The Sediment Christmas Wine Selection: Week Two

After last week’s set of shoddy suggestions from CJ, I can only imagine the foreboding of his friends and family, who now realise what they will have to suffer drinking on Christmas Day. As I have said to him before, things have come to a pretty pass when you spend more on your turkey than on your wine.

No, this is the time of year when you feel that you can  sweep into a wine merchant that sounds like a chartered surveyors, a wine merchant posh enough to have an ampersand in its name. A chap in a striped shirt will say “Can I help  you, sir?”, in that manner which suggests “Can I help you to find the other place you are clearly supposed to be?”

But this time, you can reply “I hope so – I’m looking for a bottle of Pol Roger…” And he will smile knowingly, and you will feel that you have earned your right to be there.

So of course, my Christmas Day will begin with Pol Roger White Foil Brut, because it was Churchill’s favourite champagne and, like him, “My tastes are simple. I am easily satisfied with the best.” Churchill supposedly had 42,000 bottles opened over his lifetime, but for my Christmas Day a few less may suffice. If someone objects to CJ’s budget Cava, he’s got no-one to blame but himself, but if anyone disapproves of my choice, I can always lay the blame on Winston. And while I’m trying to conquer the cooking, I can come out with his quote about champagne: “In victory I deserve it, in defeat I need it”.

(Of course, you don’t have to get your Pol Roger from a posh wine merchant. You can get it from Majestic. But the chap serving you might be wearing a polyester fleece…)

Let’s not get carried away with this “traditional” business. I mean, I don’t spend Christmas prancing around in a periwig. But on the other hand, a screwcap New World red is simply not on. A screwcap wine is about as traditional as a vacuum-packed turkey.

And again, Christmas is a rare opportunity to stroll into a proper wine merchant’s, and boldly ask for a bottle of claret. Not a bottle of Bordeaux; use a proper, Olde English term for a proper Olde English occasion. I shall leave it to your better judgment as to whether or not you add “my good man”.

A wine merchant might not know what you mean if you wander in forsoothing and gadzooksing, but he’ll know what you mean by claret alright. He’ll know you’re someone who appreciates tradition. And so will your guests – which matters, because if you don’t appreciate tradition, why are you having a traditional Christmas dinner?

You’ll want a wine you can decant for the Christmas table, because I find it’s one of the rare meals for which you can put out a decanter and no-one will accuse you of being pretentious. So you also need a wine which will benefit from a bit of breathing space; unlike CJ’s rubbish, whose flavour uses the excuse of meeting the open air to disappear faster than Santa’s reindeer. You’re looking for a wine with a bit of clout. Of course this is the time for something like my treasured remaining Leoville Barton 1989, but if you’re looking at under £20, something like a Larose-Trintaudon 2007 will retain a sense of sophistication, while stunning the range of flavours in a Christmas dinner into submission.

CJ asks why on earth you would need a bottle of white for Christmas dinner. The simple fact is that while he is still wrangling with his recalcitrant oven, civilised folk are having a civilised starter, like smoked salmon for example, which cries out for a nice bottle of white. I’m not as precious about the New World when it comes to whites, and something like First Press Napa Chardonnay from Waitrose is half the price of its Burgundy equivalent, but has the richness and complexity to go with both the starter and the pud. And it will go with the cold cuts on Boxing Day if there’s any left. If…

In the interests of symmetry with his own post, I am not permitted to stray into the contentious territory of vintage port. CJ seems to object to it because, and I quote, “It is not 1908.” Well, it might as well be at my abode, given the dinner table decorum and the talk of Winston Churchill, so we’ll be finishing off properly with port. As I’ve said, this is the one day when it’s all about tradition; so woe betide anyone who passes it the wrong way.

Haven’t you spent enough on presents already? bleats CJ. Well, probably not for yourself. What better way of demonstrating the generosity and largesse of Christmas, while simultaneously treating yourself, than indulging in some splendid wines? Go on, go for it – and have a great Christmas.

