A special SEDIMENT series in which we looked back at the wines which made Britain a nation of wine-drinkers – and revisited those wines today.
The Wines That Made Us (1): Mateus Rosé
You couldn’t go wrong. No worries about
Mateus Rosé had so much going for it. Unlike red or white wine, which were posh and old-fashioned, Mateus was, as you might gather, rosé – or, as its ads made clear for those who didn’t even know what rosé was, pink.
It was very slightly fizzy. As wine novices, we were of course unaware of the correct term, petillante, but it seemed to be covered by the incorrect term, “very slightly fizzy”. And most of all, it was rather sweet. This in an era when the popular pub tipples of the recently-permitted were Southern Comfort for the fellas, and for girls, a teeth-coating combination of vodka and lime cordial. Which all meant that Mateus was a wine we could drink without fear – and without food.
None of us looked too deeply into the nature of the wine itself. The curlicued, parchment-coloured label simply suggested an established, traditional wine which was centuries old. It seemed authentic. It depicted the Palace of Mateus in Vila Real; “And,” said one ad, “no wine ever had a lovelier birthplace…”
Which obscured two awkward truths. First, the wine had actually been created only thirty years before, exploiting the collapse of the Port market across Europe during World War II. A group of friends in neutral Portugal seized the opportunity to exploit the glut of Portuguese grapes, by making cheap table wines which could be shipped straight across to the lucrative Brazilian market. Only when that market itself declined after the War was Mateus Rosé offered to emerging British wine drinkers.
And the Palace of Mateus was just a stately home near to the commercial winery, whose name and image were purchased for use on the label. The owners were offered the choice of a one-off payment, or a royalty per bottle. In a commercial decision akin to that of the record company exec who turned down The Beatles, they took the one-off payment.
Then, of course, there was that bottle. “Beware of curously shaped or oddly-got-up bottles,” wrote Kingsley Amis in his 1972 book On Drink. “I would not want to decry Mateus Rosé, a pleasant enough drink which has been many a youngster’s introduction to wine, but its allure, and its price, owe a lot to the work of the glassmaker.”
Its frosted dark green glass hinted at protection of precious contents, while its shape was based on the water flask of a WWI Portuguese soldier. What a great story. Was it a military coincidence that this squat, flat bottle would also conveniently fit into the capacious pocket of a (fashionable at the time) calf-length ex-army greatcoat?
And the bottle led to the lamps. Unlike regular wine bottles, the shorter Mateus bottles were just the right height for bedside lamps:
These would presumably imbue one’s home with all of the sophistication and worldliness that was beginning to accrue to wine-drinking. They did, however, require the drilling of a hole in the glass bottle for the cable which, in the days before instructive YouTube videos, often required a trip to a local hardware shop for advice and equipment, followed equally often by a trip to a local A&E.
Hard as it may be now to believe, Mateus Rosé was drunk by fashionable people.
It was not to be sneered at. It appeared in the background of a Graham Nash album cover, and in the lyrics of an Elton John song, things now equally hard to believe were not to be sneered at.
But as we learnt more about wine, we all thought less of Mateus Rosé. Its sugary flavour seemed unsophisticated, its colour trivial, and its bottle unsuited to modern tables, whether dining or bedside. In 2002, they revamped it and dropped the word “rosé” from the bottle, on the grounds that “people know it’s a rosé”, Then a little over a decade later, they turned the bottle from green to clear, on the grounds that “people don’t know it’s a rosé”.
I can no longer find a Peter Dominic, where, in 1973, I would have bought it for 87p a bottle. But I did find it on the next-to-bottom shelf in the supermarket, for £5. Like me, it has changed a bit over the years.
Of course there’s no longer a cork, but even the screwcap is rose-gold, while the similarly coloured neck foil bears a signature which reads worryingly like weapons inspector Hans Blick.
The wine itself is a bold, lurid pink. It shines through the clear glass as if this were one of those jars which used to stand in chemists’ windows.
Was there ever such a thing as strawberry cordial? If so, that is how it smells. And yet, after a fleeting puff of fruit from its slight fizz, it has no flavour. None. Its formula was changed some years back, to appeal more to contemporary tastes, and perhaps the object was to make it as bland as possible. Perhaps if, as the Mateus marketing now imagines, you are on a yacht in the sun, you might enjoy a garish, slightly fizzy wine which tastes of nothing. But then, if you’re on a yacht, you might conceivably have more than £5 to spend on your wine.
So they’ve really taken everything away: the cork, the bottle, the label and the taste – and nostalgia along with them all. I can’t imagine someone turning up now at a girlfriend’s flat, wielding a bottle of Mateus Rosé like an overnight bag. But nor can I imagine someone staying up until 2am, explaining why Tony McPhee has a better guitar technique than Rory Gallagher. Neither the wine nor the conversation seemed very successful then; neither seem particularly appealing today.
PK
The Wines That Made Us (2): Babycham
All
right, then: it's a quasi-wine,
a drink that - like Camp Coffee, back in the day - was enough like
something it wasn't to keep thousands of British punters happy at a
time when the thing it wasn't, wasn't readily
available. Camp Coffee, Salad Cream, Babycham: the 1950's in a
nutshell.
What
Babycham was
- and indeed is -
is a fizzy alcoholic pear drink, invented some sixty-five years ago
by a West County firm called Showerings. Their genius was to
capitalise on two fundamental ideas. First, they found an economically
viable way make perry, a kind of low-alcohol pear cider, by using
pear juice concentrate rather than actual pears - which are hard to
harvest and tend to rot overnight. Secondly, Showerings decided to
market this stuff exclusively at those young post-War women who
wanted an unthreatening, mildly refreshing alcoholic beverage - one
they could ask for in a pub or private residence without looking
sleazy or indecorous. It came in a dinky little bottle, had a cute
foil top and an even cuter cartoon fawn for branding purposes, a
cartoon fawn dreamed up by ad agency Colet Dickinson Pearce and as
smart as anything from Coca-Cola or Disney.
