Vino de Mesa, Sainsbury's Basic

How attractive this wine looks, in its Café de Flore carafe. It is as if I am about to enjoy a drink at the legendary café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Where Sartre and Camus lingered, and where the smallest, cheapest goblet of Brouilly costs €7.50.

If only. My location is actually not Saint-Germain de Pres. The contents of the carafe are actually Spanish. The entire bottle actually cost £2.68. And whether it is actually wine, in any basic definition of the term, is something we need to discuss. In fact, we need to discuss the definition of the term “basic”.

For this is Basics red wine, from Sainsbury’s. Like most supermarkets, this is the range where they claim to provide goods of acceptable quality for the lowest price. And the latter part of that claim is pretty unassailable. At £2.68 a bottle, this is the cheapest wine I have ever knowingly drunk.

But what is “basic” wine? And why am I disguising it in a Café de Flore carafe? We are about to find out…

Basics products (“cuttings costs, not corners”) carry jaunty little explanations of their “basic” nature. Lemons, for instance, are “no lookers, great juicers”. In this case, it is “wine for the kitchen, not the cellar”. Note “kitchen” – not “dining room”, “lounge” or even, for the residentially challenged, “supper table”. Must a wine provoke a whole, socially confusing route around the potential layout of our accommodation?

Or perhaps the idea of keeping it in the kitchen, or disguising its appearance elsewhere in the house, is an acknowledgment of the hideousness of the label, the colour and graphics of which would not happily co-exist with any table setting outside of a cartoon.

There is always a line of cynical thinking, and I am always drawn to it. The line of cynical thinking says that the lurid packaging of value ranges, whether Morrison’s Tesco or Sainsbury’s, is actually designed so that people feel embarrassed checking out an entire basketful. It’s a loud declaration of poverty to everyone else in the supermarket queue – so that even people who really want to buy a week’s worth of Basics feel embarrassed to do so. Supermarkets can therefore offer cheap products, improving both their image and their relative price rankings, while knowing full well that people will top their basket up with more expensive items.

So in the “dining room”, if you have one, this label would immediately launch a whole set of assumptions which might prejudice an evening’s conviviality, from the likely quality of the wine to the parsimoniousness of the host and the dubiousness of any accompanying food. You don’t catch many glimpses of this label on Come Dine With Me.

Indeed, how far would you have read in this post if it had been topped with a picture of that hideous label? Have we all made certain assumptions already?

So, for all those reasons, I decanted the wine into my lovely Café de Flore carafe. This would allow the wine to breathe, hopefully improving its flavour. It would avoid ribald comments from the rest of the household. And it might help me to forget the provenance of the wine and approach it with an open mind.

Basic wine comes, it seems from Spain – hence vino de mesa. Not wine from romantic-sounding areas with tabletop mountains like Algar de Mesa; no, here mesa really does mean “table”, as in table wine. Still, at least we have moved from the kitchen to the table…

Sainsbury’s themselves describe it as being “An easy-drinking table wine with light red-fruit flavours". Now, CJ and I seem to be alone in bringing into the vocabulary of wine description terms such as “challenging”, “sweaty” and “fight-inducing”. Nevertheless, I always find this “easy-drinking” notion intriguing – what else should wine be? Few cheap wines honestly describe themselves as “difficult to swallow”.

In the glass, this has an aroma I can only describe as burnt rubber, with its familiar catch in the nostrils, and suggestion of impending disaster.

But it has virtually no flavour whatsoever, beyond a vague taste of fruit-gums, possibly, but not necessarily, the red ones. As it opens up, a fragrance emerges which is reminiscent of alcohol and wet carpet, like the aftermath of a student party; but still no flavour, until the tang of alcohol finally itself forces its way through and begins to provoke a mild nausea. And a fast-impending headache.

I now understand both of the notions which eluded me. “Easy-drinking” means it is like swallowing saliva – a reflex action, virtually unnoticed, and certainly not troubling your palate. “Basic” means it echos the most fundamental aspects of wine which Messrs Sainsbury can find, viz, it is red, it is liquid and it is alcoholic. Beyond that, the relationship between this and wine is debatable.

There are wines with ironic labels like Old Git which can provoke a chuckle from your dinner guests. Sainsbury’s Basic does away with any need for a wine boldly labelled Cheap Bastard. It might provoke a chuckle. Or it might lead to an exodus, before any similarly “basic” food arrives…

PK

Cremant de Limoux Brut, LIDL (Carpentras)

A trip to France (the Ventoux region, hence Carpentras) and where did we end up? Lidl. Or, as they put it at the entrance to the Carpentras branch of this pan-European dimestore, L'Idéal c'est Lidl! There were caves everywhere around us, vignobles offering on-site dégustation, the whole oenophile experience, obviously, but equally obviously, Lidl required no finding (we were just passing by) and had excellent parking facilities. And, God knows, we could have at the same time picked up ten metres of hosepipe or a welder's mask, the way one is tempted to in Lidl: which you would find difficult (I'm presuming) in the retail outlets of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Anyway, we bought this Cremant de Limoux and enjoyed it with our friends on their heartbreakingly beautiful south-west-facing depth-of-the-countryside terrace, along with a knot of their French neighbours, and it tasted fine. I forget how much it cost (between €5 - €10) but it was fizzy and agreeable and even better if you bunged in some Crème de Cassis or that noix stuff to generate diversity. Can I find it back here in England? No. But three far more vital things emerged from the encounter:

1) The French now drink in moderation. The four French persons there (two men, two women) played up to their national stereotype by talking 75% of the time about food, at least as far as I understood the conversation, which shot past me like jets of steam; but they failed to consume anything more than a couple of self-denying glasses each before disappearing to have their supper. What happened to the long, slow, mature, persistent tippling that one used to associate with the French, particularly in rural areas where ouvriers used to warm up with a brandy at elevenses and go from there? What happened to the light alcoholic haze? Well, I was told, very earnestly, that the French Police now have the power to stop and breathalyse drivers without needing any special provocation. As a consequence, those motorists who used to blunder down the long, unlit country lanes, wine seeping out of their ears after a good meal or a good conversation, have got a lot more cautious. And in Paris, they're too busy earning money, to get lit up. There you go.

