My name is Viney. What are the associations? Were my ancestors wine growers? A hotel porter in France congratulated me on my ‘good Breton name.’ When I first started my websites, I had enquiries from Vineys in Dorset, the west of Ireland, The Channel Islands, French Switzerland, Quebec …the places where French Huguenots fled to at the end of the 16th century. Mine were the least ambitious lot, getting just across to Dorset and staying put. Does it go back further? Southern England was a major wine producer until the English Kings held swathes of France and found it cheaper and better to import. Some wine production continued until the dissolution of the monasteries. It’s all back. Our local cheese and wine retailer must have twenty English wines, half of them from Dorset.
Or less romantically, is it associated with the Dorset cheese Blue Vinny?
That’s named for its prominent blue veins. Did my ancestors have bulbous noses intwined with blue? Just to check, my name is vine-ee not vinn-ee. This leads me to the vine, wine connection. The French porter said vinn-ay, which is what my Canadian cousin found in Quebec.
In my parents day wine was Sauternes from the off-licence round the corner for Christmas Day and Easter. This was Southern England, and we may have watched Coronation Street but we never called it the offie. It was French, sweet and to my 13 or 14 year old palate extremely nasty. There was a cheaper Spanish Sauternes which is a name they couldn’t use nowadays … like California Chablis or Australian Burgundy. There was sherry and it was either South African or Cypriot, never Spanish. The pub had an off-licence counter too. You had to ring a bell and someone came into the tiny boxed area from the bar. They also sold crisps. I didn’t see much wine at teenage parties. It was beer or cider.
Then when I was eighteen, I met a new girlfriend and on dates we usually started at an Indian or Chinese restaurant. That was with Lutomer Riesling from Yugoslavia. Early 1966. This is from Dart Travis’s No Secrets To Conceal in a thinly fictional version. The prices are accurate:
‘What shall we have to drink?’ she said. Then laughed, ‘Don’t look so anxious, Steven. I am going to pay half.’
‘No, I couldn’t …’
‘Yes, you could. I think a bottle of wine … Yugoslav Riesling or Spanish Sauternes, Steven? What do you think? They’re both nine shillings and sixpence.’
‘We had Sauternes on Christmas Day. I didn’t like it.’
‘The Yugoslav Riesling tastes just the same as Blue Nun,’ she said, ‘That’s what my father usually buys with Indian food, and that’s twenty-five shillings.’
‘Let’s go for the Yugoslav then.’
She was smiling, ‘Romantic dinners for two aren’t your normal means of evening entertainment, are they?’
Steve had never had a romantic dinner for two before, ‘I can quickly get used to it.’
Everywhere sold Lutomer. It was advertised heavily as ‘The most popular dry white table wine in Britain.’ It was from Ljutomer in what is now Slovenia.
Mateus Rosé from Portugal around then was popular for the shape of the bottle. We would have had it a few times. They did advertise ‘When you’ve finished stick a candle in it.’ We did. Buying coloured candles and shaping the dripping wax was a popular after dinner pastime then. It’s still sold, with a smaller label. In a fit of nostalgia we bought a bottle.
At university in Hull, wine was rare, but for me so was beer. It took me twenty years to discover that in terms of hangovers and feeling drunk, half a pint of beer is the equivalent of half a bottle of wine. I had an allergy test. I am mildly allergic to beer. It would be the yeast. I found Mexican beer was fine and couldn’t work out why. So is Belfast Black stout. So I’m not a beer drinker now.
Wine was loosely applied. We used to drive out to deepest Dorset where pubs sold English country wines made from fruit. They still do. Gooseberry. Elderberry. Once we drove out to the wilds of Yorkshire in a friend’s Citroen 2CV and filled the boot with elderberries from hedgerows. It was Sunday morning, so we decided to crush them to pulp and buy a home made wine book the next day. Ah. It gave volume, not weight. So we used the same volume of pulped as fresh. We kept it in the airing cupboard for months. It was magnificent, but extremely powerful.