It
was a gap in the market and Showerings filled it. At its peak in the
mid-Sixties, the Babycham factory in Shepton Mallet, Somerest, was
turning out 108,000 tiny bottles an hour. It was the ur-Prosecco of
the time, the hen party Chardonnay before there was Chardonnay.
Moreover, it was the first alcoholic product to be advertised on
British TV, in 1957. That's how culturally central Babycham is,
or was.
And
yet. The name, for instance.
It
suggests champagne, but is actually a reference to the number of
prizes the drink won in its earliest,
pre-Babycham
days - so many that it became known as the Baby Champion, or Babycham
for short. Or the associated rubric,
The
genuine
champagne perry:
even if you know that perry
is a fermented fizzy pear drink, what, exactly, is a champagne
perry? But
even as this occurs to you, those delirious, groundbreaking 1950's
ads point out that The
Babycham bottle fills a champagne glass.
Lots of things fill a champagne glass, including an aspirin dissolved
in water and a small cup of Camp Coffee;
but if Babycham is meant to be poured into a champagne glass, well,
that makes it more like champagne than other things. And, a bit like
champagne, you can mix it with drinks that aren't champagne to make
something drinkable in a different way. You can have a Stinger - a
mix of Babycham, brandy and Angostura bitters; a less classic (but
printed on a promotional Babycham coaster, so it must be okay)
Babycham plus a half of Guinness for a kind of flat-pack Black
Velvet; a Baby Blue - vodka, Babycham, Blue Curacao, pineapple juice.
And so on. It is whatever you want it to be, apart from champagne.
Inevitably,
this conceptual wooziness
has, over the years,
led to the courts. The first time, Showerings brought an action
against the founder of The
Good Food Guide who
implied in an article that they were dishonestly passing off Babycham
as a real champagne. The result? The
Good Food Guide
guy was let off and Showerings had to pay his costs. Second time was
in the late Seventies, when French champagne producers were busy
litigating to get control of the champagne
trade name. This time it went Showerings' way, and they were allowed
to keep the word on their packaging, as there could, apparently, be
no confusion in the public's mind between a drink costing an arm and
a leg and served from a really big champagne bottle; and one coming
out of a container about an eighth the size, priced in pence rather
than pounds and accessed with a beer bottle opener.
But
there was another kind of uncertainty shadowing the early Babycham. At exactly the same time as Babycham was being
launched, a rival product appeared: Rosayne, a pink sparkling wine -
made from grapes this time - borne aloft in the ads by a drawing of a
generically pretty girl whose message to the reader was Tonight's
the night for Rosayne - The exhilarating pink wine with the exciting
champagne sparkle!
At the foot of the page? The
2/- bottle fills a champagne glass.
Yes, Rosayne was another sparkling one-shot, sold in a dainty
foil-capped minibottle which you opened with a beer bottle opener.
The producers were, apparently, Anglo-Mediterranean Wines Limited. On
closer inspection, however, Anglo-Mediterranean turned out to be
based in Shepton Mallet and their product was marketed by Showerings.
Who'd
have thought? Showerings weren't utterly persuaded that Babycham
would succeed - in fact, they were unconvinced to the point where
they actually had a stake in another, very slightly different,
lady-themed sparkling drink. Looking back, of course, it's hard to
believe that Babycham wouldn't succeed over Rosayne - it had the
dancing fawn, for God's sake; it had the taste that people craved.
Which
brings us right up to the present day and a confession: up to now, I
have never drunk Babycham. I mean, I was too young when it was in its
heyday (I
was all
of ten years old) and by the Seventies, when drinking became an
actual personal thing, I wasn't in the target market. And yet, how
can I have got this far without
trying one of the most iconic beverages in the British beverage
landscape? I mean, Babycham! It's the drink everyone's heard of and
very probably has an opinion about, even if they've never touched the
stuff. Its perceived naffness goes before it like a blazon.
Fair
enough. I acquire a four-pack of Babycham (£2.80 from Tesco) freeze
it to death, take out my novelty Threshers bottle opener, lift the
lid. Tragically, it now calls itself the Refreshing
Sparkling Perry
and is owned by Accolade Wines of Weybridge, but it's still got the
cute fawn on the label, plus The
Happiest Drink In The World
across the cap. Taste-wise, it doesn't taste of anything apart from
at the very end, where there's a
hysterically
parching finish that leaves me unable to speak for a whole minute. On
the other hand, it's cold, fizzy, very marginally alcoholic (6%) and
a lot less than terrible; less terrible than some regular whites I've
drunk.
In
fact I'm not sure I couldn't get a taste for it - a genteely
stimulating tipple that works out a bit pricey in absolute terms but
doesn't get you smashed unless you really want it to, possibly by
adding a shot of vodka. It's okay.
All I have to do now is practise saying I'd
love
a Babycham!
and who knows? It's
a bit late in the day, but 2018
could take on a whole new affordably sparkling complexion.
CJ
The Wines That Made Us (3): Bull's Blood
Thanks for coming round to my place this cold winter’s evening. For anyone who doesn’t know me, I’m Shop Steward at the British Leyland Cowley plant. You can call me Robbo. No relation to Red Robbo up in Longbridge, but I’m honoured that some people make a connection! 1
Now as you know, we stand on the brink of enormous political change. This winter of 1978 has been hard and cold, but we have seen solidarity across nearly every major national industry. Our brothers on the trains and lorries, the bin-men, even the gravediggers have come out on strike. We are demonstrating that the workers are the backbone of this nation. And so I’ve invited you all round to my home this evening for a bit of a get-together, not only to discuss that future, but to raise a glass in celebration, and to toast the biggest shift in the political power of the workers which this country has ever seen. 2
Some of you will have come here tonight, hearing the promise of a bevy, expecting your Double Diamond and your Red Barrel – and for those of you with a continental bent, your Skol lager. You’ll have come expecting to see one of those giant Watney’s Party Seven cans propped up on the kitchen table, ready to flood the floor when someone opens it. But tonight, I’d like to offer you something a little… better. I’d like to offer you wine.
