredge, who worships the ground she treads on, as well as being ignorant of the fact that, in the right conditions, Tracy Lord will get shitfaced on Champagne and misbehave spectacularly. The conditions - a great society party on the eve of the wedding - duly transpire, and Tracy ends up in the arms of troubled hack journalist (he intends to be a great writer) Macauly Connor (a stupendously thin and passionate James Stewart, his only Oscar-winning performance), both adrift on a sea of drink.

The whole thing is Hollywood at the absolute peak of its powers - brilliantly clever, droll, magical. The emotional entanglements rival anything in Jane Austen. The resolution is as wise as it is heartwarming. Yes, the world is divided into those who like The Philadelphia Story and those who prefer the musical remake, High Society. But even allowing for the charmlessness of Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra's inability to act, Society is still a crappy film. The Philadelphia Story is the one which is preserved in the United States National Film Registry as an artifact of especial cultural merit. I rest my case.

And the drink, of course, the drink. By my rough reckoning, somewhere between half and two-thirds of the movie is spent with the characters drinking, getting drunk, being drunk, and recovering from being drunk. It is a drinker's fairytale, in which the cast starts on sherry, moves on to orange juice in a fleeting diversion by the pool ('How about you, Mr. Connor?' asks C. K. Dexter Haven, 'You drink, don't you? Alcohol, I mean?') before swerving into the cocktail hour, followed by a cadenza of endless Champagne. 'More Champagne!' cries the reprobate Uncle Willie at the height of the party, and by God, they get it. 'That was a flock of wine we got away with', Connor says to Tracy in the blinding sunshine of the following morning. 'What about an eye-opener?' Which arrives in the form of one of Uncle Willie's notorious pick-me-ups. 'What is it?' Tracy asks Dexter Haven. 'Just the juice of a few flowers', he says. And, suitably re-lit, they all launch into the final scene, mirth and heartache all round.

It is, therefore, an intoxicating film - figuratively - about figurative and literal intoxication, and the wisdoms that spring from it. It is a film that makes you feel better about drink and the world, which reminds you that Hollywood was once able to make the highest kind of art, and which demands, in the best possible way, that you raise a glass to it.

The past returns to haunt us – Piat d'Or

2011-12-13T10:03:00.000Z

When LP Hartley described the past as another country, where they do things differently, he was almost right. The past is another county, and that county is Cumbria.

In many respects, the Lake District is the past. A place with sweetshops. A place with milk in bottles. A place where the local hardware shop offers a selection – a selection, mind you – of replacement walking stick ferrules. And a place where, on a recent familial visit, I found a bottle of Piat d’Or.

There is something irresistible about brands from our past, about Spangles and Mateus Rosé, Angel Delight and Tiffin bars. Is it that we want to see if things remain the same? Is it that we want to test them against our now more experienced, grown-up palates? Or is it the simple lure of nostalgia, what Mad Men’s Don Draper described as “a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone”?

Wine-drinking in the UK was built upon brands like Piat d’Or and Hirondelle, which have largely disappeared from winesellers in the capital. When customers were frightened of varieties and vintages, they were reassured by slogans like “It’s about as likely as a duff bottle of Hirondelle”. Nowadays, that slogan would only serve to emphasise the blend’s mechanical production. And equally unlikely within that consistency was a really good bottle of Hirondelle.

Some of these brands, particularly whites, are forever being “relaunched” for the new, wine-literate market. I tried for some time last summer to find a bottle of a supposedly “relaunched” Blue Nun, but I mistakenly purchased the relaunch before last, a vile, sugary white which left my teeth carpeted.

So there was a certain element of nostalgic excitement in discovering that, in the Lake District at least, you can still buy a bottle of Piat d’Or red for just £4.95.

Sadly, this is not quite the Piat d’Or of our youth. Launched in 1978, it went through its own “relaunch” in 2001. Despite its French name, and an ad campaign which insisted that “The French adore le Piat d’Or”, the French had actually never heard of the stuff. So in 2001, it was decided that the whole French connection should be abandoned. “France and the French are no longer aspirational,” said their marketing manager at the time, which will come as news to wine buyers in China and Hong Kong today.