Another Dart Travis quote:
‘Home-made wine,’ said Jerry proudly. He opened the larder door. The larder was crammed with bottles on both sides, ‘I collect the over-ripe fruit and veg from the greengrocer’s up the road.’
‘Quite a cellar,’ said Steve.
‘I’ve got the lot; parsnip, elderberry, tea and lemon, banana, mixed fruit, pear, carrot. I can highly recommend the carrot. The mixed fruit’s of pretty dubious origin.’
He produced a bottle of bright orange liquid and shook it gently, ‘I think it should be about ready by now.’
‘What’s that one?’ said Tina pointing at a bottle of murky brown liquid on the same shelf.
‘That’s carrot as well.’
‘Why’s it brown?’
‘Didn’t wash the carrots, old girl. We’ve all got to eat a peck of dirt before we die.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘No. It’s no problem though, the dirt falls to the bottom eventually, then I can pipette the rest out of the bottle. The alcohol kills any germs.’
Jerry uncorked the bottle and poured a sherry glass for Steve. He took a sip with trepidation, ‘Sweet, but not bad.’
From Music To Watch Girls By: Summer of 1967
In 1968 the Empire Grill & Wimpy House in Westover Road, Bournemouth advertised:
I worked in The Salisbury Bars, a big pub in Boscombe, in the Summer of 1969. I don’t remember ever serving wine. Vermouth, sherry, Babycham (champagne perry) but never straight table wine. When someone asked for a Martini in Boscombe, they only ever meant the brand of vermouth, never a gin cocktail. I got a shock on our first ever visit to OUP when I asked for a dry Martini and was presented with a glass of gin with just a shade of Vermouth. Cinzano was popular due to heavy advertising as was Dubonnet (Do ‘ave a Dubonnet). I don’t think that bar even stocked ordinary wine. The landlord was an irascible man who used to get extremely angry whenever anyone ordered a soft drink. ‘I don’t do this to sell lemonade,’ he’d moan. He got even angrier when the brewery kept pointing out that the profit margin on soft drinks was several times that on beer, where much of the price is tax.
My girlfriend at Hull had an Italian mother, and I developed my taste (and strong preference) for Italian red wine staying at their house in London where wine always came with meals, and when we went out to dinner to Italian restaurants there.
Back in Bournemouth in holidays, the first pizzeria, La Lupa, was opening in the late 60s. They served chianti (allegedly) in carafes. We loved it. Italian restaurants always had Chianti Ruffino in straw-covered bottles they could later stick candles in. Bottled was obviously more expensive than open carafe. Fast forward ten years or so to 1978, and we were in that same pizzeria with my first editor, a wine buff. He tasted the wine and said, ‘Bournemouth water has a distinctive taste, and is around a third of the contents of this carafe.’ Back then in the late 60s we didn’t know.
Move on to the 1980s. I was in Osaka to give a talk for OUP as was Robert O’Neill for Longman. A typhoon struck, the talks were cancelled and Robert and I spent the entire day in the hotel restaurant hoping the winds and rain would not smash the windows in. After some chemically sweet Japanese rosé, the preferred colour in Japan in those days, we looked at the bar. It was decorated with two straw-covered bottles of Chianti Ruffino. No, we couldn’t have them. Not for sale. Robert kept offering more money until they relented and handed both bottles over. They had not suffered from their years upright on a shelf as display items, and we both agreed it was the most enjoyable red wine we’d drunk in years -we had been in Japan a week each by then and were missing wine. We split the price (bribe?)
Pop back to 1969-1970 and University of East Anglia. My half-Italian girlfriend was working in London, and when she came to visit, insisted we always drink Pouilly Fuisse which was already very expensive, she paid, and I loved it and still do.
By 1970, rock group tipple was universally Blue Nun, or other Liebfraumilch like Black Tower.
The problem is that the fruity, uncomplicated flavours of Blue Nun, and imitators like Black Tower, attract the novice drinker who, as their taste matures, has a tendency to churlishly spurn the wines which turned them on to the pleasures of the grape in the first place. Truth be told, for the most part, these aren’t bad wines, just simple ones – give me an honest liebfraumilch over a thin, acidic pub pinot grigio any day.
