Sunday morning wine – Innocent Bystander Pink Moscato

Sometimes, you come across a concept of which the very linguistic construction suggests a potential shift in your lifestyle. It’s like the first time you hear of onboard wi-fi, the staycation or slip-on shoes.

Thanks to an invitation from Liberty Wines  CJ and I were able to sample some of Australia’s premium wines; and it was there I heard Innocent Bystander winery, from the Yarra Valley, describe their Pink Moscato as “a Sunday morning wine”.

It was like a revelation. I’m sure there are many differences between Sunday mornings in the Yarra Valley and those in London. But the mere notion of a “Sunday morning wine” suddenly changed the whole prospect of waking up at the weekend.

Readers of a certain age will remember this television ad from the 1980s for the Halifax, which infected my generation with its smug notion of a loft-living lifestyle, “easy like a Sunday morning”. And such a Sunday morning, with a Docklands apartment, cat, coffee, cool music and a crisp white shirt. Oh, and the only newspaper seller in London who is positively cheery in the morning, and is happy to accept notes from a cashpoint without responding “Ain’t you got nuffink smaller, mate?”

But time moves on. You can tell that lifestyle’s a thing of the past, if only because the chap in the ad gets his milk in a bottle. By now, he has hopefully found a more significant other than a cat to share his bed; and perhaps he has even progressed through the assault course years known as parenthood, during which mornings are anything but bloody “easy”, and through which he is unlikely to have retained yawning warehouse doors opening five floors up.

Personally, I always fancied Sunday mornings like those at Downton Abbey, 

descending to find a range of cooked dishes such as kedgeree lining the dining room under silver domes. For some reason, Mrs K hasn’t quite got round to this provision. And my average Sunday morning begins, unlike the Earl of Grantham, by waking up with hair like Einstein; getting up before anyone else in my slumbering household; and trudging downstairs to interpret the premises like a crime scene.

How many offspring and/or guests might be lurking in the bedrooms? What did they eat last night, and if the tins are anything to go by, how could it involve both tuna and baked beans? Are any bottles in the recycling and, if so, are they from the (acceptable) kitchen rack or the (forbidden) Cellar? And is anything meant to be consumed at this time of day, like milk/bread/eggs/coffee, actually left in the house? Sadly, things here remain resolutely downtown rather than Downton.

So could a Sunday morning wine transport me from reality? (Of which, as we know, human kind cannot bear very much, and since waking I had tolerated at least half an hour.)

Innocent Bystander’s Pink Moscato is a gorgeous, flamingo pink, and comes in a cutely shaped half-bottle for about £6.95, with the all-or-nothing consumption that a crown cap (like a beer) suggests.

I’m immediately thinking verandahs, dappled morning sunlight, warm breeze, birdsong – none of which, it goes without saying, applied this week at our humble abode. Here in London it’s already too late in the year to sit outside on a Sunday morning, and it’s not my idea of fun to eat breakfast in a fleece, under a grey sky with drizzle in your muesli. No, to me that sounds too much like a music festival…

Made from Gordo and Black Muscat grapes, this wine it is breathtakingly sweet, at a level which would normally make my teeth wince. But the crispness and effervescence keeps it light, and away from the cloying dessert-wine syrup you might expect. So it’s actually fresh and bright, but with an overwhelmingly strawberry flavour and floral bouquet.

It’s like a Bellini made with strawberries, or a Buck’s Fizz, but better. (Buck’s is the only significant gentlemen’s club to be founded since the First World War, and unlike most of the Pall Mall clubs I have visited, so very handy for the shops; but its great creation, Buck’s Fizz, is surely fatally flawed by both its acidity, and its bits).

The Pink Moscato is still 5.5% alcohol, which puts it just a notch above Strongbow cider; and if someone came downstairs at 9am they would be rightly concerned to find me swigging from a can of Strongbow with breakfast.

But the half-bottle is just right for two. If person two actually gets up before you finish it…

Pink Moscato doesn’t brighten the weather, but it does begin to brighten one’s attitude towards it. It’s just so much more stylish than a carton of fruit juice. I find myself feeling somehow celebratory, even reading the magazine section first. Things seem to be looking up, God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world…and yes indeed, the chap does arrive on time to clear out the gutters!

