The Wines That Made Us (6): Nicolas

Was Nicolas the first wine I ever drank? Could well be. It appeared at the family dining table four? five? decades ago and I was encouraged, in the French manner, to try it with water, half-and-half, as a way of developing a taste for wine without becoming a dipsomaniac before I'd even reached my teens. It's horrible, of course, red wine and London tapwater, but I went through with it because if that's what the French did, then it was not only the right thing to do, but the right Gallic thing, like the subjunctive mood. I wanted to be cool enough to be French, was what it came down to.

I still don't really know who or what Nicolas Wines is or are. They started in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century - this much they claim on one of their websites - and were bottlers and distributors of their own brands as well as being merchants for other people's wines. Which makes them sound like one among thousands of others. The only difference being that in Britain, or at least in our morose trench of the North London suburbs, they were France itself, a metonymy which drove us wild over the roast beef and two veg when their product started to make its presence felt at mealtimes.

How did we know that Nicolas encapsulated the entirety of everyday French culture? Because the ads told us so. The Sunday supplements - in themselves an invitation to a new world of heightened awarenesses - ran these full-pagers depicting what looked like a Parisian milk float doing the rounds of an arrondissement - only instead of milk from the Unigate Dairy, it was delivering a litre or two of Nicolas, the stuff which, it seemed, kept every Parisian household en forme for the rest of the day. Nicolas' Vin de Table or Vin Ordinaire - terms which have tragically more or less vanished from the world of wine drinking - thereby combined the idea of wine - a costly, hedonistic rarity for most Brits - with quotidian necessity in a way which we'd read about or seen in the movies, but had scarcely, if ever, encountered. It was breathtaking in its relaxed, winey, maturity. Better yet, it was authentic in a way the other competition for our minds and stomachs - Blue Nun, Mateus Rosé, Goldener Oktober - could never manage. It even had a plastic bung rather than a cork: that's how real it was.

But then, back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, France still had a stranglehold on the theory and practice of the good life. Any Gallicism you could think of was a glimpse of better things: savoir-vivre, couture, insouciance, crème de la crème, liaison, tendresse, Belle Époque, entre nous, avant-garde, chic, soigné; I could go on. A scant twenty miles across the Channel, the French were so different, so highly-developed, that the Lyons (as in Joe Lyons) coffee company actually advertised, in British publications, its fresh ground standard roast with the words Une recette qu'on ne trouve pas dans les livres de cuisine, a sentence now impenetrable to almost everyone. At the same time, French cinema still mattered, the true haute couture was French, gastronomy took its cues from French haute cuisine, the Citroën DS was still in production, the South of France was home to Picasso and Chagall, and Francis Poulenc had only recently died, in Paris. Nicolas was an ambassador, in its way, to all this. Did it even matter what it tasted like?

All of which would be fine, except for one problem. I'm starting to wonder if perhaps I haven't remembered more than there was to remember: that I'm indulging a false memory. For a start, can can you still get Nicolas? In this country? Well, yes, there are still Nicolas shops, but the things they sell under their own name are generic-looking Chardonnays and Sauvignon Blancs and Côtes du Rhônes, nothing to shout about, no sign of the big old bottles with the plastic bungs. Nor can I find any evidence of the advert which changed my life - the one with the wine float trawling the backstreets of the arrondissement. I've got one (see above) which ticks some of the right boxes, but it's not the wine float, it's just a bottle and a Duralex and a newspaper. And a piece of baguette. Which is good, but beyond that? Added to which, no-one I have mentioned the imperishable late Sixties Nicolas to, has anything like the same recollections of it, if any.

My memory is an undependable ally at the best of times and it's starting to look as if my whole wine-drinking life may be premised on an initial lie. Which then raises the question: do I prefer the lie to whatever the truth may actually be? How much do I want to cling on to this misapprehension? On this occasion, I think I'm going to have to say quite a lot.

CJ