How French is Piat d’Or, anyway? It does declare it is produit de France, but the label also reveals it is actually bottled in Italy. And its description is printed in English, French and German, a rare opportunity these days to see these three European cultures in accord on a document.

The original label did have a subtle reference to France, through the fact that it was gold (“d’Or”, duh…). Ironically, having discarded this little linguistic Gallic echo, they seem instead to have tried to copy the work of Fabien Baron. He’s a US art director who, they may not have realised, is originally… French. Still, their imitation fails badly; the Piat d’Or label now just resembles the random typography of a ransom note.

(One thing I did not attempt was to pour the wine in the manner depicted on the label. This seems to involve slopping the wine into some kind of tsunami in the glass, and would almost certainly result in a tablecloth resembling a butcher’s apron.)

The “rebranded” Piat d’Or declares its grape variety, which frankly is just as well. Initially it has a strong blackcurranty nose, but like that first fragrant opening of a jar of instant coffee, this is utterly misleading. The bouquet, and indeed any taste of fruit, vanishes pronto, leaving only a nasty, brackish aftertaste from the alcohol. It’s a bland, watery, unpleasant drink, which may once have succeeded in a market unfamiliar with wine if only because we didn’t know how wine should taste. Not only would I challenge anyone to say in a blind test that this was a merlot, I would challenge them to say it was wine.

But perhaps there was something reassuring about finding it at all. The rest of the country may have moved on, but as with a display of walking stick ferrules, the presence of Piat d’Or may reflect the comforting refusal of Lake District retailing to discard the attitudes of the past.

Indeed, one of my family asked if there was any chance of the local supermarket’s wine buyer getting in some Cloudy Bay? No, he said, demonstrating a misunderstanding of the whole idea of modern retailing. “There’s no point. It sells out as soon as we get it in.”

So many wines… Montepulciano, Rioja, Pinot Noir, a Load of Things from Tesco and All the Knowledge in the World

2011-12-06T16:29:00.002Z

So I was having a quiet drink with PK the other night when, suddenly, it all got too much and I found myself frenziedly badmouthing the whole business of wine and everyone who had anything to do with it, myself included. Why? I think it must have been my Christmas purchase from Tesco, and not specifically because Tesco, true to form, had failed to deliver half the order.

Nor even because I wished I hadn't ordered some mixed reds from them in the first instance, or because I think Tesco will have chosen terrible wines. I am putting my faith in this mighty Fordist combine and I do not expect to be disappointed, except by the efficiency of the delivery. No the thing is, the mixed case contains wines from four different countries, fair enough, it could have been twice that number, but I was suddenly assaulted by this question: why am I expected to know about so many wines?

I mean, I'm not sure I could say I know anything about even one wine, but it's become the burden of the Anglo-Saxon wine drinker to be expected to have some kind of working understanding of wines from all over the bloody world just so he can stand a chance of negotiating his way around the thousands of possible wines that are on sale in this country at any given moment. And this struck me, suddenly, as a kind of fatuous madness.

Look. In provincial France (in my limited experience) people will have a considerable working knowledge of the local wines, along with local cheeses, charcuterie, what have you. Beyond their home region, they will get increasingly vague, maybe holding an opinion about Champagne or Calvados, but someone based in the Ventoux will not only probably not have a great fount of knowledge of Entre-Deux-Mers, they won't even care. They have their own stuff to drink, and that's what principally interests them. And if you venture a question about, say, Chilean wines, five will get you ten they'll just frown at you as if you were the village simpleton and say They make wine in Chile? What can it possibly taste like?

Ditto Germany, another well-known wine-making country. We have been served some authentically unknowable, and sometimes undrinkable, German wines in spooky green flute-like bottles by our kind hosts because it wouldn't occur to them to serve anything other than one of their local products. Last time I was in Germany I think I may have touched conversationally on Australia, a New World country that now apparently makes its own wines, only to be met by the same polite incomprehension as Chile with the French.

