Decanting wine for appearance's sake – Cape Diversity shiraz

I have taken to decanting my wine of late. But this is not to improve its flavour; frankly, a lot of the cheaper stuff dies a brief death in contact with the air.  Nor is it to reduce my consumption, although finishing an elegant demi-carafe seems to complete a meal, and suppresses the urge to go and slump in front of the tv and polish off the rest of the bottle. 


No, the decanting is simply to avoid the suspicious glances of my household, as yet another garish bottle featuring animals of the world, flora, fauna, ugly graphics and strange typefaces threatens to grace the dining table.


Mrs K and I take great pride in the presentation of our dining table. I don’t go quite as far as one restaurant I visited before opening time, where a white-gloved maître d’ went around the tables matching every place setting, to the centimetre, against a photograph. (But I if I could…)

We are not eating off crates. Our dining table does not look like this. We take our Indian out of the foil trays in which it arrives.

And if you do take care with your choice and layout of crockery, cutlery, napery then surely you should be concerned about the look of the wine bottle you put in the centre of the table?

I am not alone in this. That great style icon Bryan Ferry, interviewed in the Wall Street Journal, objected to this label, which shows the rock that makes up the vineyard’s terroir. “I hate that,” he said. You hate the wine, asked the interviewer? “No, the label,” he said. “I can’t drink a wine if it has an ugly label.”

This by way of comparison, is one of his favourites. Bryan Ferry and I are as one. (Sorry, can I just have the pleasure of repeating that sentence? "Bryan Ferry and I are as one…")

It’s been shown by lots of controlled tastings that our judgment of a wine is influenced by things such as cost, name, reputation and, of course, label. And why not? Like the plating up of food, or the framing of a print, the presentation of something helps to shape our experience.

Writing a while back about a Chilean wine from the Lafite Rothschild stable, I explained why I believe that actually, we do judge books by their covers; which is why we have Harry Potter in adult jackets, and why the novels by one author will often be redesigned to match the cover of his bestseller. So I get a little exercised with critics who insist that we should ignore the label on a bottle of wine. Appearances count. 

One American wine website decided to explore the alternative, that “it’s what’s inside that counts”. Just look at the hideous, garish bottles used to illustrate this thesis. 

Frankly, I wouldn’t care if their contents were delicious. They look as if they contain fizzy drinks. They would reduce my dining table to the status of a children’s party.

(Perhaps they include the repellent Vimto, the only drink I know whose name is an anagram of its consequences.)

I could send you all over the web to look at hideous wine bottles, but I will settle for just one, this set of blue glass bottles with cartoon wine labels, the whole effect not only garish and nauseating, but disturbingly childish on an adult drink.

I do have a couple of very nice decanters, which are a pleasure to use and look at. But even before I did, I have to admit that I would pour wine into anonymous bottles, rather than put ugly specimens like these on my table.

(Here’s a tip – the Nicolas petites recoltes range of vins de pays  come in completely clear glass bottles from which one can easily soak the cheap paper labels. In the days before I could afford a decanter, I used one of these to serve wine anonymously. I was trying to follow the minimalist designer John Pawson, who had recommended this Baccarat crystal decanter – which looks like a wine bottle, has the capacity of a wine bottle, will aerate your wine no better than a wine bottle, but costs £238. The Nicolas bottle is equally hopeless for aerating, of course [although the pouring from the original bottle will help] but it only costs £5.49 – and yet unlike the Baccarat one, it comes conveniently filled with wine…)

And a decanter will, of course, genuinely improve some wines in flavour as well as appearance. I was forced to put Cape Diversity's shiraz into a decanter, simply because of its hideous label, depicting (Why? Why??) a species of South African grass. Bryan Ferry would, I am sure, have agreed, although I doubt he drinks much wine costing £6.95.

From the bottle, it was a tight, unforgiving little wine. It left my mouth resembling a cat’s anus.

But decanted, and left a while, the tannins softened, the wine opened up, and it became richer, softer and altogether better than its price tag might suggest. Even Mrs K “thought it was alright,” an approval rating neither its taste nor its appearance would have been likely to achieve straight out of the bottle. 

