Amnesia: Cowrie Bay New Zealand Chardonnay

I'm sitting at the kitchen table, gloomily unscrewing a bottle of Cowrie Bay New Zealand Chardonnay, and my wife says, 'Didn't you drink that the other day?'

'Well, yes,' I say, defensively. She has her head angled in such a way as to let me know that I'm doing something wrong.

'I thought you didn't like it.'

'No, I didn't,' I reply, quite truthfully. It looked all right at the time, in a dully corporate sort of style (which was, naturally, why I bought it) but it tasted of bananas and chewing gum and gave me a headache.

'So why are you drinking it again? Is it something to do with Sediment?'

This hasn't occurred to me as a reason why I might be tackling a second bottle of something I didn't enjoy the first time round, so I say, 'Yes. That's why I'm drinking it again'. She ratchets up the disapproval by narrowing her eyes. This takes us to a new level of threat, after which she can start asking questions like Is that the second bottle today and Have you made a start on the bathroom? Luckily, the phone rings and she goes off to answer it, shooting me a parting glance heavy with incredulity. I now have to find something to say about it, or look like a man who doesn't know why he's sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a wine he doesn't like.

I stare at the Cowrie Bay. It occurs to me that I might be drinking so much these days that I can't remember any more what I'm drinking, that the whole week has become a Lost Weekend in which I experiment repeatedly with already over-familiar wines in a completely senile and circular fashion before forgetting whatever it was I might just have learnt and going out and re-acquiring the wine I have only recently consumed and reached an unfavourable judgement upon. It's possible. I have recently started reading novels while burdened by a chimerical sense of familiarity, only to discover (usually with my wife's assistance) that I have actually been re-reading them.  

On the other hand, living like a goldfish has its advantages, especially if I can pare my sensory and intellectual experiences down to about five items, never have to go in search of anything new and never get bored. Except that on this occasion, now my memory has been jogged, I can recall that Cowrie Bay tastes of bananas and gum. So what amnesia overwhelmed me at the point of purchase? Dr. Freud tells us that there are no mistakes, only the promptings of the unconscious mind, so what was my unconscious trying to tell me when I involuntarily grabbed a bottle of wine I didn't like, at a price I did?

'It can't have been very good, otherwise you'd have remembered,' says my wife, suddenly close by again.

Years ago, in the late twentieth century, I did try and keep a wine diary, presumably in anticipation of this dreadful day, but I never wrote anything more revealing in it than Red: rough; or Red: extremely rough and soon gave it up. A friend of mine - I don't think it was PK, although I may be wrong about that, too - told me once about finding someone else's wine diary, which turned out to be as inconsequential and uninformative as mine was, and this did cheer me a bit. Unless he'd found my wine diary and forgotten it was mine when he told me about finding it, which is also possible.

Anyway, the Cowrie Bay Chardonnay is sitting there in front of me, so I pour a slug, bracing myself for the worst, only to find - to my amazement - it tastes quite different from the way I think I remember it. Yes, there are some horrible grace notes of custard and melon and artificial sweetener, but there is also a bit of bite underneath, a bit of steeliness, which makes the whole experience really quite appealing.

'You know, this isn't bad', I say. My wife shoots me another glance, then the phone starts ringing again.

C J

Fine wine & footwear: Domaines des Pierres Blanches Faugères 2008

Bear with me. I’m going to compare a wine to a pair of socks. But that's not a tasting note. 

My colleague CJ has occasionally purchased a repellent bottle of sub-£5 wine which actually tastes like a pair of old socks. But not me. Oh no.

I was back at the wine shelves of my local Mace. It’s been a long time since my last desperate visit, but it was one of those nights; Mrs K was out, I couldn’t justify opening a decent bottle from the cellar, and the bright lights of the High Road beckoned. 

For those who do not know (Good morning, America!), Mace is a franchised convenience store business in the UK, something akin to a 7-Eleven. And along with the usual groceries, they also sell alcohol, their window sticker promoting themselves for “When you want a bottle of the good stuff.”

Thank goodness for the licensing regulations in the UK which mean that a corner shop can sell wine. It’s just the notion of “good stuff” which might be a little contentious. For I later discovered their handy online “guide to selling more wine”,  where they observe that “You don’t have to be a master of wine to be the master of a profitable wine range in a convenience store.” 

And sure enough, neither of my assistants had the air of an MW about them. One, behind the counter, was having a lively and clearly uninterruptable conversation on his mobile phone; I couldn’t identify the language, but the word ‘passeport’ featured frequently and urgently. The ability to simultaneously conduct a sale and a phone conversation is nowadays a key skill of London’s convenience store assistants. The ability to assist is not.

The other ‘assistant’ is sweeping the floor. Given that he is wearing a taqiyah prayer cap, he is also unlikely to be an MW. When it comes to the wine, I’m clearly on my own.

The store has a surprising number of wines on display, over some half-dozen shelves. I can easily spot the branded, blended rubbish to avoid – the Echo Falls, First Cape, Falling Leaf and Kumala, all coming in at under five or six quid. But the strange thing is that every other bottle I pick up seems to cost £8.99.

Bordeaux? £8.99. New World Cabernet Sauvignon? £8.99. Burgundy? Burgundy?? Go on, hazard a guess - £8.99. 

Now perhaps there is some brilliantly astute purchasing going on here. Or, they know that we locals will pay £8.99 for a late-night bottle of red wine and that’s it, regardless. Perhaps they really are all of an identical quality. Or perhaps the price-labelling gun got stuck. 

