A travellin' man – and his wine

So I got back from my travels – but did my wine travel as successfully?

There was an old notion that a wine “might not travel”. Many a wine which tasted delicious abroad, with grilled sardines at a beachside table as the sun shone, tasted surprisingly rubbish back home, with tinned sardines at a kitchen table as the rain fell.

Yet still people brought wines back with them, souvenirs which were little more than the sombrero hats and straw donkeys of less sophisticated travellers.
 
That, of course, was in the days when you could carry bottles in your cabin baggage. You would haul a nylon carry-on through the airport, clanking and clonking with bottles of booze, each one in its protective little plastic mesh jerkin. Your bag was so heavy you were hardly able to lift it from the floor, let alone hoist it into the overhead lockers. But unless you actually dropped them on the airport’s terrazzo, you could be pretty sure of getting home in one piece as many bottles as you could carry. Assuming, of course, that HM Customs would accept that they were all for personal consumption. (“Just ask my wife, officer…”)

Those days are sadly over. And there is little to inspire confidence in the treatment of checked-in luggage, when you watch suitcases crashing and sliding from the cargo hold on to the Tetris of the baggage-claim conveyor belt.

But against this comes the siren call of the wheeled suitcase. With hotel lifts and burly taxi-drivers, the first time you lift your case yourself nowadays is to hoist it on to the tell-tale conveyor belt. Surely it could cope with a couple of bottles of wine?

Nowadays people are selling wheeled suitcases entirely designed to check in bottles of wine. These will indeed allow you to safely travel back with a dozen bottles.  I am not sure however what you do with the fortnight’s worth of clothes contained in the suitcase when you went out. Perhaps, if you are willing to be the least popular person on the plane, you make the return journey wearing all your (dirty) clothes at once?

(I also note that a reviewer of the VinGardeValise says “The customs people in Mexico were really interested in the case”. This is meant to be a five-star recommendation, but sounds to me like a prelude to sharing a cell  with El Chapo Guzman.)

Is it still worth trying to bring back wine? Is it any more than just a desperate urge to extend the very taste of a holiday?

Well, there’s the crude financial appeal. Here’s the magnificent Lacuesta Vermouth in London, at £8.95 a bottle. In the Spanish supermarket, El Corte Ingles, it is €4.95. Yes, that’s in Euros.

And visiting the most prestigious wine merchant in Barcelona (as of course I would), it seemed rude not to buy a couple of wines by Telmo Rodriguez, an exciting Spanish winemaker whose wines are hard to get hold of in the UK, and some of which are never imported. Except, now, a brace of them by me.

Some time ago I mentioned travelling back from Spain with bottles encased protectively in dirty socks. But that was unplanned. (And I would like to emphasise to past guests that soiled clothing obviously never touched the contents or indeed even the lip of the bottles. That’s what capsules are for.)
 
This time, however, I planned in advance. I travelled with several large sheets of bubblewrap. 

“Of course you did,” scoffs CJ. But why scoff? Bubblewrap is practical, and weightless, and takes up little space when flat. It’s recycling all the stuff which people like Amazon have sent me. It’s forward thinking. And anyway, CJ scoffs at the fact that I take socks.

My bottles are packed encased in said bubblewrap, then inside plastic carrier bags (in the hope of containing the wine if they should break). These are sealed in place with socks. The base of the bottles are planted inside shoes, at the foot of the suitcase, to absorb any shock if the case is banged upright, and to stop them moving around. That whole lot is inside a big plastic bag. And then that is surrounded by clothes on all sides, to absorb any lateral impact.

See how much thought and planning has gone into this? Which is particularly reassuring when the case trundles off on its conveyor belt and immediately falls on its side. When it crashes onto the belt at Heathrow like a dodgem car. When the cab driver slings it into the taxi.

But mirabile dictu, the bottles survived the journey. I am proud, and CJ is jealous. You just need faith, hope and bubblewrap, these three. But the greatest of these is bubblewrap.

