Getting aerated: Vidigal Dão D.O.C. 2008

An evening at home alone; no better way of alleviating that than a nice bottle of red. Cheap, obviously – this was for me alone. But this is where a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

One of the most enjoyable wines I have ever come across is the deliciously supple, bright and beautifully balanced Quinta do Correio, a Dão red available from the Marylebone wine merchants and bar Vinoteca. I managed to get CJ to drink it there just before Christmas, by the ruse of buying a bottle before he arrived, and hence before he could complain about the price to drink it at a table (£21.75) – and even he was very happy with it. (Even happier when they offered it at the excellent takeaway price of £9.30 if we vacated our table, to somebody eating, and finished our drinking at the bar.) So I thought I knew something about Dão. 

So when I saw this Dão, with its elegant, minimal label, reduced in a City wine merchant’s sale from £7.95 to £4.95. I fooled myself into thinking that it was not one of CJ’s sub-£5 gut-rot specials. Oh no, this was a bargain, spotted by my knowledgeable eye. Spotted, admittedly, in a bin of wines with a big sign saying “Under £5”, but nevertheless.

The assistant went on for a bit, saying that she’d tasted it, how it needed to rest for a bit before drinking, etc etc. The back label endearingly described it as “A Soft medium bodied Dão wine to your delight” (sic). And I uttered the fatal words, “Well, how far wrong can you go for £4.95?” 

To which a suitable response might have been, “Have you got your passport?”

Because this was a wiry, thin wine, unpleasant bordering on undrinkable. It had to be forced down, with my cheeks contracting like salted slugs. Its bouquet – no, correction, its fumes – reminded me of bathroom cleanser; it was bitter on the palate, and even sat in my stomach like a large, cold stone.

But one of our mottos is “I’ve bought it, so I’ll drink it”; I had planned a cosy evening alone with this bottle, and I was damned if it was going to beat me. 

So, remembering the suggestion that it needed to rest for a bit, I thought I would try putting it through my recently-acquired Soirée aerator (as seen in the neck of the bottle above).

I already possess an aerator called a Magic Decanter, a gift from my offspring, about which I will write at length some day. But I am particularly proud of my new Soirée, because I won it in a competition on the excellent Blogyourwine site, with the kind of display of my wine knowledge which exasperates CJ, and leaves him glowering at me like a disgruntled Fred Emney. 

I was determined not to be put off by the Soirée’s resemblance to an optic spirit measure, which suggested I might be intending to consume my wine by the shot. No, the wine swirls around in this little glass bowl as it leaves the bottle, and is thereby immediately aerated like a spell in a decanter.

And yes, the Soirée did soften the acridity of the wine quite considerably. Indeed, it could be said that the very name promises a softening of one’s drinking. Had I now embarked upon a soirée, with all its sophisticated undertones, and not just an evening of quite basic solo bottle-bashing?

Sadly not. Aeration cannot transform bad wine into good, and a softer bad wine is still…bad. I became steadily angrier at the stuff I was drinking, and the lengths to which I was going in order to try and render it drinkable. The effort/reward ratio was badly, badly skewed. Instead of returning to a relaxed and gently inebriated husband, Mrs K came home to find a fizzing ball of frustration, surrounded by half-finished glasses of wine; aerated, unaerated, poured, decanted and rested. And all, in their various ways, vile.

Mrs K will agree. There’s one thing that doesn’t benefit from getting aerated. Me.

PK

Time for a drink? Miwok Ridge Shiraz (Again)

The earliest I think I've started drinking wine was about eight in the morning. Not my suggestion, I should point out: we were staying with a friend of ours who lived in a converted pigshed near Barcelona, nicer than it sounds, the ground floor still indefinably murky but nevertheless good for somewhere that had recently housed animals. And for breakfast, on the penthouse floor, two stories up, our host cheerfully sliced up a beefsteak tomato, cut a round of bread, laid the the tomato on the bread, and poured a glass of rough red wine over the whole thing.