And I am absolutely sure that it would be the same in Italy, or Spain, or Portugal: one's interests can be deep, but essentially narrow. Our French-based friends drink gallons of the local stuff at varying levels of refinement and in different colours, and it's all good, and if you go out for a meal, well, the wine list might be a bit more high-end, but it'll still be familiar and contain the nearby names, and you will have a handle on it and it'll still be good.

Whereas in the UK, and in The States, even though the latter is a proper wine country, what criminal masochism encourages us to think that we should not only have a view on all the main wine-producing regions of France, Italy and Spain, but on California, Coonawarra, Marlborough, Mendoza and Tamil Nadu? We are not really a wine-producing country. We can't be much except eclectic. But since everything from everywhere is now available, the result is that nowhere (unless you have really thought about it and taken a self-denying ordinance to drink wine only from, say, the Central Otago region) means anything more than anywhere else. Which taxonomical impossibility then generates an entire eco-subsystem of advisors, pickers, experts and know-alls, artfully funnelling your ignorance through their own preferences and pretensions and encouraging those cruelly humiliating wine lists in fancy restaurants which look like the gazetteer out of the The Times Atlas because that's the cultural assumption we are too spineless not to live with.

PK likes all this, of course, because he's a bit of a trainspotter and he's quite good at remembering things. But I want less in my life. I would be happy if there was one-fifth the choice of booze in my nearest supermarket, but it was all okay, price permitting. Like an inhabitant of the Ventoux, I will drink the same kind of stuff day in day out, if tastes nice. It will be one less thing to worry about.

Which is pretty much what I said to PK. When I'd finished ranting, he said something pointless, along the lines of Well it's a lifelong pursuit, isn't it? And then a fellow drinker fell on the floor and had to be helped back into his seat. It wasn't The School of Athens in there, I'll be frank.

How to remove a screwcap

2011-11-29T14:22:00.000Z

I have been disturbed by some research which claims that screwcaps on wine bottles are now the norm. 85% of regular wine drinkers in the UK, it seems, now accept screwcaps. Which leaves me, not for the first time in my life, among the minority.

There has been a lot of claim and counter-claim about corks vs screwcaps. But what no-one seems to have addressed is the aesthetics of their removal.

You may think this is ridiculous. The whole idea of a screwcap is the ease of removing it. Sadly, for someone like me, ease is an alien concept. Effort equals reward. And style is all.

Removing a cork can be an act of elegance and flair. It is a beautiful thing to see a capsule cut and a cork professionally pulled, with little flourishes and smooth, effortless grace concluding with a gentle pop. It is a skill some of us struggle, over years of practice, to master.

And a skill some never learn. I am reminded of CJ’s wrestling match with a cork, when “the cork started to split, and by the time I’d dragged the thing out into the open (like pulling a sack of sand across a ploughed field) there was cork everywhere, over the table, an acne of cork bits floating in my bell-shaped glass.” CJ has always expressed a preference for the screwcap. This does not surprise.

So is there a manner of removing a screwcap which even begins to echo the grace and elegance of a skilful cork removal? Let us consider the methods:

1) Making a fist of it. Effective, but brutal and ugly. If statistics are correct, 99% of men will be familiar with this grip (and the other 1% are lying). Both activities can be enhanced, I understand, by a flamboyant twist of the wrist at la moment critique. Nevertheless, both are but crude and less satisfying imitations of superior activities.

2) The inverse fist – more polite (because less onanistic), but clumsy and awkward to the opener themselves. It often fails to provide sufficient grip to separate cap from sleeve. See 5).

3) The flick. The ne plus ultra of screwcap removal. The cap is snapped free with a sharp movement of second finger and thumb, the same as a click of the fingers. I was once greatly impressed by an usher separating tickets from their stubs like this. The only cool way to remove a screwcap, but demanding immense finger strength.

3a) The inverse flick. Given the direction of the screw thread, this is only for the left-handed, but could be even more challenging than finding left-handed corkscrews.

4) The optimist. The cap is held delicately but firmly betwixt first and second fingers and thumb and, as with opening champagne, the bottle is rotated and the cap held still. Called the optimist because it assumes that the cap will simply and cleanly, with only a little effort, separate from its sleeve. It will probably not. Once again, see 5).