PK

The Sediment Christmas Wine Selection: Week One

So we are where we are, with Christmas only two weeks away, and we need to start getting the drink in, because nothing is going to get us through the unmitigated horror of the Festive Season except being very lightly oiled nearly all the time. The good news? The crisis contains the seeds of its own resolution: we are necessarily talking quantity here, not quality - no-one is going to thank you for serving up the Chateau Palmer at Christmas, the whole thing is a gastric warzone from start to finish - and this gives us all the licence we need to head straight for the bargain section of the nearest supermarket/cornershop/petrol station and do the business right there.

What do we need? We need sparkling; we need red; and we need a bit of white. Thus -

Sparkling: Tesco Cordoniu Cava, for which I recently paid £7.49 a bottle, and even that seems excessive, although not as excessive as what they seem to be asking today. What am I going to do with it? Get it absolutely frozen, so cold it might as well be screenwash additive, and dispense it in a hurry, and often. Any complaints about the taste? Throw in some crème de cassis or noisette and remind the complainant that there is more than one use for a turkey baster.

Red: We need a ton of this stuff, for when everyone sits down at the table and gets stuck into the (by now) overdue Christmas Dinner. But what, exactly? After all, it's going to be paired with sprouts, stuffing, Utility gravy, congealing Pigs in Blankets, awful things in their own right, only tolerated because of the time of year. So my two top picks turn out to be

Aldi Chilean Carmenère - Gooseberry nose, nice overlay of caramel and chocolate, well-controlled acidity, not much finish, slight throb in the temples and an odd whiff of gunsmoke at the very end, but at £4.99 a bottle, this is the way forward, only challenged by

Sainsbury's Winemaker's Selection Corbières - an absolute steal on the day I paid £4.75 a bottle for it, generating a nice sensation of armpits on the nose, some good tannins, a hint of brush cleaner, perilously little finish, but on the other hand a fabulous colour, positively imperial in its depth and murky richness.

White: Why do we even need a white? I know a dessert wine quite often makes its way onto the table at the same time as the pudding/mince pies, but realistically, everything calls for one of the reds above. Except: not everyone drinks red. It's Christmas. The obscure Auntie Sis has come to town; she only likes white; you've forgotten to get any. What to do? The obvious: rush round the corner to the newsagent or petrol station (God knows what time of day this is when she reveals her preference, I'm assuming the supermarkets have shut) and get a bottle of Blossom Hill Chardonnay, priced around £5.99, + or -. I have to admit that this is weird drink, with elements of nasal spray and marshmallows, a fugitive implication of grapes, a kind of terrible brightness about it, like an American TV news network. But this does not matter, because Sis, who only drinks white, who drinks it with rare roast beef and venison flanks, doesn't care as long as she's got some to console her through the long flatulent orgy that is Christmas Day. 

And relax.

Next Week: PK's more portentous take on the same thing, but honestly, I wouldn't waste your money. I mean, haven't you spent enough on presents already?

CJ

Sonic Decanter; Lidl Rioja

So there are times when I wonder if this isn't the moment to start up a Sediment test lab, to catalogue the various ways in which the wine drinker can improve his or her experience of the drink without spending any long-term real money or having to buy any big-ticket wines. 

I mean, so far, and quite without any proper co-ordination, PK and I have played around with a mug, a pichet, a Riedel Tasting Glass, a wine aerator, a Duralex tumbler, plus some variations on the DIY angle, just to see what easy, low-rent, low-cost, ameliorations can be achieved in the wine/drinker interface. At least two (Duralex tumber; Riedel Tasting Glass) have turned out to be more or less guaranteed to lift the experience of drinking - one by wrapping it in a psychologically benevolent envelope; the other, apparently, by messing with the physiology of consumption, although anyone who spends £25 on a wine glass is going to have to justify that little indulgence any way they can, physiology or not, and I remain unconvinced, but that's by the by. Anyhow, every encounter with wine is mutable: the wine itself being nothing less than an opportunity to deal in sensations.

To prove the point, it turns out that scientists have properly stormed the winerack, with the creation of the SonicDecanter - a miraculous device from, obviously, the United States, which treats wine as merely the first term in a narrative, using ultrasound to Make every wine better.

