So the
wife and I (mostly the wife, to be honest) are having a bit of a
party, scores of superannuated guests invited, and I have been put in
charge of the wine. This is not as much fun as you might imagine.
First
off, how much do we get in, sparkling and still combined? The
estimates we're currently using give us something like one and a
third bottles per head. Either this is not nearly enough, or way too
much. If I drink a whole bottle of wine in the course of a few hours,
I generally feel fairly lit up. Is everyone else going to want to
feel the same way? Quite a few guests will be driving, so that cuts
them down to a mere couple of glasses, I would have thought. A few
more won't want to drink much anyway. This then bumps up the possible
input, for the hardened boozers, to something like a bottle and a
half, which sounds
quite a lot. On the other hand, the last thing we want is to run out.
Or perhaps we do, to act as a heavy-handed way of marking the end of
the fun? Okay, so the numbers stand, for now.
Secondly,
where to get it? As it happens, Sainsbury were doing a good price on
some champagne a couple of weels ago, so I ordered three cases
online, went to pick them up two days later, found that they only had
one case and had made up the rest of the order with Prosecco and
anything else lying about. So I took the champagne, left the
filler, and where did I turn? Majestic. Yes, Majestic have been
getting some mixed publicity recently and we've drivelled on about
their apparent loss of mojo, but all I can think of now is that they
do wine, wine is what they do, I want several cases of wine, the wine
I actually want, not the wine left lying around in the stockroom and
so, helplessly, guiltily, I gravitate to Majestic and immediately
pick up some more cheapo champagne to make up the deficit.
While
I'm there, the still white chooses itself (a basic Picpoul de Pinet,
really rather delicious) but the red is more of a challenge. I grab a
bottle of generic Spanish red for sampling purposes, mainly because
it calls itself the
guv'nor,
which I think is kind of amusing; only it turns out the
guv'nor
tastes like the floor of a hardware shop, so back I go for more red
samples, ending up with a Tempranillo, a Malbec and a Barbera D'Asti,
all within the price range.
A
couple of days of intensive sampling then pass, at the end of which I
feel ill and slightly unhinged. I am so full of cheap drink that If I
lean over, red wine starts to form a puddle in my ear. Also, I'm
getting some bad interference from the copy on the backs of the
bottles. I know this is the kind of thing PK is always ranting about,
but the beastly guv'nor
does itself no favours (not that it could, anyway) by announcing,
just above the alcohol content, that the
guv'nor rules his establishment with confident poise, yet his
disarming politeness conveys a sense of wariness. He is not a man to
be trifled with. The
Malbec, on the other hand - Argentinian, who knew? - turns out to be
called Las
Maletas
- the
suitcases
- complete with a Hanna-Barbera-themed cartoon on the front of a man
holding a suitcase over his head and an injunction to Pack
your suitcase, grab your coat and travel the length and breadth of
Argentina via these flavourful wines,
on the back, again just above the alcohol content. The wrongness of
all this still haunts me.
In
the end I go for the Tempranillo, not least because it comes in a
bottle with a label and not much else; also because it stays
down, not something I can otherwise guarantee. So I'm done! All I
have to do now is put the order in and hope that it's delivered at
the right time and to the right place by a business whose existence
is predicated on the idea that it can deliver the correct wines to a
given address on a given day.
And
then I have to sort out the music. I'm thinking The Crystals, The
Shangri-Las and Betty Everett. And possibly Bernard Hermann and the
Northern Dance Orchestra, although this might change. I mean, there's
still time, now that the booze is under control.
CJ
Tempranillo and the NDO! There's no improving on that... Great post.
ReplyDeleteIt's the only way to go!
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