5) The tools. Am I alone in finding that a troubling number of screwcaps simply refuse to open? What I think of as Thatcher caps – simply not for turning. Or, worse still, the cap clings to the sleeve, the sleeve fails to cling to the glass, and the whole thing simply revolves around the bottle neck. Unlike the single, efficient corkscrew, you may then require any of three tools to get the thing open; monkey wrench to hold the sleeve, pliers to grasp the cap, and a knife to sever those irritating little stubs of metal which hold the cap to the sleeve. (The knife will almost certainly be blunted and ruined. It may also slip, and cut one’s left thumb, in that fleshy bit on the side just below the nail. Trust me.)

And then there’s the sound. I was taught that a champagne cork should be removed, not with a vulgar explosion, but with a gentle pfft, described to me as the sound of a duchess farting. There must be a similar analogy for the lovely sound that accompanies the removal of a standard cork – suggestions welcome in Comments. That resonant, optimistic pop of a cork being pulled, as anticipative as the tap of a conductor’s baton, can never be replaced by the harsh clack of a screwcap being removed.

Nothing, of course, can alter that clack sound, with all its nasty connotations. You can only smother it, with a well-timed cough or stamp of the foot. This technique is judiciously accompanied for some with an appropriately-placed Tena pad.

So, you have succeeded. What to do with the cap? You need not sniff it. Experts have long argued the value of being presented with a cork to sniff; no-one has ever suggested the benefits of sniffing a screwcap. (Which is just as well, because another thing in favour of corks is that you never run the risk of lacerating your nose on any aforementioned little stubs of metal.)

A screwcap does not look nice on the table next to the decanter. It does not tell you the vintage. It is rarely a souvenir. There is nothing you can do with it other than throw it away.

(I’m sure there is someone out there who is recycling metal screwcaps in some ostensibly creative manner, but do not tell me about it, unless you have an accompanying image of Bryan Ferry possessing the resulting item.)

What about some wine tasting? What indeed. I’m afraid I simply had to put my intended bottle aside. I was told that its screwcap could be twisted off by just a short, sharp jerk.

Not me, then.

PK

Suntory Whisky - The Unbreakable Drink

2011-11-21T16:42:00.001Z

OneofthegreatthingsaboutSuntoryJapanese Whiskyisthatitcomesinareallystrongbottle.Ican attest to thisbecauseas Iwasdoingmybesttosmugglea(full) bottleofSuntoryintoourchi-chiryokansothatwecouldhaveaquietsundownerinourroom,thething felloutofmybagandfellquitealongwaytothegroundwithoutbreaking.Iwasstandingnexttoourcomedyrentacaratthetimeandthebottledidn'tshatteronthehardstoneatall,but instead bouncedonceandskiddedunderthecar,whereitlay,glintingintheshadows.

SoIgotdownonmyhandsandkneesandstartedgrovellingunderneaththecomedycar,atwhichpointourexquisitelycharmingandformalJapanesehostesscamepatteringoutbehindmetoaskifeverythingwasallright.Igrabbed the bottle with an audible grunt, leapedtomyfeet,crammingtheunbrokenSuntorybackintomybaginoneseamlessmovementandsaidthateverythingwaswonderfulandwhatalovelydaywe'dhad,beforeslammingmycoatnegligentlyinthecardoor,fromwhereIthenhadtoremoveitasifI'dmeanttoslam it in a car door allalong.Therewasalookoffrank alarmintheeyesofourhostess,butshenonethelesscontinuedtosmilegraciouslyatmeasIflappedandbangedawayinfrontofher,tryingnottotearmycoatordroptheSuntoryagain.

That'swhatyoudoifyou'rebasicallyabumonabudgetandyoucan'taffordtohaveabrimmingwhiskyandsodabroughttoyoureleganteight-tatami-matroombyakimono-wearingservantandset respectfullyonthetableinfrontofyou.Infact,I'velostcountofthetimeswe'vehadtosmuggledrinkinunderthenosesof different hotel managements, all over the world, our pocketsbulging with contraband cashew nuts, our tote bags burdened byliquids, followed by the degradation of having to drink cheap whiskyor gin or red wine out of a toothmug with the door locked.