'Breakfast Catalan style,' he said. 'Do you want some?' I joined him for the sake of form, obviously, but the kids were a bit young at the time and the wife just stood there looking appalled.

When he next came over to our place to stay, he arrived from the airport with a vast wheelie suitcase which he hauled along our path and up our steps like a gun carriage. He was gasping for breath and fanning his armpits as it rumbled to a halt in the hallway.

'What's in it?' I said. 

He opened it up: it contained four five-litre plastic carboys, like the one I used for my precious petrol-pump Ventoux, full of incredibly cheap red wine; plus a tiny brick of fresh socks and pants, wedged into the bottom.

'They put anti-freeze into it,' he said, gesturing at the red stuff in the carboys, 'and sugar. To make it more drinkable.'

He had it for breakfast, with some fried eggs.

The earliest I started spontaneously drinking, as opposed to merely joining in, was also around eight in the morning, at Marco Polo airport, near Venice. We had all formed a queue at the cafe bar for a breakfast cup of coffee, and some deviltry made me ask, not for a flabby cappuccino, but for a heart-starting caffé corretto, that (typically) brilliant Italian confection of an espresso with a shot of grappa in it - the espresso buzzing you up, the grappa mellowing you out, till you reach a state of god-like acuity and inner balance, a state in which no situation - like getting a bargain flight back to London - is too depressing to deal with.

'It's a bit early, isn't it?' a man behind me said, so I leered back at him, 'It's never too early for this.' He looked appalled.

And then there was the Calvados I was offered in the middle of the morning, in Normandy, to keep the cold out. Various ouvriers were supping away in this bar at Un p'tit Calva, also to keep the cold out, before going back to operating heavy machinery, handling explosives etc., but seemed unconcerned. This time it was my turn to look appalled but I had one anyway, before going out and nearly being run down by a man full of Calvados, driving a backhoe loader. It was about eleven a.m.

How early is too early for a drink, then? I only ask because it's not yet six o'clock – pm, I hasten to add, but no-one in our house is allowed a drink before six o'clock, on account of it being The Road To Ruin. Obviously if I'm going out on the lash with PK, this condition is capable of being modified, but normally nothing happens until we've reached that existential moment, that six o'clock, that philosophical sundown, but today it seems as if the existential moment is never quite going to realise itself, and I am filled with a sense of unease made worse somehow by the fact that I know what I'm going to be drinking - more of that Miwok Ridge stuff from Tesco, the Creosote's Revenge - and therefore it has no terrors, only the promise of an affordable homecoming and a slightly tarry sensation between the ears, and yet time stands still, and if I was our friend who lives in Spain and packs twenty litres of sewage-treatment red wine just to come to England, I'd already have made a start, but that's as it may be, and it's only just five o'clock! but the Calvados workmen, they'll have made a start, and so will some other lucky swines who knocked off early or enjoyed the advantages of living in a different time zone, I can't help but think to myself as the clock on the screen labours past the five-thirty mark...

Not quite forty minutes to go. And in Bucharest it's already half-past seven!

CJ

The great wine & game con trick – Les Garrigues Carignan 2010

“Goes well with game” – how often do you read that about a wine? But how often do you actually eat game? Exactly.

Most people are ignorant of game. There are many for whom a partridge will only ever be a bird that spends its Christmas in a pear tree. 

But wine merchants clearly think that, by associating a wine with game, they are somehow imbuing that wine with posh, aristocratic qualities – qualities which would not accrue from an association with, say, sausages. Suddenly, they think, that wine will appeal to people who like to imagine themselves going out on a Downton Abbey shooting party.They may not actually eat game, or even know how it tastes – but they will buy a wine which they believe might, on some stately dining table, accompany it.