Felicity Cloake, The Guardian, 2010
When Karen and I had a flat in Bournemouth at the end of 1971, we used to get on the bus to Waitrose in Westbourne. They had a range of own-brand Waitrose German white wines with plain blue and white labels with detailed description of the contents. Our favoured one was Rudesheimer Rosengarten. It was on the menu for the fish course the night the Titanic went down. These were all medium-dry white wines for people who had not grown up with wine but were just starting. We were still frequenting the pizzeria, which was the standard place to take students at the end of each month of the ELT course. In retrospect, that very quaffable light red was not chianti.
Then there were the Châteauneuf du Pape years. They’d started at Le Bistro, next to Le Disques A GoGo in Bournemouth, where I saw The Who, Manfred Mann, Rod Stewart & The Soul Agents, Al Stewart as folk singer. I spoke to Paul Jones of Manfred Mann at a more recent concert, who said they played the Disques circa 1964purely to have a free meal at Le Bistro. I spent my 21st Birthday there in 1968. We had Châteauneuf du Pape . The thing you always had was Tournedos Rossini with Châteauneuf du Pape. In the early to mid 70s a major treat was a restaurant in Palmerston Road in Boscombe. It was just a varnished wood door in a blank wall, so as to look like a Speakeasy, inside humming with activity (and local property developers and second-hand car dealers) and the basic choice was always Tournedos Rossini with Châteauneuf du Pape. It gave you a splitting headache if you had too much. I’m still not fond of it.
When we went to Paris in 1972, we had a voucher from the travel company for a free carafe of wine at a cheap bar. On that trip we discovered that 1970s very cheap open carafe French red was akin to vinegar, though not as nice as most vinegar. We switched to something which came in a bottle with a label, but it had to be really cheap as there were exchange controls, no credit cards and we were fast running out of money in spite of the extra £10 cash each stuffed in our socks. Our Algerian waiter brought us labelled Algerian Rosé with a cork in. He whispered that ‘the steak’ was horse meat. We avoided it. We went there again, and again, because we could afford it. Just. Over several meals we became friends (we were teaching large groups of Algerians in the UK) and he took us to meet his family out in the suburbs. He was a trainee doctor and later visited us.
In the early 70s wine kits were all the rage. You bought them from Boots The Chemist (or elsewhere – we used Boots) and followed the instructions, added water and waited. It was really cheap too. We did it. Hands up, I admit it. I sought an image online. You can still buy them. You chose a flavour – claret, chardonnay, hock – and off you went.
We were doing the stage shows for foreign students throughout the 70s. My task was to go out and get the drink at lunchtime. Guy and Nick went for Olde England Sherry. Karen, I and Alan went for Carafino. This came in litre bottles. Karen and I shared a litre of the Carafino Hungarian Red, and Alan went for the Carafino Hungarian Rosé. There was no question of matching to food, because we never had time to eat.
When we moved to Parkstone in 1974, a ten minute walk from our current home, there was a small off-licence round the corner in Bournemouth Road. It belonged to a brewery. From memory they only stocked about six wines. Four were local brewery red, white, sweet white, and rosé – labelled Produce of Several European Countries. Then they had genuine AC Macon Blanc or Macon Rouge. That’s all it said on the labels.They became our standard purchase. They were the most expensive wines they stocked, but were still cheap. The Brewery blends were undrinkable. The red was basically Gamay grape, so Beaujolais from just outside the region. The white is Chardonnay, but a long way from the Australian and American strong sun-baked Chardonnays. To me, the grape comes out as too strong and too headache making in most New World versions … though they are now producing un-oaked younger versions.
Around that time, my head of department was John Curtin, who had lived many years in Spain. He brought La Iña dry sherry with him to dinners at all times (including the pizzeria), and drank it with a meal like wine. It works, too.