A decanter won’t solve everything. And let’s face it, while you can decant a bottle of red, it’s a little odd to decant your white (and harder to keep it cold), while only an idiot would try and serve a sparkling wine decanted. (Put that Tesco Cava back, CJ…)

But at least it does keep your wine anonymous, attractive and suitable for a civilised dining table. And while a decanter can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, it can sometimes retrieve a satisfying drink from a cat’s anus.

PK

Enjoying wine James Bond 007 style - Three Cape Ladies, Warwick Estate

James Bond was originally not that much of a wine drinker. Spirits, cocktails, yes; the ubiquitous Martini, and of course Champagne – but the writer Cyril Ray, who worked with Bond's creator Ian Fleming, once said that Fleming “knew nothing about wine except what he was told when he rang up friends in the wine trade, and then usually got it wrong.”

Perhaps that’s why in both books and films Bond stuck primarily to the irreproachable Chateau Mouton-Rothschild – a 1947 with Goldfinger, and half a bottle On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a 1934 ordered by M in Moonraker, and a ’55 in Diamonds are Forever – where, of course, Bond unveiled the assassin Wint because the man didn’t know that Mouton-Rothschild is a claret. And, fitting to the perpetrator of such a crime, killed him.

(Frankly, for using a gas ejector to open the bottle, he deserved to be shot…)

But now, the American author Jeffery Deaver has written a new James Bond novel, Carte Blanche. And appropriately, just as the 1950s Bond knew all about cocktails, the contemporary Bond is something of a wine connoisseur. The question is whether the wines he enjoys today fit the James Bond we have always aspired to be. After all, like most English men of a certain age, I have always felt something of the Bond about myself…

In Carte Blanche, Bond is invited to lunch at the Travellers Club on Pall Mall, by a solid man in his mid-sixties, identified only as the ‘Admiral’. (He later turns out to have been M.) Deaver has certainly got the right venue for such a diplomatic assignation, and I can vouch for the descriptions of both the Club and its typical member. But the wine?

Menus descended. Bond ordered halibut on the bone, steamed, with Hollandaise, boiled potatoes and grilled asparagus. The Admiral selected the grilled kidney and bacon, then asked Bond, ‘Wine?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘You choose.’
‘Burgundy, I should think,’ Bond said. ‘Côte de Beaune? Or a Chablis?’
‘The Alex Gambal Puligny, perhaps?’ the waiter suggested.
‘Perfect.’

Fools! It should be Puligny-Montrachet – no-one who knew their Burgundy would omit the legendary suffix. Bond would surely delight in correcting the waiter, know that both of the two ‘t’s are silent, and suavely order it from him properly. Then kill him.

Except, he wouldn’t order it. Not just because it’s a poor pairing with grilled kidney and bacon. Nor because it has an ugly modern label.  But because it’s not on the wine list at the Travellers Club. Indeed, I was told, “Regarding the wine, I’m afraid no-one ever heard of it being served in the club house.”

So that’s the end of that one. James Bond would not be drinking that particular wine at the Travellers, and so nor shall I. (Although, if you are ever in the fortunate position yourself of ordering a white Burgundy at the club, may I suggest the Meursault 2002 Cuvée Tete de Murger, Domaine Patrick Javillier, whose flavour has been rather poetically described as “haunting”…)

Bond eventually heads off to South Africa to pursue the usual shenanigans – which, as he wines and dines a female executive, start with an order of a Rustenberg Peter Barlow Cabernet 2005.

This is a Bordeaux-style red, possibly a little young, but given all the government cutbacks, at around one-tenth of the price, an understandable substitute for someone whose expense account can surely no longer bear the cost of Mouton-Rothschild.