Such people might visit Berry Bros & Rudd, who, with their Royal appointments, are probably the most aristocratic of what I always describe as the Ampersand wine merchants. This is clearly the place to go if you’re looking for wine to accompany game; just Search various possible main courses, and see how many wines come up. On the day I did this it suggested:

Beef 22 wines

Fish 52

Lamb 27

Pork 9

and Game…53

Are we actually supposed to believe that the aristocracy need twice as many recommendations for game suppers as they do for beef or lamb? To meet that level of consumption, they’d have to be taking to the moors with sub-machine guns.

Or take Majestic, for example, a merchant surely more representative of the wider UK wine-buying public. Their Search pairs some 45 wines with lamb, 43 with fish and 17 with sausages. But they also pair 16 wines with game. Do Majestic customers really need as many wines to match game as they do to match sausages?

And ironically, Majestic seem completely confused about the style of wine which actually pairs with game. Because according to their own style descriptions, the wines they recommend are either: medium-bodied (6); rich, spicy (5); light, elegant (3); full and fruity (1); or powerful (1). You might just as well pick a wine blindfolded.

In any case, what is this blanket term, “game”? Game ranges from the delicate flavour of partridge, through the richness of venison and the darkness of hare to, say, snipe, a bird whose flavour is described as “a woody flavour similar to sweetly rotting wild mushrooms”. (That description is from Rules, a restaurant which I adore for its game, but which clearly has problems understanding the notion of “appetising”.)

There are too many wines, of too great a variety, being recommended to pair with game, for it to be anything other than a marketing exercise. Which is really a pain, when you actually do want a wine to go with game.

Which I did. For here is my supper of pheasant breasts. Now, I realise, because of the aforementioned associations, that this will only fuel CJ’s notion that I am some aspirational Lord Snooty. But in fact this was wire-basketed from Sainsbury’s, at a meagre £4 for two. Pheasant like this lies somewhere between the texture of pork and the taste of chicken, and is quite mild in flavour. (Remember that traditionally, game is hung for a week or so to decompose and give it that “gamey” flavour; in Sainsbury’s meat department, decomposition is not actively encouraged.)

Now, happy as I am to display my skills as plating up – are you watching, John Torode? – I could not begin to pretend that this is an inherently aristocratic meal. Believe me, I am not wearing white tie. Not even black tie. Not even a tie. The closest my supper got to a shooting party is this rogue piece of lead shot, which almost cracked a tooth.

So I thought I should pair it with a wine which (a) claimed on its back label to go with game, but which (b) an aristo would not touch with a shooting stick. Or, for that matter, his woodcock.

Les Garrigues Carignan 2010 was kindly sent to me by the nice people at lovethatwine.co.uk. It’s a wine from the Mont Tauch co-operative in the Languedoc, rapidly becoming a handy imprimatur for decent cheaper wines. Les Garrigues has a light, fruity nose with a burnt edge, and tastes of sharper fruits like plums and damsons. But with its tannins resolved, the result is slightly shallow; it’s alright with my fresh, supermarket pheasant, but definitely lacks the weight I would want to accompany serious game. A reasonable buy at its French price of €5.60, but nothing special at its UK price of £8.75 – and isn’t game supposed to be special?

This wine would be unlikely to find its way onto a stately dining table. Carignan is a grape historically associated with table and country wines; unlikely to appeal to an aristo trying to impress his chums. Especially when the wine comes from a co-operative, which sounds dashed close to Communism. And most old-school toffs want their chummies to think they paid more than a tenner for their vino, so even if it’s not terribly good, they tend towards tried and trusted B&B – Bordeaux and Burgundy. 

No, this wine is more appropriate for those of you who think “beaters” are chaps who drink Stella. 

So don’t believe the merchants. There is nothing inherently posh about wine which goes well with game. It’s a pretty arcane pairing, given the small amounts of game people actually consume; and pretty pointless, given the variety of game itself. It is a description simply trading upon our notion of class.

Which may, in itself, be misplaced. Peter Jay once memorably wrote in Oxford Today, “As for the aristocracy, are they not better left where PG Wodehouse safely bestowed them, as objects of derision?”

As for me, I shall return to a social position in which snipe and grouse are merely descriptions of my behaviour. 

PK