Still.If that's where you're coming from, Suntory (the regular Kakubinvariety, not one of the swankier versions)not only comes in a fantastically strong and grippable (squarecross-sectioned) bottle, it tastes good, too, toothmug or not:rounder, smoother and with a sweeter finish than your mainstreamScotch, but uniformly satisfying and with a nice amber colour.They've been making the stuff since 1924 and it's good in a hotelroom in the nervous dark and it's good when drunk without undueembarassment as a highball in a bar/eaterie, where there's a fairchance you'll get Suntory with Wilkinson Tansan soda, a column ofcrushed ice and possibly a twist of lemon peel to finish. Tokyosalarymen knock this stuff back as if every night were New Year'sEve. The consumption is prodigious.

Howdo I know? I came across a party of them, shitfaced, hitting eachother over the head with bags of satsumas at half-past eleven atnight, one friday. That's how I know.

Saké – the rice wine of Japan

2011-11-15T12:45:00.002Z

So, having come back from Japan, I am first of all obliged to express my deep gratitude to

a) The Japanese themselves, whose charm, friendliness, helpfulness and courtesy, were limitless, and

b) The Japanese railway system. This is so good - startlingly punctual, clean and efficient - there were moments when, in an unhinged and jet-lagged kind of way, I wondered if I hadn't died and been put on the Heavenly Afterlife Train along with a surprising number of Japanese commuters and my own wife.

Booze? I made a discovery: Sake, with or without the terminal é, is delicious. Previously, if I had any opinion at all about Sake, it was that it was a kind of comedy drink, warm and sweet and made from rice and tupped from a thimble-sized porcelain cup: altogether meaningless in any Western context.

Then we found ourselves a couple of hours north of Tokyo, in one of those hole-in-the-wall bar/eateries the Japanese seem to have a genius for, and the sake was everywhere and being drunk in prodigious quantities, cold, out of glassware. What to do? I thought about hanging on to my comedy drink prejudices, but the chance was too good to pass up; not least because the sake itself was being served from these wonderfully shapely, nearly two-litre-sized bottles (see bleary photo) with elegant Japanese characters cascading down the front, simply demanding to be taken seriously.

So I gibbered and squeaked a bit, and found out that, yes, you could have your sake sweet (and elsewhere I did see it served sweet and warm and out of a diminutive teapot plus tiny porcelain drinking vessel) but you were more likely, given the relative clemency of the weather, to have it dry and chilled. And in a little box. A playful refinement: the little box is emblematic of the crate in which the rice would originally have been stored. You can have your sake poured directly into this baby crate (makes it bit tricky to swallow, especially around the corners), or you can have it in a glass (see other bleary photo) which then sits in the crate and, indeed, is filled to overflowing so that some of the sake ends up on the floor of the microcrate, betokening generosity.

It is not, in other words, like having a quick beer. Sake, made of the rice which sustains Japan and the rest of south-east Asia, is a drink pregnant with significance. You can find sake presented at temples, in bottle form or in barrels, a sanctified wine. You will toast the happy couple at a wedding with sake. You can find it on sale in sleek drink shops and in supermarkets. You can find it in gilt gift packages and you can find it in resealable waxed cartons. It affirms a culture.

So I raised it apprehensively to my lips, not wanting to find it disgusting in any way and as a consequence start coughing and spitting and wiping my nose and doing other such impermissible things, but no: all was good, a whiff of some kind of very dry white wine (what PK would doubtless call a flinty Bordeaux), maybe a gesture towards a vermouth, Noilly Prat, and then a follow-through a bit like a Dry Martini, but without that nail-varnish shimmer you sometimes get from the gin. Frankly, it was terrific, light and a bit astringent, but subtly warming, too, leading to a sense of complete genial clarity and refreshment.

Also, within ten minutes, I was pretty well lit up. On the strength of one large schooner of sake on top of a couple of beers. Sake isn't that powerful (somewhere around 15%) but my ears were ringing, in a good way, and I had some difficulty leaving my seat. 'This is a fantastic drink,' I kept saying, and it is - subtly crafted, beguiling, silently anaesthetic. It would make a perfect pre-meal drink over here, the only problem being the inevitable one of excessive novelty, and looking a bit of a twat, offering sake instead of a glass of cheap Tesco cava. Why didn't I bring a bottle back with me? Damn.

