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

Decanting wine for appearance's sake – Cape Diversity shiraz

I have taken to decanting my wine of late. But this is not to improve its flavour; frankly, a lot of the cheaper stuff dies a brief death in contact with the air.  Nor is it to reduce my consumption, although finishing an elegant demi-carafe seems to complete a meal, and suppresses the urge to go and slump in front of the tv and polish off the rest of the bottle. 


No, the decanting is simply to avoid the suspicious glances of my household, as yet another garish bottle featuring animals of the world, flora, fauna, ugly graphics and strange typefaces threatens to grace the dining table.


Mrs K and I take great pride in the presentation of our dining table. I don’t go quite as far as one restaurant I visited before opening time, where a white-gloved maître d’ went around the tables matching every place setting, to the centimetre, against a photograph. (But I if I could…)

We are not eating off crates. Our dining table does not look like this. We take our Indian out of the foil trays in which it arrives.

And if you do take care with your choice and layout of crockery, cutlery, napery then surely you should be concerned about the look of the wine bottle you put in the centre of the table?

I am not alone in this. That great style icon Bryan Ferry, interviewed in the Wall Street Journal, objected to this label, which shows the rock that makes up the vineyard’s terroir. “I hate that,” he said. You hate the wine, asked the interviewer? “No, the label,” he said. “I can’t drink a wine if it has an ugly label.”

This by way of comparison, is one of his favourites. Bryan Ferry and I are as one. (Sorry, can I just have the pleasure of repeating that sentence? "Bryan Ferry and I are as one…")

It’s been shown by lots of controlled tastings that our judgment of a wine is influenced by things such as cost, name, reputation and, of course, label. And why not? Like the plating up of food, or the framing of a print, the presentation of something helps to shape our experience.

Writing a while back about a Chilean wine from the Lafite Rothschild stable, I explained why I believe that actually, we do judge books by their covers; which is why we have Harry Potter in adult jackets, and why the novels by one author will often be redesigned to match the cover of his bestseller. So I get a little exercised with critics who insist that we should ignore the label on a bottle of wine. Appearances count. 

One American wine website decided to explore the alternative, that “it’s what’s inside that counts”. Just look at the hideous, garish bottles used to illustrate this thesis. 

Frankly, I wouldn’t care if their contents were delicious. They look as if they contain fizzy drinks. They would reduce my dining table to the status of a children’s party.

(Perhaps they include the repellent Vimto, the only drink I know whose name is an anagram of its consequences.)

I could send you all over the web to look at hideous wine bottles, but I will settle for just one, this set of blue glass bottles with cartoon wine labels, the whole effect not only garish and nauseating, but disturbingly childish on an adult drink.

I do have a couple of very nice decanters, which are a pleasure to use and look at. But even before I did, I have to admit that I would pour wine into anonymous bottles, rather than put ugly specimens like these on my table.

(Here’s a tip – the Nicolas petites recoltes range of vins de pays  come in completely clear glass bottles from which one can easily soak the cheap paper labels. In the days before I could afford a decanter, I used one of these to serve wine anonymously. I was trying to follow the minimalist designer John Pawson, who had recommended this Baccarat crystal decanter – which looks like a wine bottle, has the capacity of a wine bottle, will aerate your wine no better than a wine bottle, but costs £238. The Nicolas bottle is equally hopeless for aerating, of course [although the pouring from the original bottle will help] but it only costs £5.49 – and yet unlike the Baccarat one, it comes conveniently filled with wine…)

And a decanter will, of course, genuinely improve some wines in flavour as well as appearance. I was forced to put Cape Diversity's shiraz into a decanter, simply because of its hideous label, depicting (Why? Why??) a species of South African grass. Bryan Ferry would, I am sure, have agreed, although I doubt he drinks much wine costing £6.95.

From the bottle, it was a tight, unforgiving little wine. It left my mouth resembling a cat’s anus.

But decanted, and left a while, the tannins softened, the wine opened up, and it became richer, softer and altogether better than its price tag might suggest. Even Mrs K “thought it was alright,” an approval rating neither its taste nor its appearance would have been likely to achieve straight out of the bottle. 