How does it work? We know this much:

- It uses patented technology

- Ultrasonic energy transforms the molecular and chemical structure of wine

- It softens tannins, esters and polyphenols

- You have to put a bit of water in the base to get it to work, stick an unopended bottle of wine in, then press a white button for whites and a red for reds

- No decanting, no aerating. It takes twenty minutes to soften up a red

- You can control it from your smartphone

- Gizmodo reviewed it, declaring that I Zapped My Wine With an Ultrasonic Decanter and It Tasted Pretty Good; while Drinknectar.com hollered Great Results in Wine Tasting and a lot of other fabulous things

- The inventors went to Kickstarter to get enough funds to start production, and in no time had hit their target of $85,000. Last time I looked, they were heading for $140,000. There is clearly a need for this device

It seems that the vast majority of wine bought in The States costs $10 a bottle or less - pretty close to the £6 watershed we observe over here. Anything, therefore, which can make $10 wine taste like $20 is evidently going to be up there with remote car unlockers and disposable razors in terms of sheer utility. Projected UK price for the Sonic Decanter is around £150, which means it will have to double the perceived value of about 25 bottles of £6 wine before it pays for itself. Which is nothing. Why, only the other day, I bought a couple of bottles of Lidl Rioja at £3.99, both of which could have done with a good two hours in the Decanter, given that my red-eyed tasting notes reveal massive tannins, road re-surfacing, some flypaper, vanilla and crisps finish before concluding on a dying fall of alcohol haze like standing under a flightpath. Of course, at £3.99 a go, I'd have to buy 37.5 bottles before the Sonic Decanter cleared its inital costs, so there may be a law of inverse pleasurability in operation, but I think we can afford to be pragmatic.

The question then becomes philosophical, rather than economic or purely technological. How much does it matter that my £12-tasting bottle was only made with the care and attention of a £6 bottle? If breaking out the Sonic Decanter is the wine equivalent of using studio magic to make a terrible singer sound like Etta James, is it fundamentally an imposture? Is it a typically American reduction of distinctive craft skills to an approximated universality, which, in time, will leave us all drinking indivisibly okay reds and whites whether we want to or not? Do we take an objective or subjective view? And what would I have to do to get my hands on a pre-production model? I have no laboratory; but I do have a very old raincoat which, if you half close your eyes, looks a bit like a lab coat. I mean, it's a very light mac.

CJ

Wine and snoring (and other side-effects) – Ricasoli Chianti Classico Riserva 2010

It was the morning after one of our dinner parties. A convivial evening, involving a couple of bottles of the excellent Ricasoli Chianti Classico Riserva 2010, a wine of beauty (which is all ye need to know), after which I had been contentedly dead to the world. I blearily descended to a cluttered kitchen, and asked Mrs K how she had slept.

“You were snoring,” she said, bitterly. “You always snore when you’ve had too much wine.”

Well, this was the first I’d heard about this. Various negative side-effects have been levied in the past against my wine-drinking, but snoring had not been among them. Although it's fair to say that wine has taken the rap for a significant number of my failings, from the medical and social to the financial and psychological.

Belligerence, for example. Plutarch, the Graeco-Roman essayist, said that the openness encouraged by wine led to a better level of debate at the dinner table. “Wine inspirits some men, and raises a confidence and assurance in them,” he wrote, “but not such as is haughty and odious, but pleasing and agreeable.” Which seemed to me a jolly good reason for oiling dinner party conversations with plenty of wine. Then I was enlightened by my good wife that far from being pleasing and agreeable, in fact I was philosophising so aggressively that guests became frightened.

Now I have to be more contemplative over my glass, hoping to stay on the right side of that fine line between judicious thoughtfulness and that other potential side-effect of wine, a surly silence.

Is wine-drinking responsible for extravagance, as I was once accused? I think not. When it comes to wine, one buys what is needed; you wouldn’t accuse a driver of extravagance for buying petrol. 

Besides, it is hard to be extravagant in Sainsbury’s.

In fact, my wine bill is incredibly modest, and no, it is not going to lead to poverty. And if it did, well, there are some less necessary expenditures I could point to, like food, heat and lighting. I can’t say I regret my spending on wine; I have to agree with the late great Vivian Stanshall, who said that “If I had all the money I’ve spent on drink, I’d spend it on drink.”

