So,
a couple of weeks ago,
PK and I are at this tasting of Hampshire wines.
Just looking at the phrase Hampshire
wines
gives me a bit of a start: go back a
generation and it would have been the cue for a flurry of cheap gags
about Derbyshire sherry and the clarets of Aberystwyth, but such are
the times we live in that we go along quite looking forward to it.
And yes, it is all very pleasant, although PK is frustrated at not
being able to snoop around the smartyboots private club in which the
event is taking place, on account of the wines of Hampshire being
kept sequestered in a special basement with its own tradesmen's
entrance.
That
aside, what do we find? Basically a roomful of sparkling whites,
about two still wines and a load of people murmuring suavely away at
each other. Nothing wrong with that; we toil round the tables along
with the other cognoscenti
(Oz Clarke!) and I think come out finally in favour of the Hambledon Classic Cuvée; or it might be the Danebury Madeleine Angevine.
Either way I forget to pick up a pencil at the check-in desk and now
it's gone out of my head.
What
I do recall, though, is that a) there is a definite regionality or,
at least, identity, in the stuff we try, which is charming,
especially given the charm of Hampshire itself, one of my favourite
counties, and b) for all that, it is kind of underwhelming: a lot of
crisp, slightly virtuous, Englishy hints of apples and hedgerows, a
whiff of bicarb, but also a very slightly tragic undertow of Babycham
- I mean, a really top-notch Babycham, as good as Babycham could ever
get, but there all the same.
The
upshot? Given that I've been droning on about the latter-day thrill
that is English wine, I come out of the the tasting conflicted. Why
is it all so nearly good without getting completely across the finish
line? Is it the wine witholding or is it me? I feel I have to act.
First move is to bring round a bottle of Camel Valley Cornish white
sparkliing to the PK house where he and Mrs K are having some people
round, plus me and the wife, for a sophisticated
three-courses-plus-cheese dinner such as I can I only dream of
confecting. This is in order to answer the question that PK and I
keep fatuously shouting
at
each other at the tasting: Would
you serve this at a dinner party?
Well,
yes, it gets served and everyone makes polite noises about it, but it
is still pretty much Babycham, the sort of Babycham you might get in
Business Class on Cathay Pacific, yes, but Babycham. So, on to phase two.
Phase
two is a bottle of New Hall Bacchus 2016 Reserve which someone must
have brought round to our place and which I must, equally, have
stuffed away against just such an eventuality. Essex-based, this one,
and a tantalisingly bland 10.5%, so no risk of running amok even if I
drink the bottle in one. As it happens, it lingers for three days
before I get to the end of it and what do you know? It's definitively
pleasant, without quite ever being there.
I mean, it's fine, but so unassertive it's hard to know if I'm
actually drinking it or only think I am.
On
the other hand, it does befriend me in an odd sort of way. I start to
think of it fondly, with its self-effacing semi-presence in the
bottom of the fridge, a drink I can take or leave without knowing
which of these two I have actually done, but a companion nonetheless,
a modest tipple on the way to something else, perhaps, something
shoutier. I could go for another bottle if it came my way.
Which
leads us back (doesn't it always) to the fact that there is a nice
little niche here for something genteel, tempered, very English in a
Georgian domestic architecture, country garden sort of way, except
that the booze costs twice as much as it should. And until English
winemakers get some serious economies of scale - about half southern
England under vines should do it - there the matter rests. Given the
way the planet's burning up, I would say they've got about six weeks
to act.
CJ
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