However, going from one extreme to the other, I think we have to ask whether James Bond would order a wine which is sold in Tesco.  Last seen in a wire basket alongside a special offer meat pie for one? Is that going to impress the woman he is trying to seduce? Though that outcome is never really in doubt, given that her name is Felicity Willing…

Willing by name and, as it proves, by nature. And she is responsible for the third of the wines he supposedly enjoys. When she later visits him for a return match, as it were, a wine bottle appeared from her shoulder bag – vintage Three Cape Ladies, a red blend from Muldersvlei on the Cape. Bond knew its reputation. He took out the cork and poured. (Good to see he’s mastered that tricky sequence!) They sat on the sofa and sipped. “Wonderful,” he said.

This wine is extremely difficult to buy in London by the bottle; I have to thank the enormously helpful Handford Wines on the Old Brompton Road, a lovely, traditional wine merchant whose knowledge, service and sheer Englishness would surely have merited Bond’s own custom.

Bond’s “wonderful” is not the most precise tasting note I have come across. Nor is it, in this case, the most accurate. This is an immensely muscular wine, dark purple in colour with a hot, foresty bouquet. Perhaps it’s been whacked around its privates with a knotted rope.

It’s dense, almost cloying in the mouth, dominated by cabernet sauvignon but with just a little edge from pinotage and syrah in the blend, and a long, echoing finish. And it’s so heavy and powerful, with 14.5% alcohol, it really needs food to carry it down. It has the lumbering strength of Moonraker’s villain Jaws, rather than the finesse of Bond himself.

Bear in mind that this wine is not, as the overexcited PRs suggest, Bond’s own choice of seduction wine, but his Willing partner’s. Nevertheless, Bond deems it “wonderful”, and like him it is ruthlessly effective. Shortly after sipping it, He kissed her and slowly began to undo the buttons… I’m sure Handford Wines will help anyone wishing to recreate at least the sipping part of this scene.

So 007 could not have savoured the “Puligny” as described. The Rustenberg Peter Barlow is certainly appropriate in both taste and looks (nice traditional label), but may be too commonplace. He finds Three Cape Ladies more “wonderful” than I, but it certainly proves seductive. Hmmm.

Bond’s own London club, Blades, has a knowledgeable wine waiter in Grimley. Faced with a choice of wines in Moonraker, Bond says “Perhaps I could leave it to Grimley?”

Yes, perhaps he should.


PK

(“Who? Kill him…”)

Semiotics - Stormhoek Pinotage 2008

Well, maybe I worry unduly about the look of things, or the exact fit of the glass in my sweating paw, or the foolproof opening qualities of the closure, or the price; and not quite enough about the quality of the drink going down my neck. But we live in a world full of mediations and interventions which are not directly about fermented grape juice but which bear heavily on it and - let's get to the point - would you drink a wine (or a beer, or indeed, a tisane) which said, in upper case, on the label, CHANGE THE WORLD OR GO HOME?

Perhaps it adds to the general sense of refreshment, being hectored by a bottle. I wouldn't want to be prescriptive about it. But when I got my case of trendy Stormhoek Pinotage as an Xmas present from my father-in-law, apart from being shamefully grateful (a whole case! Which is as much as to say, unlimited drink!) I was thrown momentarily off-balance by the disjunction between the label on the front - a mixture of blue and grey lettering on a white background, tasteful in a Travelodge sort of way, offset by a stylised, embossed, representation of a young woman draped in the sitting-room curtains, leaning against a metre-high ship's anchor - and the label on the back (which at first I thought was the front) which bellows the following instructions:

BE PASSIONATE LOVE (that's not a term of endearment, as in, "be passionate, madam", but a simply huge 66-point injunction) DREAM BIG BE SPONTANEOUS CELEBRATE and finally that minatory CHANGE THE WORLD OR GO HOME.

In other words, while the front is engaging us in a fairly tame, conventional, discourse, suitable for small claims lawyers and local council middleweights the world over, the back is shouting at us that in fact we fall dismally short as imaginative and fully engaged human beings and that, as W H. Auden very nearly observed, we must freaking well love one another and/or die.