No, any extravagance is reserved for special occasions. Like Christmas dinner, when, as I recently insisted to CJ, things have come to a pretty pass if you spend more on your turkey than on your wine.

Some supposed side-effects of wine are down to simple misinterpretation. Wine does not, for example, induce selfishness. The wine had spent most of its time the preceding night at my end of the dinner table out of social courtesy. I was assisting the designated driver not to drink, empathising with the chap on painkillers for his back, and acknowledging Mrs K’s modest consumption, by saving them all the embarrassment of declining repeated offers of wine.

And I’m quite happy myself to suffer minor, temporary physical side-effects like stained teeth. They may even pass unnoticed. Unlike an increasing number of television celebrities, I have teeth which reflect a lifetime’s eating and drinking. My teeth are a proper older Englishman’s teeth, the colour of cardboard. They have not been artificially rendered to resemble a mouthful of bathroom tiles.

But this snoring business is obviously affecting someone else. And having looked into ways in which I might deny it, I’m sorry to say that there does seem to be a genuine link between the two. Drinking wine can cause a relaxation in the muscles at the back of the throat. (Which, had I known, perhaps I could have blamed for my growling at guests…) It seems that inspiratory resistance, which causes snoring, can increase fourfold after drinking.

And the only remedy I could find online was that of abstinence. Which sounded to me like the old Tommy Cooper joke about the man who goes to his doctor, and says “My arm hurts when I do this…”, to which the doctor replies “Well, don’t do it then.”

However, Mrs K said that she halted the snoring, with a judicious kick. So I can only conclude that an irrefutable side-effect of my wine drinking must be a deep sleep. Deep enough to render one oblivious to four-fold inspiratory resistance, surely a beneficial side-effect if one sleeps alone. And deep enough to render one oblivious to a kick, if one does not.

Nightcap, anyone?

PK

Home-made: Seyval Blanc

So I'm having a glass of wine with a pal, and it's rather a nice Seyval Blanc. It's chilled, lightly effervescent, extremely tasty and, to be perfectly frank we're eating a bit of smoked salmon at the same time, and all is good - but here's the thing: our wine is home-made and is served from an old Tesco Cava bottle which arrives stoppered with a crown cap, like a beer bottle. Have we gone mad?

No. The pal - whose wine this is, and who has made it himself, with his own hands and someone else's bottles - is actually a big deal in the wine beer and spirits industry and has a background in biochemistry. He can make beer, he can make wine, he can probably service my car. As he puts it, 'Making wine is a mug's game. It's so easy. Especially in comparison with beer, which is a complete pain'.

Naturally, one casts one's mind back to homemade brews of the past, just about all of them bleakly underwhelming - from the teenage homebrew beer I used to neck, sediment and all, just to get plotzed in a mate's front room; to my Pa-in-Law's ineffable spider wine, made with bits of tendrils, weedkiller and, key ingredient, dead insects. But one would be wrong to lump the Seyval Blanc in with this tragic historical debris.

It's made using the méthode traditionelle, which in this case means not much more than crushing and pressing the grapes (which come from an allotment in the sunny outer suburbs of London; used to be a microvineyard in Sussex, but too much travelling involved), sticking the juice in a steel bin for a week or so before decanting it into a second bin, and leaving it until some time the following year, when the new wine is siphoned off and rudely bottled and stoppered.

Of course, there's more to it than that. 'They all have some acidity correction,' he notes. 'Nothing more than precipitated chalk.' I carefully note down precipitated chalk, back in the school chemistry lab, equally adrift. 'And this one's got glycerine in it, to add to the mouthfeel. When I was making country wines, years ago - ' wines made from anything at all, parsnips, rhubarb, chicken wire ' - I used to tip in a load of glycerine I got from Boots.'

'Uh huh,' I say, as if I understand.

'And at the end, when I'm bottling the wine, I put in a bit more yeast and sugar, to create the effervescence and up the alcohol content. They're English grapes, so they never give much more than 8%. I have to add sugar early on to get it to around 10. On the other hand, the great thing about Seyval Blanc, is that it's idiot-proof. And it makes quite a nice sparkling wine.'