Now settle down, lads, settle down. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, wine’s a nob’s drink. A toff’s drink. A boardroom drink. And I would say to you, yes, brothers – and that’s exactly where we’re heading.
I’m not saying that we’re going to adopt the whole bourgeois, management lifestyle. But we need to accustom ourselves to some of the trappings of authority. We’ve got to play the part. I mean, if Michael Foot got to run the Labour Party, he wouldn’t wear a donkey jacket, would he?
And don’t listen to those who say that wine’s the drink of the Right. I was proud, when I was at Poly, to go to bring-a-bottle parties, and see that when some Young Conservative did bring-a-bottle of wine from Chile, grown under that fascist Pinochet, that bottle stood there unopened. We do of course observe the boycott of all South African produce, and that includes wine. Personally, I’m still a bit concerned about wines from Greece or Spain, because they might have been tended by oppressed hands during the rules of the Colonels or of Franco. And don’t get me started on French landowners and Napoleonic law.
But thankfully, there are now several wines coming out from our comrades in Eastern Europe. Bulgaria, Czechslovakia and so on. Most of it goes to Russia, which sounds like a recommendation to me! But some of it’s coming to us, and our hard Western currency is going back the other way, so it’s fair dibs all round.
This is Bull’s Blood, a wine I’m proud to say is from Communist Hungary. I know we’ve had a few issues with Hungary, with all that nonsense back in 1956, and people calling it “goulash Communism”. But here is a prime example of what Communist labour can produce, to rival the wines produced elsewhere by exploited peasants for their landowners. Its name is testament to the strength of the wine, and the vigour of the workers who make it. 3
And it’s affordable – one of the few wines we can afford, until the management see fit to meet our demands and get this piecework nonsense sorted out. Hungary’s workers have abandoned the old vineyards of the historic landowners, got out on their tractors, cultivated the communal land, and boosted production, so that we can all benefit from this excellent wine. 4
What’s it like? Well, I’m no Johnnie Cradock! I’m not going to ponce on about bouquets and so on. You know me, lads; when I hear “palate”, I think of a fork-lift! But I think I can say, even in these days of Women’s Lib, and as Sue from Accounts isn’t here, that this is a proper man’s drink! 5
Under capitalism, the working class in this country didn’t get to drink wine. If capitalism were to prevail – which it won’t! – but if it were to prevail, you wouldn’t see affordable wine like this in our supermarkets. Oh no; wine would be kept as a drink for the privileged few. And you certainly wouldn’t see wine from Eastern Europe, because the West wants to stifle their economies.
So let’s enjoy some Bull’s Blood together in the spirit of these extraordinary times. Here’s to the day when wine is no longer a bourgeois drink; and we can all drink good quality wine from the hands of the workers. 6
Raise a glass, brothers, of a genuinely Red wine!
Cheers!
PK
1 Derek ‘Red Robbo’ Robinson was Shop Steward at the car manufacturer British Leyland’s Longbridge plant. He was credited with causing 523 walkouts at British Leyland between 1978 and 1979, costing an estimated £200 million in lost production
2
What became known as the
Winter of Discontent in 1978 led to the fall of the Labour government, and
ushered in the reign of Margaret Thatcher. This did indeed bring about “the
biggest shift in the political power of the workers which this country has ever
seen”.
3
In
Hungarian, this wine is called Egri Bikaver, and bikaver does mean bull’s blood. Eger is a town in north-east Hungary, an area
which produced wine since the 13th century. Around 1552, Hungary was
invaded from Turkey by Suleiman the Magnificent, who laid siege to Eger.
However, the town was defended by Hungarian soldiers who had been fortified
with a local red drink which stained their beards and armour. They repelled
their invaders, fighting so ferociously that the retreating Turks spread the
story that they must have been drinking bulls’ blood.
4 Under Communism, the quality of East European wine
was neglected in favour of overcropping, pasteurisation, and industrial
production. Historic sloping vineyards were abandoned in favour of flat land, which
allowed for the use of tractors. And all of the grapes were mixed together in
centralised production, so there was no incentive for individual growers to
develop the quality of their own crop.
5
The
full body and dryish palate of the Bull’s Blood of the 1970s is still fondly
remembered as a perfectly drinkable red wine. That may be because for young
men, the name alone meant that drinking Bull’s Blood without complaint
conferred a certain machismo.
6
In 1989, on the anniversary of its 1956 Revolution,
the Hungarian Republic was officially declared. A revised constitution
championed the "values of bourgeois democracy”. In
2017, Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book listed wines from 11 formerly Soviet
regions, including Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria along with Hungary.
“Hungary’s wine traditions, regions and grape varieties are the basis for
Eastern Europe’s finest wines,” he writes, “finally recovering from the
Communist years.”
PK
The Wines That Made Us (4): Sanatogen
So
what with one thing and another, I've been feeling a bit peaky. You
know, colds and flu, the world situation, they get you down.
And I thought, Well, I've tried almost everything except prayer, so I
might as well have a glass of tonic wine - Sanatogen Original Tonic
Wine, to be specfic, £6.25 for 70cl from Tesco. Sanatogen is one of
those products whose essential redundancy has never stood between it
and market share: it's one of the last of the great Tonic Wines, a
drink which may or may not do you any good ('The name Tonic
Wine
does not imply health giving or medicinal properties' it announces
darkly on the label) but which is 15% by volume and has a handy screw
top for those really bleak moments.
In
its heyday, of course, it was aimed at emotionally depleted British
housewives who found themselves having difficulty with the modern
world ('...all you have is an empty house. And the same dull round of
household tasks...') or the business of child-rearing ('...it wears
you out. And your husband wonders what's wrong with you!') or
anything, in fact; and who needed a jolt of something to get through
the day ('In no time at all you should feel your old self again').