I've spent some time fretting about this. Is it mean to be an opposition? If so, why? Is it an administrative cock-up? Or is it instead a worryingly bipolar articulation of the same idea – the notion that if you're the kind of underachiever who falls for the pallid suavities of the front label then you absolutely need to re-order your priorities as expressed on the back? In fact, a whole bottle went down while I brooded. (Stormhoek Pinotage is pretty tempting, by the way, a nice inky sort of red, velvety without being an actual fabric, not excessively shouty, unlike the packaging) until I thought of today's picture, the (detail of an) iconic Cartier-Bresson image of the boy in the Rue Mouffetard, taken in 1954.

Apart from the sly knowingness of the composition, matched only by the sly knowingness on the Gallic runt's face, the stars of the piece are of course the bottles of red wine he carries. They are the story: absolutely huge in comparison with the boy himself (eliciting a shout of appreciation from an equally small girl a few steps behind) and virtually anonymous, apart from a tag of some sort on the neck (Nicolas perhaps?). They lie in his arms like beasts that he has slain in the course of la chasse. They are wine bottles that demand investigation, and quite possibly some sort of subjugation. They are not wine bottles covered in warring signifiers, like a roundabout with too many roadsigns. They are unknown, creatures of nature.

And it's this facelessness which is so shocking to the modern drinker. Having moved from the daunting classicism of the traditional French wine label, all curlicues and masonic passwords, to the yelling insistence of New World volume-produced grog (GO HOME, LOVE), we've got used to being told something about the experience ahead of us. Unlike, say, a lamb chop or a piece of cake, wine comes wrapped in language. It's a crutch which has been fashioned in thousands of different ways over time, without ever not being a crutch. But what happens when the instructions stop? Wouldn't it be nice if more things were unidentified, speculative, transparently mysterious? What's in those bottles?

CJ

The Whale Caller, Shiraz/Cabernet Sauvignon

Who's responsible for this rubbish? No, not the Sediment blog – sadly, like a guilty schoolboy in a kept-behind class, I am all too aware of who is responsible for this misdemeanour – nor the rubbish on the right (appropriately incorporating this post's subject), but this rubbish:

In the coastal South African town of Hermanus, the Whale Caller waits on the cliffs, calling for the whales to return from the Antarctic waters. 
As you savour this rich red wine, with dark berry fruit and hints of chocolate and spice, you may just catch the strains of the Whale Caller's horn, blowing on the southern wind.

This twaddle is on the label of my latest foray into the disagreeable realms of the sub-£5 wine. And The Whale Caller (Waitrose, £4.29) is a wine with a lot of disagreement.

On the Ocado site – that is, the people who deliver the stuff – there is unanimous approval; six five-star public reviews, only dropping one star in one reviewer’s reckoning for “quality of packaging”, which is pretty odd when you think about it. What exactly is an inferior quality bottle?

The professionals seem ambiguous and, for once, divided. Anthony Rose in the Independent described it as “an affordable glugger” which I found faintly repellent. Do you “glug”? Would you think “glug” an acceptable description of your guests’ drinking manner? Or perhaps those who do “glug” would find this an appealing drink?

Equally, last August, Suzy Atkins in the Telegraph described the 2008 Whale Caller as “ a brill barbie red”. This to me is equally dubious. Does she mean it’s in the territory of potentially poisonous outdoor consumption, inducing stomach cramps and vomiting?

There’s surely more than a whiff of social judgement here. It’s not, you may note, a nice wine to drink at a barbeque, but a brill wine to glug at a barbie. Call me a subtextual post-structuralist, but methinks these are not your average Waitrose customers.

Sipping the wine in my study (he says – judge as ye may) I found it dull and thick. Any shiraz spiciness is flattened out by cabernet sauvignon to leave just a vague, nasal burn. It has a bouquet of diesel before, and a sickly, plastic aftertaste. The whole process of consumption is frankly distasteful.

Fiona Beckett, who also writes in the Guardian, is upfront about the wine (and not its audience) when she blogs that “It's incredibly jammy but not in a nice way with no structure or acidity. The best thing you can say about it is that it's not rubbery. And might be a bit better if you chill it.”