I find myself reflecting helplessly that if that's all there is, why don't we all do it? But I am not a trained biochemist with years of experience in the making and flogging of mass consumer beverages. All I can do is observe that his 2012 homebrew is a bit tart, with that slightly brassy sherryish introduction one rightly fears in hobbyist wine; although it mellows nicely by the finish. The 2011, on the other hand, is just delicious. Bit of moss in the nose, a hint of lychee further along, well-controlled acidity, altogether an extremely shapely drink with a finish that keeps on going. The only thing one has to remember is to decant it first, on account of the fine lees at the bottom of the bottle. Fortunately, my pal has the steadiest pouring hand I have ever seen.

'It gets better the longer you leave it. The yeast dies and releases all sorts of things that improve the flavour. Trouble is, we tend to make a start on it as soon as it's drinkable. After six months, we're saying, this is really good. But by then there are only a couple of bottles left.'

Is it too late to acquire this kind of competence? Have I wasted my life buying drink instead of confecting it myself, in the back yard? I forget to ask the unit cost per bottle, but it can't be too high, even allowing for the expenditure on a couple of stainless steel tanks and a press (which can be also used for apples, pears, some laundry). Oh, but there is a cloud in the sky: 'The biggest pain,' the pal says ruminatively, 'is getting clean bottles. We keep our old champagne bottles and scrounge the rest from friends and neighbours. But do you know, they don't all rinse them out before giving them to us?'

'Some people,' I say. 'Don't tell me we've drunk it all.'

CJ

IKEA wine – their little-known accessory

IKEA keep unusually quiet about this particular product. I found IKEA’s wine in one of its restaurant’s chiller cabinets, but it’s not listed on their Beverages page, like their lagers, or shelved in their food department. And it is not to be confused with IKEA Vinglögg, for that is not wine per se; Vinglögg is described on the label as an “aromatized wine based drink”, and so lies beyond the remit of Sediment, which is not an aromatized wine based drink blog.

No, this is a seemingly proper Cotes de Provence white wine, of undeclared vintage, called, rather oddly, Navicert  – and with the IKEA logo on the label.

It comes in, unusually, a 25cl bottle – that’s 1/3rd of a regular bottle. Trust an IKEA product to employ its own unique measurement system. In their restaurant it’s £2.80 plus VAT, which adds up to what would be a little over £10 for a full bottle. Conveniently, its components do come ready assembled. And with a combination of practicality and economy typical of IKEA, it eschews either cork or Stelvin in favour of a juice-bottle cap.

Now, I could go into the taste of it, using IKEA-related terms to describe aspects such as its construction, its legs, its playful florals and its oak finish. In fact it’s perfectly drinkable; its taste will please most people through being relatively minimal, like everything at IKEA apart from its checkout queues.

But it’s the very concept of offering wine to IKEA customers which deserves some thought.

A traditional Navicert, or ship’s cargo certificate, was meant to aid passage during hostilities, which is of obvious benefit in a trip to IKEA. And a stiff dose of something alcoholic might, like an 19th century explorer of Africa, aid one’s journey around its badly-mapped interior. 

Yes, wine might fuel even more marital rows in the furniture areas; but it could also blur one’s sight, so that one does not spot all those unnecessary but irresistibly cheap items in the strangely compelling Marketplace.

But IKEA wine would surely be of the greatest benefit to its customers if it was incorporated into the actual flatpacks. In the spirit of which, consider the following instructions for use:

PK

Out Now! The first SEDIMENT book – Sediment: Two Gentlemen and Their Mid-Life Terroirs

SCENE: A Gentlemen's Club

CJ and PK are seated in leather armchairs. 

CJ: I say PK, what’s that in your hand?

PK: This?

CJ: No, the other one.

PK: This, my friend, is the long-awaited first book from Sediment

CJ: A Sediment book?

PK: Yes! Sediment: Two Gentlemen and Their Mid-Life Terroirs. Published by John Blake Books, available from today.

CJ: What a handsome volume – how much does it cost?

PK: £12.99 or less, from Amazon and all good booksellers. Which is less, even, than a bottle of wine.

