So I'm
reading PK's post last week, the one about Vinovispo,
wincing with bafflement and frustration as usual; and while I'm not
even going to attempt
to unpick his insane etiquette cosmology, the one in which people are
forever clubbing their brains about which fork to eat scallops with
at dinner, or whether you can call a Bowler Hat a Derby, I am
going to offer a tiny corrective to his appreciation of the Vinovispo
stuff.
He
was quite right, in that the drink we tried in London's glittering
West End was not very
sparkly, not exactly flavourful, and definitely not cold enough, but:
the conversation we had about it afterwards was rather differently
nuanced than he suggests. As I remember, it went:
PK:
That fake Prosecco was flat, bland and not very cold.
Me:
True. What we tried just now was a bit rubbish. But if it were
done properly, I could see it working. Imagine you're going to a pub,
or a High Street wine bar, let's say with a lady friend, and she
says, Oh, I'd really like a glass of fizzy -well, there it is, large as
life: you just point at the tap on the bar and say, A glass of
sparkling for the lady and large red for me, please, also from the
tap. And your evening is off to a perfect start, all thanks to
Vinovispo.
It is a product which will be welcomed in places as far afield as
Reigate
and Cheltenham,
Ilford and Wilmslow.
PK:
Of course you are right, sensei.
Your wisdom flows like a spring of pure water.
Context
is everything. If you're out for a night of high-jinks, the
provenance and quality of your booze will
be inexpressibly low on your list of priorities. The beer (for
instance) you get in a mainstream pub is, often as not, some kind of
generic brown/gold beverage, cool and unassertively flavoured,
dispensed from a tap straight into the glass, and it does
the job.
Why shouldn't wine be the same? Pub wine is a graveyard of ambitions
at the best of times, being wildly overpriced, indifferent to the
taste, and usually kept knocking around for God knows how long in a
dank trio of bottles next to the crisps.
All
of which is mercifully swept away once we get with the programme and
start using pump dispensers. Along with the Vinovispo
chiller/pump combination, there were a couple of other chromed taps,
offering red, white, and I would swear rosé, pumped up from a
bag-in-box arrangement under the counter. Ideal.
A
new candour prevails: this is wine,
that popular everyday beverage, served with the same quotidian
familiarity and consistency as your everyday weak gassy lager, your
neither-here-nor-there heritage bitter, and all the better for it.
You're not going out on the town for a dégustation;
you're not going to treat every encounter as a chance to advertise
the superiority of your tastes; you just want to have fun.
Or,
as the great Nigel Slater once put it, hymning the delights of a
mass-produced burger after a night on the tiles: 'The gherkin smarts
on your tongue. A moment of absolute bliss. The doughy bun becomes
your best friend. You chase the last bit of sauce around the
polystyrene container with a stalk of warm lettuce or a cold French
fry and lick the last sweet-salty blob from the corner of your
mouth.' Quite: his point being that we can, and should, take pleasure
in all things, without guilt, provided the time is right, and we do
it as sentient human beings. Why deny yourself the simple, only
slightly corrupt, occasional pleasure of fast food or fast wine?
So.
If I can get a borderline generic red/white, plus a
hilarity-guaranteeing schooner of fizzy straight out of a hygenic tap
+ corporate logo on the handle, without any of that excruciating
titting about pretending to weigh up the pros and cons of some foul
Malbec as against an equally disgusting Merlot, as
if it mattered, then
I will be happy.
I
simply will not care what
it's called. With this proviso: it's got to cost less than the
equivalent glassful from a bottle. Since the fancier wine-makers will want
to hang on to their perceived premium values by differentiating the
bottle from the draught, I can't see this being a problem. The
technology is there. The need (God knows) is there. Can we just do
this thing?
CJ
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