What do they taste like? Sorry, taste? Having gone to all that trouble, you don’t expect me to open them yet, do you?

PK

Berry Bros. & Rudd: My Secret Shame

So PK has been on at me for ages, years, even, about Berry Bros. & Rudd, legendary wine sellers of Piccadilly, established in the seventeenth century, impossibly period retail premises, outrageous client list (Lord Byron, the Aga Khan, Napoleon III, the British Royal Family past and present), superlative knowledge of high-end wines (eight Masters of Wine working for them), history issuing from their eighteenth-century headquarters like an invisible gas, a surprising number of drinkable wines listed online for under a tenner, I mean, he says, why wouldn't anyone get down to 3 St. James's Street, SW1, and have themselves the heritage time of their lives and come away laden with drink? 'Go on' he concludes, 'you know you want to', the phrase he invariably uses for anything I really don't want to do.

How do I know I don't want to? Because I've been past the place plenty of times and everything about it puts me off, apart from the facade and a beetling covered alleyway next door which bears a plaque set on the jamb of its entrance arch: In this building was the legation from the Republic of Texas to the Court of St. James 1842 - 1845. Everything else makes my blood run cold. And yet, just to shut PK up, I will give it a go.

Give it a go is of course a relatively nuanced term. What it means in practice is that I stand at the windows (like the poop of a Napoleonic ship of the line, gnarled and lacquered with centuries of paint), peer inside and see nothing that appears to be a shop. In one part of the building there seems to be a sitting room, recently vacated by Beau Brummel or Queen Mary; in another part there is a Georgian office or counting house, a handful of scriveners seated at desks towards the rear of the space. The window displays contain a handful of sullenly impressive wine bottles, each poised on a single metal stand like a museum exhibit. There are no prices. Apart from the enigmatic bottles in the windows and the legend Wine Merchants in quiet gold lettering, there is nothing to make the uncommitted pedestrian believe that he is in fact passing a wine store. It might as well be an antiques dealer. And although this particular pedestrian knows that he is passing a wine store, he does not stop and go in; he just keeps moving. That's what the place is saying: nothing for you here, nothing you could make sense of.

What makes it worse is the fact that Berry Bros. & Rudd are not alone in this act of deadly hauteur. Next door is a shop owned by Dunhill, for the pleasure of extremely serious cigar enthusiasts. When I peer, hobo-like, through its window, all I see are three expensively-dressed men propping up a counter, talking; in the window it says Cigar Lounge; there is a humidor; I move away.

And on the other side of Berry Bros. are two even greater villains: Lock, the hatters (oldest hatmakers in the world, clients include Lord Nelson, Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Kennedy, Winston Churchill) and Lobb the bootmaker (Queen Victoria, Frank Sinatra, Churchill again). Lobb scarcely announce themselves at all, their shopfront bare except for a couple of By Appointments over the doorway and a dusty shelf in the window bearing an assortment of single shoes, apparently dropped there by chance, and an old cardboard box. In other words, I am faced, overall, with about a hundred feet of pure retailing disdain. Why, exactly, am I meant to feel good about this?

Yes, I know that high-end shops like to make themselves inaccessible and I understand that Berry Bros. aren't going to have a chalkboard outside shouting about a supremely chuggable pinot grigio, just to get me in. But there is a limit to the amount of patrician indifference I can put up with, not least because in the modern, disintermediated, world, Amazon (bless them) will supersubtly know what I want almost before I know it myself and silently and efficiently get it to me without my having to do anything more than caress my phone. Just the idea of an antiquated Piccadilly snob shop playing hard to get makes me mad. And a wine shop at that! Where the whole transaction is already rank with elitism, even in a high street outlet! What the hell kind of world are we living in? What the hell kind of world is PK living in? Not for the first time, I tell myself that I must never, ever, act on one of his suggestions again. Only this time I really, really, really mean it.

CJ

This Week

PK is away