CJ: Well…

PK: It’s rather like a wine, in fact. It contains Malbec, Cava, Bordeaux and port, some rather shoddy Côtes du Rhône, Le Piat d’Or…

CJ: You intrigue me -

PK: It’s Sediment’s most entertaining thoughts about wine drinking, wine buying and so on, in a convenient hardback form.

CJ: Revised and edited?

PK: As the lawyers insisted.

CJ: It strikes me, PK, that this would be enjoyed by anyone who reads the Sediment blog. 

PK: And it would make the perfect gift for any wine drinker who doesn't read Sediment. 

CJ: Or, indeed, any of their friends or relatives.

PK: It would.

CJ: Tell me what it is again?

PK: The perfect gift, CJ.

CJ: You're absolutely right:  Sediment: Two Gentlemen and Their Mid-Life Terroirs

Porter: Excuse me gentlemen, but we’ve had reports of a fatuous conversation taking place in the Smoking Room. Are you actually members of this club?

More Fish Fingers

So I'm reading through PK's most recent post and it occurs to me that even by PK's standards it is so flagrantly deficient in its reasoning, I must say something in reply. Which is

1) The traditional accompaniment (to use a PK term) for fish fingers and tinned baked beans never was water, but is instead a cup of tea and a slice, and quiet cig. Also a copy of the Daily Mirror to hand, or a half-completed pools coupon. A light ale is okay if that's the way things are going. The Breakfast of Champions, whatever the time of day, and nothing to stop him treating himself to exactly that. But

2) If you really really want to drink wine, then why not? You can drink wine with just about anything if you try hard enough. Cornflakes would be pushing it, and I don't think you can chew gum and drink wine at the same time, although I'm agnostic on that one. But fish fingers? What about a nice cool Loire red of some sort? Or a Beaujolais, ditto? Indeed, some thoughtful readers came up with their own suggestions, including a chenin blanc or a Valpolicella. I could go for any of those.

3) On the other hand - I know for a fact that there are at least four respectable food shops immediately outside PK's front door. There is nothing to stop him putting the fingers'n'beanz back into storage, nipping out for ten minutes and coming back with a chicken leg, a bag of salad and a nice bit of bread. Grill the chicken, do up the salad how you like it, open whatever bottle of non-confrontational wine you fancy, then, half an hour later, round the meal off with a fresh espresso (yes, he's got a classic espresso machine in the kitchen, and it works) and voilà! A brasserie-style meal such you might get anywhere in provincial France and you don't even have to leave a tip. Come on PK! It's not as if Mrs. K has abandoned you, trembling and defenceless and unable to shape your own dinner destiny. Cruel fate has not decided to stand between you and a proper drink, cramming your cheeks in the meantime with fatty, sugary, pap. You are capable of looking after yourself, except -

4) You don't really want to. This is the real thing: if you are prepared to fill your mouth with cheap and horrible beanz'n'fish fingers, which you clearly are, why aren't you prepared to drink an equivalently cheap and horrible wine? There is no inner consistency. Your standards went out of the window the moment you voluntarily stuck the fish fingers under the grill, and so did any reason to complain. But no, the unstillable voice of the wine snob must make itself heard, and, as we all know, one of the great pleasures of snobbery is that it's rationally indefensible, that it actually makes life more, rather than less, difficult. The idea must prevail in your understanding of the world, rightly or wrongly, that wine is in a different class from all other foods and drinks; that it axiomatically deserves reverence; that it can only be seen in the company of proper food. Fatal! Wine is just another commodity, like potatoes or mince (that's the everyday meat people buy, they do it every day). There is plenty of good wine about, but there's a tonne more which is very ho-hum, and (I'm guessing, I'll level with you) an even larger amount which is only just drinkable, although God knows, it gets drunk. Wine is an alcoholic drink made from fermented grape juice which can be obtained in fancy, look-at-me bottles, unmarked plastic containers, and everything in between. That's all. And the more that wine snobs beat us about the head with the idea that we're betraying ourselves and the rest of wine-drinking mankind every time we blithely snap the cap on a bottle of who-cares cornershop white to go with our fish fingers, the more incensed I get. It's just stuff. Claiming that it isn't, that it's categorically different, only sets us further back on the path to understanding.