Why did I even buy it? Ah, that I can explain. Every so often, Waitrose offer 25% off all – yes, that’s all – of their wine. Like a mug, I trailed down to my local branch with a rucksack to grab half a dozen bottles of prime plonk. But of course, when I got there, none of the prime plonk was to be seen. Either the local populace had descended on my branch like the wolf on the fold, and stripped it of everything decent; or (as it was carefully phrased to the admirable Victoria Moore, then writing in the Guardian the good stuff had been, to quote the euphemism, “de-emphasised”. Victoria had tried throughout one offer to buy a particular Cornas online, and had been unable to find it. So where do you put them, she asked? "I'm not going to tell you,” replied the manager of Waitrose Wine Direct, “because I don't want you to tell your readers how to find them." So, having found no prime plonk myself, I foolishly settled for some of the cheaper stuff.

Fiona Beckett’s blog attracted a lovely comment from someone who actually lives in Hermanus, SA who says “It doesn't sound like this wine is doing a great job at promoting our little town of Hermanus. We have some wonderful wineries nearby… but I shouldn't think this wine is anything to do with them. 
We also do have a whale crier but his job is to blow his horn to show tourists where the whales are, not to call the whales back from the Antarctic!”

So even the label fails to live up to expectations. Indeed, as I savoured (hem, hem) this rich red wine, I caught the usual sonic background to my household wine consumption: cries of mislaid keys, ringing phones, the thunder of feet and exhortations to turn off lights. I’m afraid I did not catch the strains of the Whale Caller’s horn.

But at least I finally understand the notion of a Barbie wine. It’s like its namesake: malproportioned, badly balanced and tastes of plastic.

Hazy View Chenin Blanc

CJ is currently heading somewhere in the West Country; his consumption may not falter, but his contribution will, so I am stepping in with this further tale of my own.

My local Mace (slogan: Whenever, whatever) is a typical convenience store, run by personnel whose mobile telephone calls occupy them far more than any notions of customer service. On the railings outside is a badly handwritten sign, advertising a “specious airey basemet” to let (sic, sic and, I’m afraid, sic again). This “basemet” would be “suitable for many uses”, although Younger Son, peering over the railings, seems to think that its suitability would mostly involve either Josef Fritzl or the producers of Saw.

They say life is too short to drink cheap wine; not on the Sediment blog. Tonight it is convenience, rather than curiosity, poverty or perversity, which has driven me to the Mace for wine. I am cooking Nigel Slater’s excellent recipe for chicken with basil and lemon. And it requires white wine – which on a Sunday evening means a visit to Mace. And whatever else the “basemet” is being used for, it is clearly not a wine cellar.

CJ and I refuse to succumb to the likes of Echo Falls, Turning Leaf, Jacob’s Creek et al, the cheap brands which clutter the shelves of wine at Mace and elsewhere with their dependable blandness, like episodes of some New World soap opera where no-one is ever either rich or poor.

But if not excitement, Mace does at least provide a degree of comedy on its shelves. Which self-respecting French chateau makes a wine which actually says “claret” on the label? In case of confusion, that’s “Claret from Bordeaux”, no less?

Another day, perhaps; for amongst the more predictable offerings I spot my purchase – Hazy View, a Chenin Blanc from South Africa. At £6.49 a bottle, there will be some (CJ) who think that a little steep for a bottle of South African white from a convenience store. But needs must, there’s a chicken dish waiting, and Messrs Gallo are not getting my hard-earned, thank you very much.

I think it’s always important to taste wine before you cook with it. This has nothing to do with the taste of the wine – it just numbs the fear of cooking.

So I open up the Hazy View, and pour myself a cook’s glass. And I realise that this is actually a very, very enjoyable chenin blanc – peachy, crisp, utterly drinkable. It’s fragrant, light but flavoursome. What is going on here?

I quickly check it out online, just to reassure myself that my tastebuds have not been cauterised by too much Sediment fodder. And I find that I am not alone in my regard for Hazy View Chenin Blanc. It is on the wine list of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, no less – at £21 a bottle.