2) The French don't smoke any more while they drink. This is too sad for words. I remember the Frogs smoking while driving, smoking while eating, smoking while working, smoking while talking (especially), having a quick cig in between cigs as a purely parenthetical kind of smoking, smoking in the bath, smoking around small children and domestic pets, smoking en plein air and in absolutely tiny and apparently unventilated lifts. I can still remember being taken (when young) to a restaurant in Paris and being kippered in fag smoke from the moment we entered (it was a low-ceilinged basement, which certainly helped trap the pall) to the moment we left, and even then thinking this is the way to go. Our host (immensely civilised Parisian lawyer) not only smoked between courses, but between mouthfuls, which required some dexterity on his part. So now, when not a single Frog lights up while on a social call on account of even the French submitting to the New World Smoking Dispensation, not only do I feel mutely cheated out of the opportunity to ponce a gasper for my own enjoyment (not that I smoke, of course); I mourn the way yet another once-actual pleasure has sidled off into the murky indefensible netherworld of mere nostalgia. Drinking a glass of wine and enjoying a quiet cig: a caesura in time, as Richard Klein very nearly put it in Cigarettes Are Sublime. And he was very nearly right.

3) I bought a whopping great plastic flagon of red wine with a tap. Not from Lidl. Of which more. When I've had a chance to drink some of it.

CJ

Le Fontegnac, Vin de Bordeaux

This post is something of a riposte, following CJ’s remarks about wineglasses. What may have seemed to many like a casual, passing reference to ‘human-head-sized wineglasses with foot-long stems that smart people drink from nowadays’ is clearly a reference to my fabulous Riedel Sommeliers Bordeaux Grand Cru glass.

This magnificent example of the glassmakers art (see picture) is, indeed, 5.5 times the size of CJ’s puny Paris goblet. It is not, however, the size of a human head. Well, maybe a baby human. Or an adult mango.

However, I can do no better than quote from Riedel themselves: “This glass, first created in 1959, is not a design gimmick but a precision instrument, developed to highlight the unique characteristics of the great wines of Bordeaux. The large bowl (capacity 30 oz) brings out the full depth of contemporary wines made from Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot.”

(And it will not get “trashed in the dishwasher”, because it won’t fit into the dishwasher.)

Given CJ’s last post, I simply had to compare it with his wretched little Paris goblet, that hideous little tennis ball of a glass condemned by George Reidel himself as “the enemy of wine”. A glass too thick and too small to enhance the flavour, too shallow and open to enhance the bouquet, and too mimsy to suggest generosity. Favourite of the hired caterer and the student party – and almost impossible to purchase nowadays.

(I kid you not; as I travelled downmarket, from John Lewis via Robert Dyas to Poundland, I still found it impossible to buy a Paris goblet. Eventually, Select and Save of Hammersmith offered me 6 for £3.99; one is in the picture above, and if anyone wants the other 5…)

You will see from the photo that the Riedel glass is considerably larger. 5.5 times larger, in fact. Along with the enhanced enjoyment of my Bordeaux. I think I did imagine that, seated at the head of the table with my tasting glass, I would immediately appear a knowledgeable connoisseur and masterful seigneur.

However, the glass may also convey the impression that I am intending to drink around 5.5 times as much as everybody else. Or to drink 5.5 times faster. Or I may just look a bit of a knob, sitting at the head of the table with a glass the size of a coconut.

Anyway, this being Sediment, I cannot, as Riedel suggests showcase “majestically structured red wines in all their complexity and finesse.” Frankly, they are strangers to this blog. But in all fairness to this “precision instrument”, I thought I had to find something which exhibited at least one of the “unique characteristics of Bordeaux.” Which Le Fontegnac, £3.99 at Sainsburys, clearly does. It comes from Bordeaux.

Something told me, however, that this was not going to have the sustenance of such great Bordeaux as 1947, 1961 or 1982. That something was, in fact, the back of the label., It says without a hint of shame, “It is recommended that this wine be consumed within 6 months of purchase.”

So, one for the Paris goblet, then. An aroma of wood – not oak, which could be promising, but wood as in Colliers – a dank, dark kind of scent. Then a shallow, fruity flavour, climaxing with palate-clenching tannins. Altogether reminiscent in my mouth of a leaking biro.

Not, I imagine, the kind of description usually employed by enthusiastic sommeliers. Interestingly, the bouquet in their Riedel glass was immediately enhanced, presumably because the wine had room to breathe. (Room? It’s got an entire apartment.)

But this was a bad thing. M. Riedel talks of his glass “unpacking the various layers of bouquet and delivering a full spectrum of aromas”. I could feel my nasal hairs cringing.

When it came to taste, again I have to say that the wine was, marginally, improved; less punishing on the palate. But that was probably because, given the surface area of a CD, it could evaporate faster. The aftertaste was just as acrid.

Where does this leave us regarding CJ and his dodgy wine/decent glass equation? Well, like an actor in a spotlight, a glass precision engineered to highlight the quality of a wine will highlight poor quality too. And if I have got to suffer the indignity of drinking wine at £3.99 a bottle, I am not simultaneously risking ridicule by cradling it in a glass the size of a small bucket.

PK