5) Any more ranting and I will start to sound like one of the many zealots at whom I rant. This is how international crises start. So it's time to say:

CJ

When wine just isn't right...

I’ve made my feelings clear in the past about the notion of everyday wine. (“Everyday wine? You don’t get people selling everyday meat...”) I retain, in the face of  growing evidence, a notion that wine is somehow special, and not just a commodity. And so surely, if you have any modicum of respect for wine, there are some meals from which you should excuse its presence?

I suppose you could argue that last Friday’s was not, in fact, an everyday meal. That it was significantly below that benchmark. If fish fingers and baked beans was actually my everyday meal, I suspect I would be suffering the unwelcome largesse of one of Jamie Oliver’s training courses. No, this was not so much an everyday meal as a desperate meal, an end-of-week, last-minute, empty fridge meal. Unfortunately, Casa K appears to lack the “larder” of the Nigels and Nigellas of this world, whose kitchen cupboard doors seem to open into a neighbouring delicatessen.

And the issue is, when you’re reduced to such basic sustenance as fish fingers and baked beans, is it right to open a bottle of wine to go with it?

This is not like pairing wine with fresh cod. I suppose somewhere there may be gourmet fish fingers, or bâtonnets de poisson, no doubt, which do taste of cod and not of shredded paper. Similarly, there will be people out there who bake their own beans. But we are talking here about frozen fish fingers, and baked beanz from tinz. Would a glass of wine improve, or even numb, this sorry experience? 

Out of interest, I looked at the suggestions of Fiona Beckett, a very reliable recommender of both wine and restaurants, on http://www.matchingfoodandwine.com/, “the most comprehensive food and drink pairing resource on the web.” And her suggestion was… Krug. Yes, that’s the Champagne, Krug, the one which Tesco list, in what I assume is not an accounting error, for £129.99 a bottle, with an admonishment to “Bring out the oysters with this one.” Not, I note, the fish fingers. 

Not that I have got a bottle of Krug in my cellar; but even if I came up the stairs with an ‘ordinary’ bottle of Champagne, I don’t know what Mrs K would think. I can, however, imagine the scorn which would ensue when it emerged that this was my proposed accompaniment and, no, we had not won the lottery.

I don’t believe that a decent wine could possibly be enhanced by fish fingers, or for that matter baked beans, or particularly by the dollop of vinegary HP sauce which is a required accompaniment to the two. The food could only detract from the pleasure I might have got from the wine itself.

And there is surely even less point in heaping some rubbish wine upon my rubbish food, in a kind of dual assault on my palate. I’m sure that down there, in the three-for-£10 category, there will be a wine that can counter the blandness of the fingers and the sugariness of the beans, with the acidity to compete with the HP sauce. And perhaps after we’ve eaten, we could use the rest to remove Mrs K’s nail polish. 

No thanks. I decided to pair this meal with…water. 

I know, I know, I’ve seen it in a dozen old Italian restaurants; “A day without wine is a day without sunshine”, an aphorism which seems particularly fatuous after dark. I prefer the observation by Adam Gopnik that “A meal with water is a meal for prisoners”. Which seemed particularly appropriate for the basic rations last Friday here in Cell Block K.

But we all eat rubbish meals on occasion. Don’t tell me that at your place it’s always seared this and a tagine of that and Ottolenghi recipes as long as your loo-roll. And when you’re eating fish fingers, or baked beans, or pizza straight from its cardboard box, surely drinking wine with it is as ridiculous as laying the white table linen and silverware. Some of us don’t want wine to become a commodity, like salt or paper napkins, an unremarked accompaniment to each and every meal whatever it might be. And perhaps the solution to that is to forgo it once in a while, on those rare occasions when the food doesn’t actually deserve wine. 

Plus, you appreciate it more on the following night. Abstinence does make the heart grow fonder.