A fool and his money…3 French wines for £10

2011-11-09T08:55:00.000Z

With CJ away in Japan, I thought I saw an opportunity to beat him at his own game. In fact, to beat the wine business at its own game.

I persist, you see, despite all evidence, internal damage and sink stains to the contrary, in believing that I can find good, cheap wine. I continue to think that I will somehow spot a bargain on the shelves; that with the smattering of knowledge I have gained, I will spot a hidden gem, a fine wine ignored amongst the branded rubbish.

How will it have got there? Why is it unnoticed? I don’t quite know. And why do I continue to think that, in the wine trade alone amongst all others, this kind of thing is likely?

Is it remotely feasible that, for instance, on the forecourt of a secondhand car dealer, alongside the clapped-out Astras, a Porsche would be lurking, unnoticed and undervalued? Or that the secondhand bookshop wouldn’t spot a First Edition? Yet somehow, I imagine, I will find a fine wine at a bargain price, lurking somehow in the system like a Rembrandt in an attic.

And then, in CJ’s absence, I read online about some French wine, selling on a “French street market stall” in West London, for the astonishingly low price of 3 bottles for £10.

Now, given UK duty and tax, that price is absurdly low. There’s a semi-plausible explanation online about rejects from supermarket contracts, but that price is SO low that I managed to persuade myself something suspect might be going on. Perhaps it had come into the UK by some dodgy means, back of a camion, contraband Grand Cru hidden under a pile of charcuterie? Perhaps it really is good quality wine which just had to be offloaded from a short-lived stall? If it’s not obvious branded and blended rubbish (which I hope even I can spot), for £3.33 a bottle, surely it’s got to be worth a punt? And if I can find decent wine, for less than CJ’s optimum pricepoint, well…

The stall is there for only two days, so I interrupt my planned journey westwards that evening, and pay it a visit. I have encountered French markets in England before. Or, to rephrase that, I have encountered what appears to be the same French market, in various locations including Cheltenham, Hove and East Finchley. That particular French market always seems to sell the same combination of such vrai French produce as charcuterie and cheese, dried fruit, and an unusual combination of very expensive vegetables and very cheap soap. (In my cynical way, I do wonder about the authenticity of this produce, and whether this caravan of stalls really has come over from the doorsteps of wrinkled continental paysans, or has actually spent the morning stripping off packaging in a Lidl car park.)

However, the market in Hammersmith was a much smaller affair, with just a couple of stalls and no visible soap, but sure enough, a selection of wine, at 3 bottles for £10. And hiding behind persuasively strong French accents, the stallholders affected, with a great deal of Gallic shrugging, not to be able to explain its provenance. Which just encouraged me more.

There were around half a dozen varieties from which, using my skill and knowledge, I could choose my 3 for £10. The term “skill and knowledge” is used here in a similar manner to those old spot-the-ball contests, where it said, for legal reasons, that you used your “skill and knowledge” to guess where the football had been in the picture. Your “skill and knowledge” could not tell you that at that precise moment, the player was looking at a cloud while performing a back-heel…

My skill and knowledge told me in this case not to buy the vermentino/viognier blend, because my years in the assiduous pursuit of wine enabled me to observe on the back label the logo of The Sun newspaper.

No, I plumped instead for a Corbieres, Le Bosc, which I always think of as a gnarled paysan wine appropriate to a street market; a Merlot, Les Garrigues, because I spotted the Mont Tauch co-op logo on its label (rather more promising than the logo of The Sun…); and a suspect cabernet sauvignon called Le Lion et Le Rat, for no very good reason. (Like those buy two, get one free book offers, you always end up with one which is just making up the number…)

Well. The Corbieres did, actually, prove drinkable; a little thin, and too much alcohol in the balance, but it softened into a tolerable wine. Les Garrigues was suspiciously murky, like blood in a puddle; it twanged around the upper palate and tasted somewhat bitter. (A 2007, I suspect its best days were long gone). But Le Lion et Le Rat was violently unpleasant, with a threatening bouquet that actually made my eyes water, and an acrid flavour of burnt plastic. “Oh God,” said Mrs K after a sip, and I had explained the 3 for £10 offer, “Don’t say we’ve got another two bottles of this?”