Nowadays, half a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc would do the trick, but
fifty years ago, Sanatogen, or Wincarnis, or Buckfast Tonic Wine
('When everything's an effort'), or, even further back in the
catacombs of self-medication, Phosferine ('Absolutely fit -
Depression Banished'), Vibrona, or Winox ('40% richer than ordinary
Tonic Wines in flesh-forming properties'), were the admissible routes
to a more balanced worldview. Occasionally, the ads went as far as
showing a picture of a doctor, or at least someone you might mistake
for a doctor. So you knew you were in good hands.
What
next? Feeling increasingly starved of essential get-up-and-go, I take
my Sanatogen bottle, pour a decent couple of fingers, take a swig.
Basically? Basically, cough mixture without the unctuous syrupy
delivery. A horrible, horrible drink, really distressingly ghastly.
Fruit Gums and silver polish; old rainwater, dental disclosing
tablets, aftershave, granulated sugar; woodstain. I should spike PK's
glass with it one day, it's that bad. And I have no way of knowing
what's in it - imported
grape juice
is all the label admits to, but no sense of the mystery ingredients
which transform it from a kind of Ribena into a full-blown 15% health
drink. And what is its relationship with Sanatogen health tablets,
invented by the Bauer company at the start of the Twentieth Century?
Accolade
Wines
it says on the back, but no mention of the tabloid pick-me-up sold as
much to men (Edgy
Hubby - Your Chemist Understands)
as to women, back in the day. It's an enigma.
All
right then: in the dark as to what I've just consumed, do I feel any
healthier or less depressed after I've made myself retch through a
whole glassful? No. I feel queasy and miserable, not least because I
now realise that not only can I not drink Sanatogen Tonic Wine on its
own terms, I can't even stick it in a casserole or sauce or what have
you, not unless the recipe calls for something sugary and emetic, the
colour of a bloodshot eye.
Time
passes, though (doesn't it always? And so fast, when you get to a
certain age) and I can begin to see, in a larger, non-drinkable
sense, some kind of justification for its existence: it's a living
fossil, a reminder of a time when the British were still worried
enough about wine - real wine, this is - to have to disguise it as
something else. Not, obviously, that this is
wine, but, like Babycham, it has enough of the characteristics of
wine to allow it into that conceptual realm. The bottle looks a tiny
bit like a bottle of wine, its contents are sort of wine-coloured,
it's definitely not tea or coffee, and, best of all, it's got alcohol
in it, that sovereign restorative which dulls the pain of existence
just long enough for you to feel regret afterwards. In this guise, it
conjures up a lost world of suburban evasions and bitter falsehoods,
a place where sensual pleasures were borderline pathological, where
certain kinds of self-indulgence had to be mediated by, say, the
medical profession - a place where cough mixture met desire and
everything was forgiven.
It
also, given its original bias towards an unhappy female market, talks
specifically of the oppressions of post-War women, stuck in an
environment of routine and hobbled expectations, unable to
self-actualise like their brainless husbands and forced, instead, to
hit the bottle and shut up. It's not good. A patronising man doctor chides you
gently about your consitutional emotional frailty? Sanatogen; or
Wincarnis; or Vibrona: they'll put a stop to all your nonsense. As,
indeed, they seem to have put a stop to mine.
CJ
The Wines That Made Us (5): Beaujolais Nouveau
It was 1979, and I was in my first job, working on a magazine based in Soho, and trying hard to prove my credentials. So I was quick to go along when, one Thursday morning in November, not long after we had actually started work for the day, it was announced that we were all going out for a glass of the Beaujolais Nouveau.
Just around the corner, at a wine bar draped with tricolor bunting, there were people dressed like cartoon Frenchmen, in hooped jerseys and berets, serving a red wine to crowds of office workers who were spilling out on to the pavements. I had never seen so many people publicly drinking wine. And even to someone experienced in PBAB student party wine, this wine was peculiarly bad; but that seemed to be neither here nor there.
Because this wasn’t really about the wine itself, or even about the ridiculous ways people were racing to bring it over from France. It was the fact that Brits who rarely tasted wine otherwise would leave their offices in mid-morning, and go out together, to pay over the odds to drink this red wine. And not a delicious, can’t-possibly-wait-for-it red wine, but this particular, proudly immature wine, the tasting equivalent of consuming cake mix, rather than cake.
What on earth was going on? Bear with me on this one.
There’s a perfectly valid tradition behind the drinking of Beaujolais Nouveau – in Beaujolais itself. Back in the 18th century, the emergence of a fresh, new vintage, even if it was still fermenting in the barrels, was cause for a celebration, with the locals downing some of the barely-drinkable wine on the day of its release in November.
This eccentric ritual only began to gain wider recognition during World War II, when journalists and exiles fled the occupation of Paris for the Vichy-governed and Beaujolais-drinking “free zone” around Lyon. There, they naturally joined in with the local celebration, and when they returned to Paris looked to continue the tradition; it was an excuse to raise a glass of wine on a drab day in early winter, and to swap tales of the Occupation. So Parisian cafés began to post notices on their windows, to announce by mid-morning of its release that “Le Beaujolais Nouveau est Arrivé”.
In 1970, dining in Beaujeu the night before that release, were Joseph Berkmann, restaurateur and vintner, and Clement Freud, lugubrious politician and gourmand. Each of them argued that they would be able to drive their bottles back to London before the other. And so as midnight passed and the wine was released, they set off.
It wasn’t that much of a race, since both of them had to catch the same early morning ferry back across the Channel. But Berkmann won, largely because he was better at beating London’s rush hour traffic. The following year, Berkmann won again; and with word of their little competition spreading through their respective wine columns, Berkmann won for a third and final time in 1972.