PK

French Excess: Gerard Depardieu

So PK is badgering me about this story which appeared in The Daily Mail - to the effect that legendary French actor Gérard Depardieu routinely knocks off fourteen bottles of wine a day, plus extras: in effect, champagne for breakfast and elevenses, followed by some red wine, then more champagne along with a couple of anisettes to ring the changes, more wine at lunch, some beer in the afternoon, a few more anisettes, some more wine - red, or maybe rosé - and, to round off the day, spirits - whisky, vodka, perhaps both. 'I can't drink like a normal person,' he claimed litotically in an interview with So Film, adding that the way to handle things if they get a bit out of order is: 'A ten-minute nap and voilà, a slurp of rosé wine and I feel as fresh as a daisy.'

This, not long after a recent in-flight toilet catastrophe, in the course of which M. Depardieu peed over the floor of an Air France plane, unable to keep everything in for the fifteen minutes during which the toilets were locked for takeoff. 'Je veux pisser, je veux pisser,' he was reported to cry out in his distress. It took two hours to clean the plane up.

'All right,' PK says in what he imagines to be a persuasive tone, 'why don't you try the Depardieu routine for a day? Just to see what it's like?'

'What? Fourteen bottles?'

'It would be interesting, wouldn't it?'

I know I am the de facto crash test dummy for Sediment, but even I can see that this suggestion is ludicrous.

'It's ludicrous,' I say.

'What if you just had fourteen glasses instead of bottles?'

'Then I'd be pissed, that's all.'

PK gives me a look of sorrowing reproach, but I mean, really. In fact, the more I think about Depardieu's claims, the more I reckon they must be intended not as a genuine lifestyle statement, but as satire. Yes, Gérard's a big lad in all directions, and has survived heart surgery and a motorbike crash (he was drunk at the time), and is as tough as pavement gum, but this much booze would kill anyone, if not on day one, at least by day seven, even Depardieu.

No, it looks more like a semi-calculated insult directed at the French, whose society he has spurned on account of not wanting to pay the income tax. Now a citizen of lawless, hard-drinking Russia, he is free to have as many snorts as he likes and critique what he deems to be prissy French moderation. Because that's one of those French conundrums: for a nation which is supposed to consume quite a lot, the French don't actually drink that much, or if they do, they don't drink it that fast. When we were sponging off our French friends and acquaintances last summer, the wine was certainly there, as were all the tiresome apéros and sometimes the digestifs, but with nothing like the profligacy I associate with eating and drinking in England. I don't think I'm betraying any secrets if I say that when someone has a meal at our house it's an excuse for a) a tonne of fatty food b) litres of drink to dissolve it. And I am not alone.

But in France they are more civilised, and make their drinks last, to the extent that one bottle of wine was deemed enough for five people - five - on one occasion. (I would also note, parenthetically and ungraciously, that our hostess on this occasion was also a rabidly assertive Parisienne who assured us that not only was it impossible to get decent bread outside Paris - we were in Provence at the time - but that the British were the mauvais élèves, her words, of the EU, with our subsidy-grabbing and rule-flouting, and that we should quit at once and leave the project to the original six. Oh, and her daughter swore blind, having looked it up on her smartphone, that only 0.1% of the French working population was employed by the state. Seriously).

Everywhere you turn, in fact, the French appear to be consuming less, drinking mineral water at their desks, not even loading up on brandies and calavados in the deep countryside before starting half a day's highly-subsidised labour, not even there. It wasn't that long ago - no more than a few years - that I was in a fantastic old-school restaurant on the Rive Gauche, where a party of middle-aged blokes, they must have been profs from the Sorbonne - tweed coats, specs, frizzy grey hair, noisy abstractions - did stupendous justice to a three-hour weekday lunch, and were still doing justice to it as I left. But no more, it seems, or possibly yes, more, if you're a university don, but otherwise, no.

At any rate, I take it to be this new dispensation which Depardieu is attacking with his surreal claim about fourteen bottles. And in this sense, I am behind him all the way. If France is not emblematic of indulgence, of highly-refined excess, what is it emblematic of? What's its point? There would be no point to France, apart from the scenery. Non! Depardieu's on-the-face-of-it insane boast is actually a lament, a sublimated threnody for a vanishing culture. It is an intervention, a plea on behalf of us all, for the soul of his native land, delivered by a 180-kilo alcoholic millionaire who nearly shorted out an Air France jet with his own pee. Salut!

CJ