Thankfully not. Of course, you could argue that if I’d bought 3 bottles of the Corb, the enterprise would have been just about worthwhile. But I still wouldn't have looked forward to drinking it each night. CJ probably would. Mind you, CJ would probably have grimly forced his way through 3 bottles of Le Lion et Le Rat (“I’ve bought it, so I’ll drink it…”).

But there was nothing of real pleasure in this experience. It just reminded me that wine is meant to be a pleasure, not a challenge. The slight feeling of fiscal accomplishment simply wasn’t sufficient to outweigh the disappointment with the wines. Nor, indeed, the disappointment that, once again, I had failed to unearth the vinous equivalent of the First Edition in the charity shop.

Decanting wine for appearance's sake – Cape Diversity shiraz

2011-11-02T09:25:00.000Z

I have taken to decanting mywine of late. But this is not to improve its flavour; frankly, a lot of thecheaper stuff dies a brief death in contact with the air. Nor is it toreduce my consumption, although finishing an elegant demi-carafe seems to completea meal, and suppresses the urge to go and slump in front of the tv and polishoff the rest of the bottle.

No, the decanting is simply toavoid the suspicious glances of my household, as yet another garish bottlefeaturing animals of the world, flora, fauna, ugly graphics and strangetypefaces threatens to grace the dining table.

Mrs K and I take great pridein the presentation of our dining table. I don’t go quite as far as onerestaurant I visited before opening time, where a white-gloved maître d’went around the tables matching every place setting, to the centimetre, againsta photograph. (But I if I could…)

We are not eating off crates.Our dining table does not look like this. We take our Indian out of the foiltrays in which it arrives.

And if you do take care withyour choice and layout of crockery, cutlery, napery then surely you should beconcerned about the look of the wine bottle you put in the centre of the table?

I am not alone in this. Thatgreat style icon Bryan Ferry, interviewed in the Wall Street Journal, objected to this label, which shows the rock thatmakes up the vineyard’s terroir. “I hate that,” he said. You hatethe wine, asked the interviewer? “No, the label,” he said. “I can’t drink awine if it has an ugly label.”

This by way of comparison, is one of hisfavourites. Bryan Ferry and I are as one. (Sorry, can I just have thepleasure of repeating that sentence? "Bryan Ferry and I are as one…")

It’s been shown by lots ofcontrolled tastings that our judgment of a wine is influenced by things such ascost, name, reputation and, of course, label. And why not? Like the plating upof food, or the framing of a print, the presentation of something helps toshape our experience.

Writing a while back about aChilean wine from the Lafite Rothschild stable, I explained why I believe thatactually, we do judge books by their covers; which is why we have HarryPotter in adult jackets, and why the novels by one author will often beredesigned to match the cover of his bestseller. So I get a little exercisedwith critics who insist that we should ignore the label on a bottle of wine.Appearances count.

One American wine website decidedto explore the alternative, that “it’s what’s inside that counts”. Just look at the hideous, garish bottles used to illustrate thisthesis.

Frankly, I wouldn’t care iftheir contents were delicious. They look as if they contain fizzydrinks. They would reduce my dining table to the status of a children’s party.

(Perhaps they include therepellent Vimto, the only drink I know whose name is an anagram of its consequences.)

I could send you all over theweb to look at hideous wine bottles, but I will settle for just one, this set ofblue glass bottles with cartoon wine labels, the whole effect not only garishand nauseating, but disturbingly childish on an adult drink.

I do have a couple of verynice decanters, which are a pleasure to use and look at. But even before I did,I have to admit that I would pour wine into anonymous bottles, rather than putugly specimens like these on my table.

