Waitrose Australian Red, Smooth & Spicy - William Burroughs

While CJ is away, we take this opportunity to publish an appreciation of the Waitrose Australian Red ('Smooth and Spicy'), £4.99 a bottle, written by the late William Burroughs shortly before his death in 1997. 

Known principally for his numerous drug addictions, Burroughs was also an occasional user of budget supermarket wines. Devotees of The Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine will observe that, although this is one of Burroughs' last writings, it recalls those earlier works in both idiom and tonality.

THE ALGEBRA OF GREED

Insect eyes watch painful in junk dawn - river smell rises in a mist, rotting vegetation, black mud like iron - Under the lights a Matron in blue denim screams, her face green with rage, 'I HAVE TO HAVE IT! IT'S ON ORDER!' - ghetto clerk scuttles away, pyrethrum addiction, his fingers rotting - wind in an alley - a truck reverses

My name is Dr Benway, surgical extremes, spectral dismemberments, you need to ask? Every time they come in, Dr Benway they say, it's the last words they ever hear. You want my advice? Shiraz grape, pendulous, that to-and-fro motion, junk sickness, it arrives by ship. Oven heat of the interior. Who says no? I will not stand for it! My professional reputation is on the line!

Junkie fingers on the neck of the bottle...'Oh, I'm saying smooth, I'm saying spicy, that party ended. Sonofabitch!'...shrill hooker voice in mescaline air...the river slows...'And he wants five bucks! Five!'...whiplash of neon, the bottle descends, red bulb blooming...a junkie dissolves - 'I wanted white, white, I got two quarters'...Yesterday he inspected my file. Took a cab across town, spoke to PK, Max, the Black Salamander, all the usuals. Four p.m. the clock jumps, he's sitting on the other side of the table.

'I make you a price,' he says. His eyes are dead. 'You want to connect?' He slides a single penny across the table. 'Remember Liz in Chi? She died. Zen weightlessness, it was not pretty. For you, I make it.' I remember bedbugs jumping from flowered wallpaper in a fifth floor hotel room. 'But don't make the glass dirty. I can't stand that. The Inspectorate calls, they find a red glass, I'm Pen Indef. Hanging from a door.'

...a young man with switchblade eyes, fingering the till...oil heat comes off at this time...ecstasy, withered hand on the bottleneck, the veins like a map...even the Scandanavians died...

WR (Gesturing ineffectually): 'You want it better? At these prices?'

JUNK BOY (Cynically): 'You have it, you don't sell it.'

WR: 'I have to listen to this? It makes me sad.'

He lights a cigarette, blows smoke coolly towards a ziggurat of black market painkillers.

WR: 'I sell it to you for what it costs. I live on the streets. It's not so bad. Give it air. Don't force it.'

...oven heat...Southern Cross image shattered on black oil settling in a glass...the red bloom swells...spectral mists rising, the smell of tarpaulins and leaves...acid in the back of the throat...puckered...the execution will be at four p.m...a Mercedes-Benz departs, its fender dragging...sanatorium Matron at the wheel, eyes of a cuttlefish...the paint is blistered and coarse...

The party has been cancelled.

WB

Wine in tumblers – in the grip of a trend…

Everywhere I look now, wine is being presented in tumblers. It’s the fashion. So naturally, with my buttoned-up collar and bare ankles to the fore, I’m on the case.

There’s a notion that wine in tumblers reflects something of European simplicity, of cucina povera and down-to-earth authenticity. Most photography of “simple” food, shot against weathered boards or zinc tabletops, now has to be accompanied by wine in tumblers. The Observer Food Monthly (than which one cannot get more fashionable) is full of them. Nigel Slater has fallen prey. 

Our local designer pizza restaurant (for yes, we live in the kind of locale which has one) provides tumblers for its challenging organic wine. And perhaps the biggest influence of all has been Polpo, a small and of course fashionable chain of London restaurants based on Venetian bacaros. 