But then a journalist offered in The Sunday Times the modest prize of a bottle of Champagne for the first person to bring a bottle of the next Beaujolais Nouveau to his desk. And the Race was on.
Like many British sporting endeavours, the aim of actually winning was soon to be ignored by participants more interested in entertainment. Increasingly absurd methods were used to bring the bottles back to Britain. Parachutists, fire engines, hot-air balloons, motorised bathtubs and the rest created a circus of publicity, which reached even those completely ignorant of wine – ie the majority of the British population.
Who would be able to drink the first bottles in Britain? Bizarrely, it seemed important at the time. There was an air of triumph, as if the wine had been somehow wrested from the French before they could drink it themselves.
It was the most enormous boost for the newly burgeoning wine bars. With many pubs still not serving wine, here was an ideal reason to visit Champers, and Corks, and all the other poorly-named wine bars then springing up around the UK. Yes, the wine was thin, harsh and, because of a particular yeast used to hasten the production of so much early wine, often contained the unlikely flavours of bananas or bubble-gum. But the taste was easily dismissed as the price of drinking the vintage so young. For some, the poor taste was part of the fun.
The race itself quickly collapsed. The French had always had a somewhat laissez faire attitude towards drink driving, but even they could not condone a widely-publicised road race through the night by hordes of Beaujolais-fuelled Brits. The French police cracked down and the press had to stop promoting it as a race.
But we Brits continued to drink the now efficiently delivered wine. The producers couldn’t believe it. In 1983 The Times reported on the arrival of a staggering five million bottles in Britain in time for breakfast. At its peak, over 64% of the entire output of Beaujolais would be sold early as Nouveau.
What could possibly burst such an entertaining and lucrative bubble? Ironically, it was the very growth of interest in wine itself.
Once, France was considered the be-all and end-all of wine, and the suggestion of a new French vintage might have carried an almost mystical significance. But by the late Eighties, there were decent wines increasingly available from all over the world. So the French had a new vintage – so what?
Not only did blended New World wines not even have a vintage – but they were consistently drinkable. What, really, was the point in overspending on a thin, immature French wine, when there were now thoroughly drinkable Australians or South Americans available?
Sales began to fall. In 1990, several big wine retailers decided not to sell their own Nouveau. And from the 13 varieties available in 1986, there is generally only one sold in the UK today.
A vintage or two back, I tried the Nouveau for old times’ sake. It was hard to find; the occasion is largely ignored now by actual wine merchants, and by wine bars keen to retain their hard-won reputation for connoisseurship. But I found a desultory display in one supermarket. It’s still pretty nasty; its thin colour and spritely nose lead on to a real collision in the mouth between a tart body and that notorious bubblegum fruitiness on top. Perhaps if you had a single quick glass, from a bottle shared with friends, it might be tolerable, but its fruit evaporates quickly to leave a ghostly, inky-flavoured wine. Nowadays, we expect more.
Beaujolais Nouveau could, I suppose, have put me off wine drinking for life. But in fact, it emphasised for me the importance of conviviality, and drinking together, in enjoyment of wine. That enjoyment has moved on to rather more mature tastes – which leaves Beaujolais Nouveau as something of a curiosity, sought out by nostalgists, its taste tolerated like that of a childhood cough mixture, as a transport to the past.
PK
The Wines That Made Us (6): Nicolas
Was
Nicolas the first wine I ever drank? Could well be. It appeared at
the family dining table four? five? decades ago and I was encouraged,
in the French manner, to try it with water, half-and-half, as a way
of developing a taste for wine without becoming a dipsomaniac before
I'd even reached my teens. It's horrible, of course, red wine and
London tapwater, but I went through with it because if that's what
the French did, then it was not only the right thing to do, but the
right Gallic thing, like the subjunctive mood. I wanted to be cool
enough to be French, was what it came down to.
I
still don't really know who or what Nicolas Wines is or are. They
started in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century - this
much they claim on one of their websites - and were bottlers and
distributors of their own brands as well as being merchants for other
people's wines. Which makes them sound like one among thousands of
others. The only difference being that in Britain, or at least in our
morose trench of the North London suburbs, they were France itself, a
metonymy which drove us wild over the roast beef and two veg when
their product started to make its presence felt at mealtimes.
How did
we know that Nicolas encapsulated the entirety of everyday French
culture? Because the ads told us so. The Sunday supplements - in
themselves an invitation to a new world of heightened awarenesses -
ran these full-pagers depicting what looked like a Parisian milk
float doing the rounds of an arrondissement
- only
instead of milk from the Unigate Dairy, it was delivering a litre or
two of Nicolas, the stuff which, it seemed, kept every Parisian
household en
forme
for the rest of the day. Nicolas' Vin
de Table or
Vin
Ordinaire
- terms which have tragically more or less vanished from the world of
wine drinking - thereby combined the idea of wine - a costly,
hedonistic rarity for most Brits - with quotidian necessity in a way
which we'd read about or seen in the movies, but had scarcely, if
ever, encountered. It was breathtaking in its relaxed, winey,
maturity. Better yet, it was authentic in a way the other competition
for our minds and stomachs - Blue Nun, Mateus Rosé,
Goldener Oktober - could never manage. It even had a plastic bung
rather than a cork: that's how real it was.
But
then, back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, France still had
a stranglehold on the theory and practice of the good life. Any
Gallicism you could think of was a glimpse of better things:
savoir-vivre,
couture, insouciance, crème
de la crème, liaison, tendresse,
Belle Époque,
entre
nous, avant-garde, chic,
soigné;
I could go on. A scant twenty miles across the Channel, the French
were so
different, so
highly-developed, that the Lyons (as in Joe Lyons) coffee company
actually advertised, in British publications, its fresh ground
standard roast with the words Une
recette qu'on ne trouve pas dans les livres de cuisine,
a sentence now impenetrable to almost everyone. At the same time,
French cinema still mattered, the true haute
couture
was French, gastronomy took its cues from French haute
cuisine,
the Citroën DS was still in production, the South of France was home
to Picasso and Chagall, and Francis Poulenc had only recently died,
in Paris. Nicolas was an ambassador, in its way, to all this. Did it
even matter what it tasted like?
