Do we want our wine to be ‘unusual’? I’m only asking,
because that is the adjective Sainsbury's have used to describe their Taste the
Difference Marzemino. “This unusual wine…”, begins their description on both
the back label and the shelf-talker. And frankly, I don’t think ‘unusual’ is a
characteristic one looks for in a wine.
Offered something ‘unusual’, the common human reaction is
somewhere between the wary, the cautious and the downright suspicious. Would
you, for example, tell guests that the meat you are serving to them is
‘unusual’? People would be expecting fillet of stoat.
“Yes, we’re having ocelot
this evening. They say it’s ‘unusual’.” I bet it bloody is…
Surely there’s an inherent criticism if someone looks into
your dining room and says, “That’s an unusual colour…”. What if someone said to
a mother, ‘What an unusual baby…’?
Or imagine, somewhat in the vein of a New Yorker cartoon
caption, pausing at the bedroom door to say to your partner, “Tonight, I
thought we might try something…unusual”.
With drinks perhaps above all else, the notion of the usual
is something positive. “Your usual?” asks the barman, and a whole relationship
is established; he knows you and your tastes. He doesn’t think you’re a boring
old fart for having the same thing over and over again. He thinks you’re a
person of discernment, who has sampled widely and arrived at an ideal. And he
compliments your initial choice by asking, “Same again?”
Yes, the same again, please. We spend years (not to mention
pounds) hunting around for wines we really like. And when we find one, we
immediately buy a case, so we can repeat the experience twelve more times.
We mourn the disappearance from the shelves of a wine we
like; we regret the inevitable passing of a good vintage; the final bottle from
the case. We grieve for a wine we know whose cost has risen to the
unaffordable. We want our usual.
Part of this whole business of understanding wine is about
predictability. You choose a wine for a dish, a meal or a guest based upon
anticipating how that wine will taste. When you open a Chablis, you expect it
to taste a certain way. An unusual Chablis is one which doesn’t taste like a Chablis. Perhaps it tastes
like a Sauternes, which would be very
unusual for a Chablis, not to say unwelcome.
Oh, those of us who like to explore wine, and broaden our
drinking experience, do like to try something different – but we wouldn’t serve
something described as ‘unusual’ unless we’d tried it ourselves and could vouch
for it. “What’s the worst that can happen?” is a phrase suited to a
mass-produced soft drink, but inappropriate to the serving of potentially appalling
wine, where consequences can range from embarrassment and social exclusion to
nausea, choking, vomiting, headache and other symptoms drawn from the back of
pharmaceutical packaging.
Fortunately there are some, like Sediment, whose sheer
curiosity outweighs the imagined threat of medical emergency. Of course one
must try such wines alone, but avoiding any risk to one’s carefully nurtured
social status (let alone marriage) is just a further benefit of drinking ‘unusual’
wines by yourself, a benefit unaccountably excluded from CJ’s post on solo drinking.
(When you consider the wine he usually consumes, solo drinking is virtually a necessity.)
Marzemino is certainly uncommon, even rare, both terms which
might actually intrigue potential purchasers. A regional varietal of
North-Eastern Italy, often used for blending, it’s drunk by Don Giovanni on the
way to Hell in his eponymous opera (“Versa
il vino, eccellente marzemino!”).
And given the number of times I’ve
been told to go to that particular destination…
And this Marzemino has much of the Gamay about it, with
cherry, plum and delicate red fruit flavours. It’s like a very light
Beaujolais, innocuously drinkable and hard to believe it’s 12% alcohol. The
flavour drifts past, just a fleeting nuance of berries and floral notes. It probably
works best with food, because it surely offers insufficient entertainment on
its own. But to answer that classic police question to witnesses, “Did you
notice anything particularly unusual?” the answer would have to be no, officer,
I did not.
However, in store I found it reduced from £5.99 to £4.49,
perhaps an indication that it has not found favour with a mass audience. And at
the time of writing, Sainsbury are actually offering it online at £12 for three. £4 a bottle is absurdly cheap for any wine
which you can actually keep down.
Indeed, I would go so far as to say it’s unusual…
PK
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