At Anglo-Continental School of English, on special occasions the directors invited each department for dinner. They would bring out sublime Swiss white wines. It was explained that Switzerland consumed the entire production themselves. These would have been good ones. They never stinted on things like that. After the annual pantomime, they broke out the champagne for the cast too, and it was always the real thing. Champagne is odd. Karen loves it, me not so much. It’s the drink of weddings, or used to be. That’s maybe why standard Moet Chandon remains to me the true taste of champagne. Yes, I’ve had many more expensive and more highly-rated ones, but the Moet blend still defines it for me. You can keep your Dom Perignon.
To the horror of the French, in Spain they’ll serve Cava and call it champagne. They used to do the same in Italy with Prosecco. I’ve heard OUP reps call both champagne at book promotions. In France, I’ve heard Cremant de Bourgogne described as champagne. Now prosecco is so widespread in the UK that they just call it prosecco. Back in the shows, when the cast was extended, Lambrusco was popular. Fizzy light in alcohol Italian red. I never liked it.
When we were doing the shows, my boss used to appear for the advertised Importance of Being Earnest twice a year. He had been doing it for years and it was in the school brochure so we had to do it. The final line-up call was always with plates of cucumber sandwiches, toasting the audience with glasses of Pomagne. It’s sparkling apple wine. Looks like champagne if you put it in a Babycham glass (which we used to think was best for champagne). Tastes like fizzy cider. In the 80s we won a case in the kids’ school summer fair lucky dip. We drank one bottle for old time’s sake, then contributed a case of eleven back for the next year’s lucky dip. Move on a year, and a case of ten was the prize. The next year? A case of nine.
Holidays? We fell in love with Cretan Minos Red. It doesn’t travel, though for a year or two Waitrose sold it in the 1980s. We discovered as so many do that Retsina works well on a hot early evening sitting in the sun in Crete or Corfu, but doesn’t travel at all either.
Online I found:
Aromas of linseed oil and lime peel lead into flavors of apples and roses, a perfume that ends on a pine-and-lime, saline finish. Retsina wines made with Assyrtiko grapes tend to be more angular in their style (but age longer) whereas, Retsina wines made with Savatiano grapes have a more generous taste with ripe apple and peach flavors, as well as an oily texture on the palate.
Sadly, it’s just pine disinfectant flavoured wine back in England.
We had some very good Turkish red in Istanbul. Supermarkets were selling Lebanese red wines at an affordable price even the esteemed Chateau Musar. I had to go back and add ‘wines’ there. They were not selling Lebanese red. Or black.
Sardinia was a holiday discovery. If I’m in a restaurant and they have Sardinian wines on the menu, that’s me. Cannoneau, Nuragus di Cagliari red. Vermentino. Vernaccia di Oristano is like the best Fino sherry you’ve ever had. I went back to Sardinia three times on book tours. We have a local Sardinian restaurant.
1978 was when I started doing speaking tours. That was the start of an education. Every rep wanted you to try the best wine from their area … Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Hungary, Switzerland were all fabulous. I never saw Retsina in my Greek OUP travels either. We weren’t doing book promotions on Malia Beach. When we were in Crete in July 1974, they were laying the foundations of the first hotel in Malia. We used to walk from the village to the deserted beach past hedges heavy with figs. Deserted? Well, the Turks had just invaded Cyprus and most airlines had taken their tourists out of Crete. The entire beach was just us (Olympic didn’t take anyone out) and two Irish girls (Aer Lingus didn’t either). The builders had been called up so the new building site was silent.
On OUP tours, white wine from Santorini was a regular choice. Hugh Johnson’s Atlas of Wine was wrongly dismissive of Greek wine.
France? Not as good as Italy or Spain for wine on my tours. We seemed to avoid the best restaurants on tour, probably because the office was in Paris and they didn’t have regional centres with reps showing off the local best. The first rep was Irish and would suggest McDonalds or pizza for dinner because he was watching his budget. I ate and drank far better in Italy or Spain than in France and the prejudice persists. An exception was Lyon when the local bookshop took us out to dinner and one evening in Paris.