All of which would be fine, except for one problem. I'm starting to wonder if perhaps I haven't
remembered more than there was to remember: that I'm indulging a
false memory. For a start, can can you still get Nicolas? In this
country? Well, yes, there are still Nicolas shops, but the things
they sell under their own name are generic-looking Chardonnays and
Sauvignon Blancs and Côtes du Rhônes, nothing to shout about, no
sign of the big old bottles with the plastic bungs. Nor can I find
any evidence of the advert which changed my life - the one with the
wine float trawling the backstreets of the arrondissement.
I've got one (see above) which ticks some of the right boxes, but
it's not the wine float, it's just a bottle and a Duralex and a
newspaper. And a piece of baguette.
Which is good, but beyond that? Added to which, no-one I have
mentioned the imperishable late Sixties Nicolas to, has anything like
the same recollections of it, if any.
My
memory is an undependable ally at the best of times and it's starting
to look as if my whole wine-drinking life may be premised on an
initial lie. Which then raises the question: do I prefer the lie to
whatever the truth may actually be? How much do I want to cling on to
this misapprehension? On this occasion, I think I'm going to have to
say quite
a lot.
CJ
The Wines That Made Us (7): Paul Masson
Were we once really naïve enough in our wine drinking to find wine which came in a carafe more appealing than wine which came in a bottle? Did we believe that wine from a carafe was somehow more authentic? And as we grasped and hoisted it by the neck, just like a real carafe full of really decanted wine in a real “continental” restaurant, did we feel somehow more authentic?
Visit any student’s room in the late 1970s, and you’d see an empty Paul Masson carafe sitting on a shelf. Perhaps it was waiting to be used as a flower vase – of which, as they used to say, there were two chances: fat, and slim. Perhaps it was waiting to be reused as a carafe, in the unlikely circumstance that one would buy either a wine so good that it needed decanting, or a wine so bad that one wanted to pretend it was Paul Masson.
Or perhaps, without displaying the serried empty bottles of a dipsomaniac, we simply wanted to tell visitors that hey, I’m one of these new, cosmopolitan, worldly young Brits you’ve been hearing about – who drink wine.
The fact that this wine was American almost passed us by. For one thing, in those days, producers could throw around French terms like Burgundy and Champagne with impunity, so we didn’t really know what it was that we were drinking. A Rare Premium California Burgundy? If you say so…
And also, the brand played itself off against Europe in its marketing. “Paul Masson is America’s best-selling premium wine in Europe,” ran one ad. “And you can’t fool Europeans about wine.” Well, back then you could stick wine in a carafe, and pretend that it’s the sort of thing served to a table in a continental café, and you could certainly fool us.
But they mainly used another, more famous advertising slogan: Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time. Was this really such a selling point? Just where exactly was all this immature wine we were being threatened with? Would we even have recognised immature wine if someone had sold it?
Paul Masson used Orson Welles in their advertising, a man whose girth was rapidly increasing in inverse relation to his reputation. In those days, tasting notes appear to have been refreshingly basic, but even so they were ripe for a sort of “cut through the bullshit” ad campaign. “Experts say Paul Masson Cabernet Sauvignon is a mature, complex wine with nice wood”, said Orson. (Perhaps “nice wood” is not a choice of words one would use today.)
“What they’re trying to say is…it tastes good.”
Orson was eventually relieved of his duties, leaving behind an immensely entertaining outtake of one of his TV ads, showing what happened when too much of Mr Masson’s product had been consumed. Or had it? One story is that Orson was abruptly fired for admitting on a chat show that he never actually drank their wine. But an account executive contended that Welles was dropped when Paul Masson introduced ''light'' wines: ''Obviously, that would not be appropriate.''
He was replaced by John Gielgud, repeating his role as a disdainful butler from the movie success, Arthur. Sir John took a $1 million fee, on condition that the ads would not be shown in Britain, a condition which YouTube now entertainingly flaunts. Gielgud is quoted as finding the filming sessions “exhausting and somewhat humiliating”; but the great actor said that in addition to the colossal fee, he found further compensation in the way that the Paul Masson agency paid “full attention to my comforts in the way of limousines, suites at the Savoy, flowers and cigarettes provided!”
The simplicity of the formerly oval, type-only label has also been replaced, with an awkward, assymetric job bearing an image of the original Paul Masson winery, where the wine is no longer produced. And there’s a plastic lid which you push off with your thumbs, and can pop back on. Am I alone in remembering a tear-off foil seal? I certainly can’t recall any resealing requirement back in the day…
The wine itself initially has the nose of a decent, fruity Pinot Noir. Hello, I thought. But that fades rapidly, and a taste of bitter cherries tips over into plain bitterness, a sort of wrestle between liquorice and a chewed aspirin.
But the most disturbing aspect? It stained the carafe. It stained the carafe!! I don’t know whether to blame the wine, or the carafe, but… Yes, my liver’s suffered a bit of wear and tear, but can I let you know if it actually needs redecorating?
Once, it was as if there was another, wonderfully stylish world of carafes and the like waiting somewhere across the English Channel. Forty Years On – and we are so sophisticated, so continental ourselves, that “a carafe of red” is a routine offer in UK restaurants. But hopefully, it will not bear a Paul Masson label.
PK
The Wines That Made Us (8): Martini
Martini
is a mystery. It's one of the most familiar brands in the world, it's
given its name to the most famous of all cocktail drinks, for some of
us it still rings a distant answering bell as the quintessence of a
certain kind of Eurotrash High Life, but how often have I ever drunk
the stuff? How often have you? I mean, it's culturally ubiquitous but
at the same time invisible. Just last weekend I made some - though I
say so myself - killer Dry Martinis. The gin was Silent Pool
(terrific) and the vermouth was Dolin (ditto). Plus a twist of lemon,
not an olive, that's the way I roll. But not a drop of actual
Martini. Maybe I should have announced these beverages as
old-fashioned Gin & Frenchies but does anyone do that these days?