(Here’s a tip – the Nicolas petites recoltes range of vins de pays come in completely clear glass bottles from which one can easily soak the cheap paper labels. In the days before I could afford a decanter, I used oneof these to serve wine anonymously. I was trying to follow the minimalistdesigner John Pawson, who had recommended this Baccarat crystal decanter – whichlooks like a wine bottle, has the capacity of a wine bottle, will aerate yourwine no better than a wine bottle, but costs £238. The Nicolas bottle isequally hopeless for aerating, of course [although the pouring from theoriginal bottle will help] but it only costs £5.49 – and yet unlike theBaccarat one, it comes conveniently filled with wine…)

And a decanter will, ofcourse, genuinely improve some wines in flavour as well as appearance. I wasforced to put Cape Diversity's shiraz into a decanter, simply because of itshideous label, depicting (Why? Why??) a speciesof South African grass. Bryan Ferry would, I am sure, have agreed, although Idoubt he drinks much wine costing £6.95.

From the bottle, it was atight, unforgiving little wine. It left my mouth resembling a cat’s anus.

But decanted, and left awhile, the tannins softened, the wine opened up, and it became richer, softerand altogether better than its price tag might suggest. Even Mrs K “thought itwas alright,” an approval rating neither its taste nor its appearance wouldhave been likely to achieve straight out of the bottle.

A decanter won’t solveeverything. And let’s face it, while you can decant a bottle of red, it’s alittle odd to decant your white (and harder to keep it cold), while only anidiot would try and serve a sparkling wine decanted. (Put that Tesco Cava back, CJ…)

But at least it does keep yourwine anonymous, attractive and suitable for a civilised dining table. And whilea decanter can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, it can sometimes retrieve asatisfying drink from a cat’s anus.

Everyday Drinking: From the Tesco Wine List to Kingsley Amis

2011-10-25T08:52:00.000+01:00

So in the general excitement and confusion of getting ready for our trip to Japan (self + wife, not self + PK) almost nothing has made any impact on me except for:

The Tesco Autumn Wine List, which flopped through the front door the other day. This, I was pleased to see, is consolingly reticent in its wine recommendations. The new French range allows the tense punter 'To discover areas you may not have tasted before with confidence', while in the 'Simply' range you can find 'A quick and easy solution to which wine to choose'.

This is all good, but the real clincher is the anxiety-smothering quantity of industrial name brands dotted throughout the list: Jacob's Creek, Blossom Hill, Torres Viña Sol, even Blue Nun and Mateus Rose, for God's sake. This is absolutely unimprovable in its way, although it's been a while since I did anything much with Blue Nun other than smirk ironically at it. But that aside, we have a selection here that Henry Ford would have been proud of, if he hadn't been a teetotaller, on account of its dependability and its unpretentiousness. You can have your drink in any colour, provided it's red, white or pink; and your only decision centres around the price point.

There is something in all this that I find unspeakably cheering. Why? I think it may be because (in my oafish way) I find the trainspotter element of high-end wine appreciation so fantastically irritating that the sooner the thousand and one little vineyards with their arts & craft skills and unpredictable vintages go the way of bespoke car manufacturers and wrought-iron furniture wranglers, courtesy of Tesco's wine industrialists, the happier I shall be. I just want a glass of wine, and I want it with Tesco's Fordist imprimatur on the label.

And then, at the same time as the Tesco list turned up, I got a copy of Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis. This is actually on loan from the good people at The London Column and I don't know if it's going to make my life better or just shorter. A quick peek reveals the following: the recipe for Evelyn Waugh's Noonday Reviver (1 hefty shot of gin, 1 bottle of Guinness, ginger beer); the following injunction - 'Make up your mind to drink wine in quantity'; and this observation about vintages - 'Most of the crap talked about wine centres on these'.

This is combustible stuff on just about any level, and I can't wait to get to know Everyday Drinking in greater depth. On sake, Japanese rice wine, Amis merely observes that 'When I heated some on the stove recently to check that it was as horrible as I remembered, it took all the deposit off the lining of the saucepan'. As a consequence, sake is listed in the index as a 'cleaning agent'.

So no pointers for the Far East, but then I have an idea that Japan is going to be so expensive I won't be trying anything stiffer than tapwater while I'm over there. Or will there be free drink on the plane that I can smuggle into my hotel room? And would it count, anyway?