In Spain even the big mass market brands were good. Gran Vina Sol, Faustino 1 to IX (Tesco sell them still) and the German style Esmeralda. We had a fabulous Rioja (1970?) in San Sebastian because it was the representative’s last day with the company and he was using up his expense account. Many thanks, Des. I still remember it. I bought Riojas for my kids’ birth years. I regularly buy the Sunday Times Wine Club Rioja selection cases, especially when they feature Martinez Bujanda. Then the whites from Galicia stuck in my memory.
In Portugal, there are so many good Douro reds, but I’m also a Vinho Verde fan. It’s much better than the Mateus of old. Here’s another criterion. We like eating at theatre restaurants, and if we’re staying over, we like a bottle of wine. Not too strong … we don’t want to fall asleep during the soliloquy. Vinho Verde is ideal, especially before a warm summer’s night at Shakespeare’s Globe. I ordered it once and the waiter was Portuguese and we discussed it. He remembered us ever after.
In Italy, we often had Est! Est! Est! not because it was a great wine, but because it had a great story on the back label. The pope sent out priests to find the very best white wine in Italy. They got to Montfiascone and sent back the message Est! Est! Est! Yere Tiz, as we would say in Dorset (Here it is – a popular sign on 1950s pub toilets in Dorset). This is it.
More usually, it was something very local. I remember my friend and editor, Simon, getting two bottles of a very fine Amarone della Valpolicella from a restaurant way out in the countryside near Bologna – one each – to take home for the forthcoming Christmas. He had to persuade the owner to sell them at restaurant table prices. Wines remind you of people- whenever we had lunch in Oxford, Simon always ordered Côtes du Rhone. I don’t often buy it now, because recent supermarket ones come up at 14 ° or 14.5°, though when I see one at 13° or 13.5° I do. I enjoyed countless bottles with Simon.
I did a teacher training course for a friend in Macerata in Italy, and we had dinner at her co-organizer’s house. Her father grew and produced red wine and explained that he was serving it with fish because he only trusted the purity of his own wine and drank nothing else because he knew the other growers. It was spectacular. In Bari I learned that light red wines go best with fresh tuna too. Back then Puglian and Sicilian wines were a local secret. Nowadays supermarket shelves groan under their weight.
The last Italian tour we had was different. There were about a dozen of us, authors and reps. We were at a long table near Lake Garda and the Italian-based authors (English and Italian) were complaining bitterly that the wine was below their high standards, and they expected something from the more pricy end of the wine list. The reps, who were younger than them (or us), had ordered the house wine, probably comparing their own salaries with the prices further down the list. Italian restaurants pride themselves on a good house wine. It was very good too. You should not judge by the price label necessarily. I was teaching Hotel and Catering / Hospitality courses back in the 1970s. I’ve had the same discussion since. If a restaurant is good, the cheapest wine should be a good buy. It is policy in many restaurants to put the profit margin on the ‘second cheapest.’ People feel bad ordering the cheapest, so opt for the next one up in droves. It probably cost the restaurant the same as the cheapest, but with added profit, an extra three or four quid. Anyway, Karen and I were entirely on the reps’ side.
On my travels I’ve had very good wines in Mexico (the oldest vineyards in North America are in Mexico) and even Sapporo in Hokkaido in Japan. I’ve tried Chinese Great Wall white wine. Just the once, thank you. I had an American Gallo jug rosé in Thailand which was horrible.
My friend and then OUP rep Bill bought a case of red wine after a wine tasting in a department store we were passing through in Sapporo. He had it sent to Tokyo impressively fast too. He gave me two bottles to bring home. ‘Cellar them for at least five years,’ he said. Five years later, the phone rang on Christmas Day. Bill phoning from California:
‘Have you opened the Sapporo red yet?’
’No, not yet.’
‘Don’t. I just have. It’s not ready,’ he said, “Oh, and happy Christmas.’
I tried one a year later.