Now, I know you cannot compare restaurant prices with other prices. But still, a wine for which the connoisseurs of the ROH will pay £21 – and I’ve just picked it up for £6.49 round at the Mace. Well spotted or what? Self-congratulation all round, eh? Except…

Except that I am now faced with an awful dilemma. The recipe, for four people, requires two glasses of wine. If I had brought up from my extensive cellar (hem, hem) a bottle of white wine worth £21, there is no way I would put two glasses of it into Nigel Slater’s recipe. Let alone “watch it bubble for a minute”.

But I have no choice. I remind myself that this is a bottle from Mace, and that two glasses have cost me about £2.50. (The fact they would have been £11 at the ROH is neither here nor there. Stop it.) I pour it in. And, while I “watch it bubble for a minute” (sob), I wonder – have I found a £21 bottle of wine for a third of the price, and cooked one of the most expensive chicken dishes ever? Or cooked with wine that cost £6.49 from the convenience store, and enjoyed drinking a bargain?

In the end, only one thing really matters; I get to drink the rest of this completely delicious wine myself. Because I am “just finishing off that cheap bottle I got to cook with from the Mace…”

PK

Oddbins Obikwa Rosé/Pinotage

The pinkness of pink: sunset over Hounslow; rhubarb; lips and gums; a beetroot sandwich; tail lights in the rain; dentist's mouthwash; cooked prawns; acid in universal indicator; bubblegum; Lady Penelope's car; scar tissue; candyfloss; a sticking plaster; rare roast beef; a flamingo; porphyry.

There's something inauthentic about pink, something sinister and unnatural. Why the hell did I decide I preferred it to white? Oh, because every time I went near a white wine (see the post for 19 July) my teeth started to hurt and I suffered a mild occipital neuralgia. It seemed, anyway. And having put up with that for a while, I thought, the rosé, that's the one, it's like a white, but without that anarchic, disinfectant threat lingering in every glass: because as we all know, the nearer a wine gets to being a red, the easier it is to keep down.

And it works, in a very real sense, for a while, until some law of diminishing returns sets in, or the patient's physiology starts to change and what was once tolerable turns out to be almost as much of a minefield as the thing it was supposed to replace, and yes, I'm looking at you, Oddbins' very own Obikwa Rosé (£4.99 on special offer at the time) with a cartoon ostrich on the front of the bottle and a label the colour of a bloodshot eyeball, creating an area of hotly vibrant visual interference right at the point where you grip the bottle with so much expectation, that's not what we want at the end of a long day -

And even the Wife noticed, once I'd cranked off the screw cap (accompanied by the faintest of hisses), that the air had changed and there was a shimmering quality to it, like a gas leak. I took a few tearful sips and thought that maybe my Obikwa needed to be colder. It had a physical presence at the table, like a large sweaty, pink, and yet quite cold, man. I wondered if leaving it in the fridge to get it even more frigid would be a smart move, whether that would lessen the mood of intimidation. Or freeze it until it was like the outer coating of a Mivvi - it was colourful enough, to pass muster as a lolly, really freakishly pink. What do I know about rosés anyway? Candyfloss and flamingos?

So I drank a bit, wiped my eyes and blew my nose, and stuck the bottle back in the fridge, where it remained until...

Day Two: out it came again. Slight phosphorescence, no audible hiss when the cap came off, cartoon ostrich still in place, clearly the wine couldn't dissolve glass, not at low temperatures anyway. And in a long moment of distraction, I necked the rest of it without even noticing. And that was it. The threat disposed of. Didn't even get a headache/blurred vision/sense of overwhelming cosmic doom, such as one normally experiences as a result of over-swift imbibition.

What do we learn from this? Was Day One just an abreaction to the colour? Is it the deviant appearance of rosé that presents its own challenge, particularly one as luminescent as this, which sits on the table wearing its own high-visibility workman's jacket? Or does it just need 24 hours to breathe? Or if I wore dark glasses? Or drank with the lights off? Or do I need 24 hours to breathe?

CJ