And why do I feel no compunction at all about not using original
Martini vermouth?
A
five-minute trawl of Google reveals not much about the business
behind the drink - Martini & Rossi - except the unsurprising
truth that Martini began as an Italian vermouth company in the
mid-nineteenth century, reaching the New York market in the late
1860s. The first Dry Martini cocktail arrived, probably in New York,
at the start of the twentieth century - although the drink's name may
actually be a corruption of Martinez,
the guy who first mixed gin and vermouth together.
Since then, interest has mostly swirled around the exact ratio of
vermouth to gin, plus whatever interventions (brine for a Dirty
Martini; olive or twist; vermouth mixtures, like two-stroke petrol;
ice or no ice) the mixer may or may not be keen on. I am not much
better off for knowing this.
So
I go out and buy a whole litre of the stuff, in a blousy screwtop
bottle slathered in Martini-isms and try it out. I know I've drunk it
before, somewhere, but a kind of guilt obliges me to get the taste
authentically, here and now. It's the Bianco, the one you're supposed
to take long, with a mixer, or as it comes, with a lump of ice. I
pick the latter, try and few mouthfuls and, yes, there are botanicals
swirling around, plus an aromatic headiness, not necessarily in a
good way, more like stale perfume on a cashmere sweater, but I
suppose there might be times when that's the experience I might
crave, plus a tough terminal coating on the back teeth. The label
suggests drinking it long with tonic water but it's already sticky
and sugary enough as it is and anyway, if I want to drink Sprite, I
can. And now I have 90cl of Martini Bianco bulging away on the liquor
tray and I can foresee the awful stuff going with me to the grave,
endlessly undrunk, brassily insistent, and
I paid £10 for it, on offer.
So
it's not the taste and it never has been the taste. Which only leaves
one thing to account for its bothersome presence in my mind and
indeed in the mind of PK and others of our generation: the adverts.
You
know what I'm talking about, they're all over YouTube, It's
the left one...it's the right one...it's Martini,
we used to sing, back in the Seventies. Somehow these ads
appropriated a particular iconography all for themselves - the
Mediterranean sunlight, the fancy blondes, the fast cars, the
megalithic tumblers chinking in close-up, the James Hunt costumed
morons leering at the controls of a speedboat, the promise of a brown
fortified wine to set your
day straight. No-one else came close. And when this cataclysm of
kitsch wasn't blaring at us in the cinemas we had it silently
reproduced in full-colour magazine ads, a kind of top-up before the
next time we went out to watch Diamonds
Are Forever
or Shaft.
And yet - adverts and motor racing sponsorship: is that really all it
came down to?
The
answer has to be yes:
so far as I can see, no encounter with basic, raw, Martini is ever
going to be anything other than puzzling and inconsequential. Trouble
is, I can't think of anything else - even allowing for the
intercessions of time and senility - whose essence has been so
mediated by the publicity that went with it - that exists, basically,
as a thing advertised rather than as a thing. David Bowie? National
Savings Certifcates? NATO? Fondue? Quadrophonic hi-fi? Any
time, any place, anywhere...There's a wonderful world you can
share... I'm
wondering, could we just leave it at that? Keep these imperishable
sentiments without having to tangle with the vermouth? On this
occasion, isn't the advertising the thing with the real value?
CJ
The Wines That Made Us (9): Blue Nun
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Kingsley Amis in 1972, on serving white wine at home: “My advice would be to stick to hocks and moselles, which everybody likes, and avoid white burgundies.”
Back then, as Hugh Johnson recalls, "no great dinner could begin without its Mosel … or Rhine Spatlese." And not just “begin”; Blue Nun’s marketing slogan was “right through the meal”, aimed at allaying any anxiety that we novice drinkers might have about the correct order of wines. So it was Blue Nun throughout, even if your starter was carpaccio, your main course steak and you finished with Stilton. You could, according to another ad, confidently ask for “Blue Nun and the menu”.
Let’s briefly scamper through the history of Blue Nun. It was created by Hermann Sichel following the “famous 1921 vintage”. Why a nun? Well, “liebfraumilch” (which it was) is a medieval term that describes the "milk" from the convents and monasteries in the Rhine Valley. Turn that into marketing speak, as a Blue Nun representative did years later, and you could claim that "The monks and nuns of the Middle Ages knew how beneficial a glass of good wine was for the harmony of mind and body."
And why Blue? It’s possible it was a printer’s error; legend says that it was meant to be the brown of a traditional nun’s habit, until a printer misread “brau” as “blau” in Sichel’s handwriting. Or perhaps one of them was smart enough to realise that it would sound rather more appealing than having a Brown’un.
It was certainly one of the first examples of a smart branding exercise. For as Kingsley Amis also observed, “Whatever the men in the know may say, a German wine label is a fearful thing to decipher.” And that’s from a chap familiar with Welsh railway stations. The success of Blue Nun and other subsequent branded German wines, like Black Tower and Goldener Oktober, with a generation of novice wine drinkers, lay in the approachability of their names as much as that of their taste.
The complications of language and labelling were just part of an eventual triple whammy on German wine. It’s hard to be a popular success if ordinary folk can’t understand or pronounce the words on your bottle. And for a generation raised on Commando comics, German wines sounded a little too much like barked instructions to present your papers.
Then there were adulteration scandals, just as we were becoming aware of a world of alternative wines beyond Germany and France. And there was also an inevitable progression, like teenagers who begin drinking Southern Comfort and end up enjoying Chablis, away from those sweeter flavours. Today in that barometer of middle-class English taste, my local Waitrose, they have labelled sections for wines from virtually every country in the world – but not Germany.