Still on Japan, they went mad on Beaujolais Nouveau. There’s a whole article on Beaujolais Nouveau here.
In Hungary we (my son came with me) toured the wine cellars in Eger, and had young Egri Bikaver (Bull’s Blood) pipetted from the barrels into glasses by a very elderly lady. At the 1996 IATEFL conference in Eger we all received a bottle with our names printed on.
No, I can’t ever open that one. Bull’s Blood was very popular in the late 70s and 80s. Christmas is Tokai for us with Christmas pudding. Our favourite joint tour ever was Hungary just before Christmas in a ‘road show’ with a different town every day. Universally excellent wine.
We joined the Sunday Times Wine Club in the early 1980s and worked our way through many educational sample cases. I remember at the time we joined they’d just discovered Bulgarian wine- red and white. They were promoting it massively. On my first visit to Poland in 1990 it was all you ever found. The red was tolerable. The white wasn’t …back then. We drank it anyway when the red ran out. It was a thirsty snowbound conference in Lodz. After the white ran out, we finished on gin with Fanta. All these places have changed. The Sunday Times still do excellent Romanian, Bulgarian and Moldavian wines.
When we moved to our current house in 1993, the understairs cupboard was already lined with wine racks. It’s windowless and cool, on the north side of the house. They’re full and disappear into tight areas that are hard to get to now. Occasionally I venture a crawl into the depths and find things that have been hidden for years or decades. The reds might be fine. I doubt the whites will, so they stay untouched until I feel braver and have no urgent plans for the next day. Then I remember the Thomas Jefferson wines found in France: Lafitte 1787. Yquem 1784. One sold for $157,000 in 1985. Sixteenth century wines have been found in Germany. 170 year old champagne (168 bottles) was found in a shipwreck in the Baltic sea. Yes, they tasted it. Apparently very old wines are opened, you sniff once, then they die.
So-called “trophy” wines—best-of-the-century vintages of old Bordeaux—that were difficult to find at auction in the nineteen-seventies and eighties have reëmerged on the market in great numbers. Serena Sutcliffe, the head of Sotheby’s international wine department, jokes that more 1945 Mouton was consumed on the fiftieth anniversary of the vintage, in 1995, than was ever produced to begin with.
The New Yorker
A Spanish friend warned me that some of the Sunday Times Spanish selections boasting their great age were probably already past their best in his opinion.
Maybe I should try some of my lost in the dark corner bottles. Here are six I crawled in and found. I carried the Mexican one back with me.
The torn labels are from turning them on a metal rack, not mice.
Then a recipe for a Georgian stew suggested Georgian Orange wine was ideal with it. Orange is the colour, though for Georgians it’s amber. Georgian wine traces were found in 2017 in buried amphora which are 8000 years old. Georgia may be the original home of wine. Track the wines current incarnation down – it’s becoming popular.
Georgian orange wine is hard to find, but fortunately Chilean Macerao works with the recipe just as well. Orange wines were on most US wine lists we saw this year. Chilean wine is also the ‘true European wine.’ In the 19th century, the phylloxera bug from American vines devastated the European vineyards. Most European vines are now grafted on American vine roots to protect them from phylloxera. Some pre-phylloxera wines survived in Europe (Mosel Riesling for example) but not many. Due to altitude, or soil, or the barriers of the Atacama Desert and the Andes, Chilean vines are the original pre-phylloxera root stock. Several Australian regions are also phylloxera free. If you want to taste French wine how it used to be, I’m told, go for Chile.
We used to go to Rye a couple of times a year. On the way back we passed Chapel Down English winery. we joined the club to get a case discount. The whites are great. The red, not so much, which is why I have a bottle of Pinot Noir lingering in the lost section in the cellar from 2013. Too old for a very light red, I fear.
After forty years, we’re using the ST Wine Club much less. They’ve gone overboard with emphasizing alcohol strength, The Full Fifteen, El Bombero- The BIG red, and so on. I tend to avoid wine over 13.5°.