But actually, £8.99 is not that cheap. (Just ask CJ…) For nine quid I expect a decent bottle of wine. And, drawing upon all my encyclopaedic knowledge of wine (hem, hem), there is nothing here which I recognise as decent – let alone “a bottle of the good stuff”.

So the strategy I adopted was this. Forget “the good stuff”, forget the appellations you usually desire, and pick the most modest type of wine possible. Nothing with aspirations of grandeur, nothing trading off a grand heritage, nothing hanging on the coattails of big names and Grand Crus. God knows I trawl the wine merchants of the UK hoping to find decent Bordeaux for under £10, let alone Burgundy, and it’s pretty unlikely to have materialised here, opposite the Pot Noodles. So a minor appellation must be a better bet.

Faugères is a small Languedoc appellation, only created in 1982. Its wine is founded upon the Carignan grape, which can be a bit stern and unforgiving; but Domaine des Pierres Blanches declared itself as a blend with three other varieties.

And then, given it was all I had to go on, there was the label. Obviously not trading on ‘heritage’, if dangerously reminiscent of an IKEA print. Was it naïve to think that, with an image of the wine’s stony origins on the label – and the word schist on the back to describe it – this was a contemporary winemaker who rated their terroir as significant?

Back home, the Carignan nose was rather threateningly light industrial, but after sitting in the glass for a bit, this settled into a soft, fleshy wine; still with rigour around the edges, slightly grippy and chewy, but with some dried fruit notes to add interest. I wouldn’t have drunk it eagerly on its own, but it went perfectly well with my dull, feed-yourself food. A well-made lesser wine, as opposed to a poor imitation of something great; and having seen that UK wine merchant prices are all around £8 a bottle, I don’t think a further 99p was too much extra to pay for the convenience. 

Oh yes, the socks. It all reminded me of the chap who, as a teenager, was sent up to town by his mother with money to buy a new pair of shoes. He came back instead with a pair of cashmere socks. His argument was that with the sum he had been given for footwear, he could either have bought a pair of inferior shoes, mere imitations of excellence – or the best socks that money could buy.  

See what I mean?

PK

Buying In Bulk: Shiraz, and plenty of it

As a rule, whenever I buy wine, I march robotically over to the booze section of the supermarket, stand in front of hundreds of unknowable bottles and special offers and bargain disasters for about thirty seconds, then reach out as if in a trance and grab the first bottle that costs about £5. That's it. Everything after that is a matter of destiny.

There is, I know, a grown-up way of acquiring drink, which is to ascertain your preferences beforehand then buy in bulk, a couple of cases at a time, and work your way complacently through the contents. Well, I have two problems with this. First, I can never remember what I like, or if, indeed, I actually like anything. Second (and more pressing) is that even if I can think of something that might be worth drinking, whenever this household orders even the most pitiable caseful of wine, something goes wrong with the delivery.

Tesco are a case in point, with their four deliveries and three monumental cock-ups. But it's not just them. The wife rather daringly went to popular winesellers Laithwaites to order a case of my pa-in-law's favourite wine and have it sent direct to his address as a Christmas present. Fine, the stuff turned up. But the pa-in-law already had an account with Laithwaites, so they billed him for his own present, instead of billing my wife. She called them up, explained, they said of course, we'll sort it out. What happened? Next time my pa-in-law put in for an order of his own, my wife got billed for it and he didn't. This makes no sense. They don't have the same names, they don't live in the same part of the country, they don't share credit cards. How can this happen?

Buying in bulk in person doesn't work much better. The doomed Oddbins (now relaunched, may God save their souls) would sell you plenty of stuff in one go, but it tasted terrible. My most recent visit to a cave in the south of France was so frosty that I ended up buying nothing at all. And I can't be arsed to get down to the nearest Majestic (all of half a mile away) because the parking's rubbish.

Nevertheless, in a last throw of the dice, I have been tormenting myself with the thought of going to France on a day trip, buying a load of cheap grog and bringing it back in the car. Ever since the Pound collapsed against the Euro a few years ago, the idea of the booze cruise has rather tanked, but then my brother-in-law, who has an almost obsessional interest in doutbful bargains, started explaining about some outfit that covers the cost of your ferry ticket provided you buy £200 or more of booze, or at least they give you a voucher for the next time you cross.

Actually, just looking at it, now, in black and white, I can see what a terrible idea this is, involving the purchase of a huge amount of wine I can't afford, plus fuel expenditure, plus the certainty that when I get my £200 of drink back home, it will turn out to be every bit as awful as the stuff I habitually buy from the supermarket. And my car's falling to pieces, so I probably won't even make it as far as Dover.

There must be some way round this. Perhaps I should try and get PK in on the scheme, not least because he has a newish executive-style saloon which won't break down on the M20. 


The drawback with that is that he'll insist on high-end purchases such as cellophane-wrapped ham rolls on the ferry. When we get to the outlet in Calais, he'll want bottles of wine that have dates on them. Plus one of those terrible, terrible bourgeois restaurant meals you get all over France where the food tastes of mud and the service is mediaevally bad and it costs a fortune: 'Thus losing a significant percentage of what you have just saved' as my bro-in-law (who used to be a finance director) observes.

Look: I just want enough everyday Shiraz, from almost any country, to be able to bathe in. Is that so unreasonable?

CJ