Blue Nun was sold in 1996 – and you can find reports of a “makeover” in 1998; a “resurrection” in 2001; a “reinvention” in 2010. The nun herself was transformed over the years, from the one I found disturbingly come-hither in my youth, through a drawing with a Florence Nightingale vibe, to the shallow designer motif of today.
And in 1997, they introduced a blue bottle. Well of course they did. A distinctive bottle is a sure-fire sign of a wine sold by marketers rather than winemakers. I would employ the adjective “hideous”, but this blue bottle is inevitably described as “iconic” by Blue Nun’s marketing people, who wouldn’t know an icon if it came up and bit them in Constantinople.
And how do those marketers now position their product? “Whether you like to enjoy your Blue Nun wine after shopping, for dinner, getting ready for a girls night out, or staying in with your friends, Blue Nun goes with every occasion,” they say. Well, when I get ready for a girls night out, it’s by checking that Mrs K is taking her keys.
Ignoring their clumsy hints at gender targeting, if Blue Nun goes with every occasion perhaps I could work it into the bin routine on a Tuesday night. And I quite like the idea of a glass after shopping, especially if Sainsbury’s car park has been a bit challenging.
And when it’s time to move up to more sophisticated things, Blue Nun now produce other varieties, including a Gold Edition sparkling version containing flakes of 22 carat gold leaf, which presumably provides potentially rich pickings for your dental hygienist.
Unnoticed amid all this loss of dignity, they changed the actual blend of Blue Nun itself, to become less sugary, and redefined it as a Rheinhessen Qualitatswein, rather than the currently scorned Liebfraumilch. But it was too late. By the turn of the millennium, according to their website, Blue Nun had become “the best distributed German wine in the world.” You somehow know a brand is in trouble when their claim to fame is that their lorries are better than yours.
Ironically, despite that famed distribution, Blue Nun is incredibly hard to find in the UK. On the Blue Nun website, you can choose countries from Norway to Korea, but not Germany itself, who presumably get it “distributed” out of their own borders asap. But after visiting numerous off-licences, convenience stores, and a succession of grim, bunkerlike supermarkets, I only saw one of their “varieties” on a UK shelf, and not Blue Nun itself. Of course it’s online, should you wish to order an entire case. But once you’re online, I find it’s surprisingly easy to search for and order something else instead.
In 2001, its brand manager said "We are trying to get back to the situation when Blue Nun was a must-have item, high up on The Ritz wine-list." In that, they have failed.
PK
So,
guys, what do we make of the Black Tower reboot? Clear bottles? Half
black half clear? Upscale imagery? No crackle finish? Softened
typeface? Clive? Does it do it for you? I know, I know.
It was a real thing, back in the day, of course, it had presence,
right? Exactly. It looked like a thing.
Like a what? Say again, Pyotr? It was like piece of an exhaust pipe?
On a car? It was, wasn't it? Like part of the silencer, maybe. Or the
catalytic converter? I don't know, Clive, is that what they look
like? I thought they looked like boxes. But you're right, a big black
bottle that didn't
look like a bottle of wine. So cool. Pyotr? It looked like something
you could throw,
exactly, a missile.
What would you throw it at? A shop window? Really? You'd throw it at
a vegan wholefood store? Don't say that in front of Morwenna. He's
kidding, Morwenna. No, seriously. I'm practically a vegan myself. You
know that. Or an explosive device? Mm. Clive? Like something the
Nazis would have used in World War Two? Yeah, I guess. Tell you,
there was a word going round, couple of years back, they were going
to up
the Germanic. Heavy up the typeface, really scary black tower, and
they were going to rebrand it as Der
Schwarze Turm.
That's what I heard. Exactly! Standout on the wine rack! Iconic!
Really menacing! No, Clive, they weren't going to use the SS flash
insignia, fuck's sake. Tell you what I
would have done, though. I would have gone down the whole Seventies
kitsch thing. Heyday. Seventies. Ford Capri, yeah, rubber plants,
flares, James Last, lasagne, exactly. Total retro, niche, but so
niche. And Peter Wyngarde! What do you mean, Peter who? YouTube the
shit out of him, Morwenna. Wyngarde or Jason King, face hair, gappy
teeth, velvet three-piece. He's the bomb. Totally off the chain. I
would so have him upfront, the face of Black Tower. Is he still
alive? Oh. Had to be, I guess. Anyway, that's my dream, but no,
they've gone beige, Easy ends the day,
that's the strap. I mean, is that really a thing? Get
pissed, it's gone six o'clock,
I mean is that a narrative? Oh, oh, it is. Okay, guys, you're ahead
of me. But - and you probably know this - the weirdness is that at
the same time, same time as they're saying Get
pissed, depressed lady,
they've gone in with this Tough Mudder outfit as wine partner. Anyone know anything about Tough
Mudder?
Yeah, it's some kind of assault course thing you do for fun. Yeah,
seriously. I don't know, has anyone been on it? I think you crawl
through mud and jump over walls and beat yourself up like you're in
the Marines, only you pay to do it. Seriously. Yeah, it's a big
thing. So you do that and at the end you have a glass of Black Tower.
So it's like Black Tower is suddenly the 4 x 4 of white wines, like a
Toyota Land Cruiser. It's like a total Man Wine. It's called Tough
Mudders
cause of the mud, Clive. What? It's like saying Mothers
in a New Jersey accent? Mudders?
Mudderfuckers?
Clive.
Morwenna, he's just being obvious. Okay? So, anyway, all that taken
together, what do we think? I mean, you know, Blue Nun, they tried a
reboot on that, I don't think it's going that great, to be honest,
but Black Tower? New Black Tower? You think it's got traction? Maybe.
Say again, Pyotr? Have I ever drunk Black Tower? Hahahahahahahahaha.
Have I ever drunk
Black
Tower? Seriously?
CJ