As the years have passed, I avoid most Californian and Australian. Too heavy. Too much pesticide. I like Chilean, Argentinian and New Zealand though. Oh, and Washington State and Oregon wines are really good. Cooler climate. We’ve had some good Canadian wines too, British Columbia and Niagara Peninsula. One year (but only one in the late 90s) the ST Wine Club featured cases of Canadian wine. There are interesting upstate New York wines too.
New York State x 2, plus Oregon
The story is often important in the USA:
An issue in the USA is price. We found it all easy and reasonable in California, but wine is vastly over-priced in New York state because supermarkets can’t sell it, so it’s specialized liquor stores and no price competition. We found a limited selection under $20, and those were often New York state wines, which we enjoyed trying. Restaurants are shocking. $50 or $60 for known and average French and Italian wines that are £7 to £10 in UK supermarkets, then they expect a 15% to 20% tip for opening it. The $60 wines would be £25 to £30 in equivalent UK restaurants. I guess in both countries it’s basically ‘triple what you paid for it.’ An interesting point, at the airport duty free, a litre of Sauza tequila was $21. A New York state wine (750 ml) was $25.
We had canned wine in New York. It’s aesthetically unpleasing though I don’t think we’d know if we hadn’t seen the can. It’s around in the UK too. We bought two cans at the railway station once to consume with sandwiches on the train. I thought it newish, but then Waitrose has shelves of it,plus wine boxes too. Ah, I’ve seen those at book promotions.
A relative feels the same as me about heavy whites. Whenever we’re in a restaurant she’s adamant that she can’t drink chardonnay and insists on sauvignon blanc or pinot grigio. That’s experience of heavy New World wines, California in particular. She probably doesn’t realize Chablis is chardonnay. I am not fond of Pinot Grigio. Too bland. In the light white area, I like Austrian Gruner Veltliner (and the New York state copy above) and then there’s Picpoul de Pinet. That was a Southern French marketing ploy of brilliance. We first saw it in theatre restaurants at the RSC, National Theatre, Globe. You never saw it anywhere else. After a prestige start, it then appeared in decent restaurants everywhere. Now Tesco, Sainsbury and M&S all sell good ones.
I like trying new regions. We have a wine shop near us that’s Turkish owned and they have several Turkish and Lebanese wines, though they were somewhat curt when I asked where the Greek section was.
Both the above are from Aldi and under £10. Switzerland is best for whites not reds, but like Austria they do produce reds. It’s a bit thin. The Aldi Lebanese is nice enough, but hardly Chateau Musar.
The last couple of Mothers’ Days have seen major promotions on rosé. Pink for girls. That persists through many rosé labels and pretty bottles.
Is it age? New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, Macon-Villages, Muscadet, Gruner Veltliner, Chablis and the single village appellation Beaujolais tend to be our choices, along with Riojas, organic Southern Italian from Puglia or Sicily, and organic Greek reds. Any Chilean wines too. The last two years the supermarkets keep running ‘Buy six wines or more 25% off’ offers. Waitrose tend to remove other discounts before running it, but Sainsbury and Tesco include already discounted wines in the offer. That brings the Fleurie, Sancerre and Pouilly Fuisse back within our everyday range. France benefits most in fact. When it’s 25% off, we go for better bottles. That’s keeping us off the Sunday Times Wine Club.
Then there’s this:
This is where I’m going to argue the toss. Even my dental hygienist asks me how many units I drink a week. I now ‘take the fifth’ because I fear some future Puritan teetotal regime (Corbyn and Sunak are teetotal) will start refusing NHS medical treatment to anyone who ever drank 15 units a week. Even just once.
However, I take issue with those who say ‘alcohol is alcohol.’ And that’s it, end of discussion. No, it’s not. It’s an embedded British NHS belief though. I’ve had this discussion in France, Italy and Spain. In Italy it was during a meal with two medical doctors who were married to ELT teachers. They said wine with a meal is quite different in the effects on the system than alcohol away from food. Wine is different to spirits. British doctors disagree, but then surgery is a science. Medicine is an art.