Plus, drinking wine at breakfast gets you out of some of the more irksome aspects of a Sunday morning. No, I can’t drive to the supermarket, I’m probably over the limit. No, I shouldn’t trim the hedge, I’m a trifle unsteady. No, that DIY involving the power drill may not be a good idea.

Oh, this is brilliant. I should probably go back to bed…

PK

Rosé wines - Bonny Doon Vin Gris de Cigare & Chateau Guiot

This is about frivolity, about fun, about al fresco living. Yes, it’s about rosé wine.

Rosé wine is a choice of lifestyle, as much as palate. It is wine which has a time and a place. That time is between 12 noon and 8pm. Any later, and wine should really be red. (Any earlier, and you should really not be sneaking out of rehab in order to down it.) And that place is outdoors.

CJ said some frankly uncalled-for things last year  about a bottle of rosé, including the fact that “It had a physical presence at the table, like a large sweaty, pink, and yet quite cold, man.” Perhaps it is my own, inherently more elegant personality speaking here, but if a bottle of rosé does have a physical presence at one’s table, surely it could be that of a lady, enrobed in linen of a pale salmon hue, cool beneath the summer sun? Am I wrong to think of Audrey Hepburn here?

For what it’s worth, here is my own quintessential observation about rosé wine – it succeeds because it looks more frivolous than red, and tastes more frivolous than white. It is a brilliant drink on its own, as its sweeter, fruit flavours can compete with food. And its sheer presence on an outdoor table typifies light summer conversation.

When anyone tells me that they don’t like rosé wine, I try to introduce them to the Vin Gris de Cigare, from the Bonny Doon winery in California. In London, this is not easy to do; when I have found single bottles for sale, it has been at unusual outlets for about £13 – Selfridges (!) currently have it for a very unfrivolous £22.99 – but usually it only appears on the wine list of clued-up restaurants. I think it’s an instant recommendation that I first discovered this wine at Clarke’s, and have subsequently drunk it before meals at Boundary. It’s currently on the list at The Ivy,  at a troubling £45.50.  (Yes, I do eat out a bit. Someone once said of me, “He’s a man who knows his way around a restaurant menu”, but rightly or wrongly I took that as a compliment, and not a suggestion that I am a fat bastard.)

As befits a lifestyle choice, this wine begins as a conversation piece; a Vin Gris is a rosé wine made from red wine grapes; and the Cigare refers to cigar-shaped alien craft which were banned by decree, back in 1954, from landing in the vineyards of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. (Randall Grahm, the vineyard’s idiosyncratic founder, has “landed” in their patch to such effect he was nicknamed the Rhone Ranger.)

At the risk of boring American readers, Bonny Doon was among the first Californian vineyards to embrace Rhone varietals. Their Vin Gris de Cigare is a blend of 71% grenache and 2% mourvèdre, with a dash of white wine (16% roussanne and 11% grenache blanc) – not, as they admit, something which would be done in the Rhone itself. But the result is the most exciting rosé wine I have ever tasted; pale in colour, crisp and light on the palate, yet with complex fruity and floral notes. It’s refreshing and bright, yet with those gorgeous sweet flavours of summer fruits; a wine to drink on its own, rather than with food. Add in the fact that it’s a talking point, and what better possible kick-off could you have for a convivial summer lunch?

But as I say, I find it a hard wine to track down in London. (Suggestions very welcome in Comments…) The best alternative I have found is the rosé from Chateau Guiot. Again, a combination of Rhone varietals (Grenache, Syrah and Cinsault) give this an interesting complexity; red berries, watermelon, summer fruits and flowers, all above a nicely taut base. Terrific value at £6 a bottle from Majestic, and the label looks serious enough to put on a nicely laid garden table. (I know, I know, but you can’t really decant rosé, and who wants to spoil the look of a sophisticated lunch with a hideous bottle?)  

Light is not always inferior to heavy, or indeed to dark. Like the photography of Elliott Erwitt,  or the writing of Alan Bennett, rosé wine can be life-enhancing without being sombre. We need not take rosé wine too seriously; but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have a role in life.

PK