A decanter won’t solve everything. And let’s face it, while you can decant a bottle of red, it’s a little odd to decant your white (and harder to keep it cold), while only an idiot would try and serve a sparkling wine decanted. (Put that Tesco Cava back, CJ…)

But at least it does keep your wine anonymous, attractive and suitable for a civilised dining table. And while a decanter can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, it can sometimes retrieve a satisfying drink from a cat’s anus.

PK

The Whale Caller, Shiraz/Cabernet Sauvignon

Who's responsible for this rubbish? No, not the Sediment blog – sadly, like a guilty schoolboy in a kept-behind class, I am all too aware of who is responsible for this misdemeanour – nor the rubbish on the right (appropriately incorporating this post's subject), but this rubbish:

In the coastal South African town of Hermanus, the Whale Caller waits on the cliffs, calling for the whales to return from the Antarctic waters. 
As you savour this rich red wine, with dark berry fruit and hints of chocolate and spice, you may just catch the strains of the Whale Caller's horn, blowing on the southern wind.

This twaddle is on the label of my latest foray into the disagreeable realms of the sub-£5 wine. And The Whale Caller (Waitrose, £4.29) is a wine with a lot of disagreement.

On the Ocado site – that is, the people who deliver the stuff – there is unanimous approval; six five-star public reviews, only dropping one star in one reviewer’s reckoning for “quality of packaging”, which is pretty odd when you think about it. What exactly is an inferior quality bottle?

The professionals seem ambiguous and, for once, divided. Anthony Rose in the Independent described it as “an affordable glugger” which I found faintly repellent. Do you “glug”? Would you think “glug” an acceptable description of your guests’ drinking manner? Or perhaps those who do “glug” would find this an appealing drink?

Equally, last August, Suzy Atkins in the Telegraph described the 2008 Whale Caller as “ a brill barbie red”. This to me is equally dubious. Does she mean it’s in the territory of potentially poisonous outdoor consumption, inducing stomach cramps and vomiting?

There’s surely more than a whiff of social judgement here. It’s not, you may note, a nice wine to drink at a barbeque, but a brill wine to glug at a barbie. Call me a subtextual post-structuralist, but methinks these are not your average Waitrose customers.

Sipping the wine in my study (he says – judge as ye may) I found it dull and thick. Any shiraz spiciness is flattened out by cabernet sauvignon to leave just a vague, nasal burn. It has a bouquet of diesel before, and a sickly, plastic aftertaste. The whole process of consumption is frankly distasteful.

Fiona Beckett, who also writes in the Guardian, is upfront about the wine (and not its audience) when she blogs that “It's incredibly jammy but not in a nice way with no structure or acidity. The best thing you can say about it is that it's not rubbery. And might be a bit better if you chill it.”

Why did I even buy it? Ah, that I can explain. Every so often, Waitrose offer 25% off all – yes, that’s all – of their wine. Like a mug, I trailed down to my local branch with a rucksack to grab half a dozen bottles of prime plonk. But of course, when I got there, none of the prime plonk was to be seen. Either the local populace had descended on my branch like the wolf on the fold, and stripped it of everything decent; or (as it was carefully phrased to the admirable Victoria Moore, then writing in the Guardian the good stuff had been, to quote the euphemism, “de-emphasised”. Victoria had tried throughout one offer to buy a particular Cornas online, and had been unable to find it. So where do you put them, she asked? "I'm not going to tell you,” replied the manager of Waitrose Wine Direct, “because I don't want you to tell your readers how to find them." So, having found no prime plonk myself, I foolishly settled for some of the cheaper stuff.

Fiona Beckett’s blog attracted a lovely comment from someone who actually lives in Hermanus, SA who says “It doesn't sound like this wine is doing a great job at promoting our little town of Hermanus. We have some wonderful wineries nearby… but I shouldn't think this wine is anything to do with them. 
We also do have a whale crier but his job is to blow his horn to show tourists where the whales are, not to call the whales back from the Antarctic!”

So even the label fails to live up to expectations. Indeed, as I savoured (hem, hem) this rich red wine, I caught the usual sonic background to my household wine consumption: cries of mislaid keys, ringing phones, the thunder of feet and exhortations to turn off lights. I’m afraid I did not catch the strains of the Whale Caller’s horn.

But at least I finally understand the notion of a Barbie wine. It’s like its namesake: malproportioned, badly balanced and tastes of plastic.