If we’re at home, we have wine with our evening meal nearly every day. I don’t drink before that, and I don’t drink afterwards. I very rarely drink spirits, then it will be tequila or gin. I don’t touch whisky, brandy, rum, port or sherry- all high in congeners. Also, please explain how 125 ml wine is 1.6 units, regardless of whether it’s a light German white at 9 ° or a heavy Aussie ‘full fifteen degree’ red. Whoever thinks that they’re the same hasn’t tried drinking a bottle. Then Champagne affects quickly, but dissipates quickly. What I find amusing is that a late-20s temporary GP (all our GPs are young and temporary- I haven’t seen a “partner” in ten years) will tell me wine with meals every day is ‘dangerously high,’ yet I’ve had the same discussion with senior consultants who asked me how much I drink, shrugged and said, ‘Yes. Me, too.’
Added: Quantity
See Norma’s comment below on a bottle of Mateus Rosé shared between six people. My family split the Christmas Day Sauternes six ways too. That is in line with the UK Chief Medical Officer’s definition of a glass as 125 ml. This bottle contains six glasses. Even allowing generous breathing space that’s a poor host in a domestic setting. You don’t need that much space in the glass for white or rosé or lighter reds either, but it has become a recent pretension for restaurants to wet the base of a balloon glass with a smear of wine . I tend to say ‘Leave it on the table, I’ll pour.’ If catering for guests or ordering for a large table, half a bottle per head is normal. That allows for those who are non-drinkers or designated drivers and those who are hearty imbibers too. Restaurants offering wine by the glass have two or three sizes: 125, 175, 250 (a third of a bottle).
In most countries diners would look askance if they ordered a glass of wine and received 125 ml. In most of Europe they’d be appalled that someone was measuring exactly too. Note this June 2023 menu from Chichester Festival Theatre’s restaurant. They don’t even do a 125 ml glass. They start at 175 ml, as do hotels in the Accor group, like Sofitel or Novotel. It’s also a good guide to a short white wine menu in the UK in 2023 (and confirms that restaurant wine is triple supermarket price):
It’s not wine, but I was at a conference in Santiago de Compostela in Spain. It was lunchtime and I was speaking at 5.30 or 6. I’d had one glass of red wine, but my throat was sore, and the OUP rep I was with suggested a brandy with coffee to ease it. The waiter came over. I asked for a small one, meaning a UK single. Spain has no concept of measured, mean UK “singles” and “Doubles”. He said he couldn’t do that. The restaurant was full of regulars and they’d think he was cheating a stranger if he gave me a brandy to the point I indicated on the glass. I received a glass filled to the brim. As he said, I didn’t have to finish it, but he was not going to ruin his reputation for generosity.
In contrast, I was in Oslo in the early 1980s. I was alone on a short Scandinavia tour because OUP said it was too expensive to send a rep with me. They gave me £35 for food. I spent it all the first night in a very modest restaurant in Stockholm, with just a half bottle of wine. OUP assumed local book distributors would entertain me royally. so I’d only need a little. Wrong. ‘Thank you. Goodnight,’ after my talk ended at 7 pm in Sweden. We went to lunch in Oslo and I asked for a glass of white wine. They were horrified, ‘But you are speaking at 7 o’clock!’ I looked at the clock on the wall, ‘It’s 12.15,’ I said. ‘Maybe a beer would be possible.’ That’s the only time I ever received a 125 ml wine glass of beer. After the talk, it was another ‘Thank you. Goodnight.’ Thank goodness for Copenhagen where I was royally entertained to lunch and dinner!
(Moved from posts- I hadn’t enabled ‘Comments’ here:
Norma Postin
Very interesting and brought back lots of memories. In 1960s my family shared a bottle of Mateus Rose on Christmas Day ( there were 6 of us ) . In 1973 I worked for a few weeks in a hotel in Cornwall, and at the end I took 2 empty Ruffino bottles home with me.
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I once visited the palace that appears on the Mateus Rose label. There was wine on sale there, but no Mateus.
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