Some time ago now, CJ wrote a post extolling the virtues of drinking wine from Duralex tumblers. He certainly didn’t claim that drinking wine from tumblers was fashionable. Not because it was or wasn’t, but because CJ does not concern himself with fashion. Nobody looking at CJ would say, now there’s a slave to the catwalk.

So I ignored his enthusiasm, with the magisterial aloofness for which I am renowned. CJ, after all, is a chap for whom a tumbler represents the lesser of wine receptacle evils, descending from a Paris goblet to a mug.

And surely a tumbler is a rubbish glass from which to properly appreciate wine? It is too open, so you don’t get a proper sense of the bouquet. It is too thick for subtle sipping. Its shape means that you can’t really swirl with it; and the lack of a stem means you’re forced to clutch it inelegantly in your fist like a grenade.

Polpo’s owner, Russell Norman, says that serving wine in tumblers reflects a presentation which has “no pretentious flourishes”. Of course, if everyone else uses wine glasses, if a wine glass is the norm, then a tumbler is a pretentious flourish, n'est ce pas? As is trying to pretend that an Amarone Classico, La Giaretta 2008, which Polpo list at £67, is everyday drinking, a wine to be slugged from tumblers.

But Norman goes further in proselytising the use of tumblers. “I strongly recommend you try this at home, too,” he says in his Polpo cookbook. 

“It gives the wine a lower status than perhaps you are used to if you dine in tableclothed restaurants, but I feel that this is right with humble food shared amongst friends. There is also something tactile and homely about a small peasant glass that you don’t get with an expensive balloon.”

Try this at home, eh?. Well, a few issues first. Point one; it is hard to give our wine at home “a lower status” than it already has. Otherwise Mr Sainsbury would be giving it away.

Point two – can our table still be “tableclothed”, please? Or is it important for a “homely” feel to expose its old stains, and that bit where the veneer got busted off?

Point three – could the food we share with friends not be described as “humble”? I have found that phrases like “terrific” are much more conducive to marital harmony.

I’m afraid I struggle with the idea of laying our dinner-party table with tumblers for wine. If anything, I am trying to raise the status of our wine when we share it with friends, not lower it. And fashionable our friends undoubtedly are, but presented with tumblers, half will have filled them with water before you could say bacaro. No, this “small peasant glass” business only works if your friends are small peasants.

But what if it’s just me and Mrs K, drinking young, bright wine with a simple supper? Suddenly, it begins to make sense.

We do not have the Duralex design classic tumblers. No, we have Pokal tumblers, which are like Duralex tumblers, in that way that things from Ikea are often like something else. But they are squarer, chunkier – more like Nigel Slater's! – and they are 6 for £2. That’s 33p a glass, surely a very povera price. I don’t know if it’s a factor in Polpo, but it’s probably cheaper to smash them than to wash them up.

I fill them politely, halfway. This is not a lot of wine, and means you have to replenish it frequently, but that is itself a satisfying act. And the whole exercise seems to suit a simple lunch with simple wine, at home, with no guests.

And Mrs K agrees. She feels it is “relaxed”, that it’s “a sign that we know what we’re doing”. It reflects, she thinks, the “everydayness” of drinking simple wine at home. All things of which I am in favour.

There is a satisfying degree of purpose about drinking wine from a tumbler. It lowers expectation, it promotes function over form. There is wine which does its job, but doesn’t deserve a wine glass, in the way that a hot dog satisfies a hunger but doesn’t deserve a plate. It seems somehow right to drink it from a tumbler.

And drinking wine out of tumblers gives you one further thing. A talking point.

PK

Wine of the Week - Les Jamelles Syrah 2011

So the wife and I are driving through the townlet of Wilton, just outside Salisbury, and we need to get some food. It is an incredibly hot day and we have not been on speaking terms for the last hour, largely on account of the terrible heat. The only good thing is that there is parking outside the Co-Op in North Street. In silence we make our way into the shop's air-conditioned recesses.

I spend some time motionless by the ready-made sandwiches. My wife pointedly inspects the fresh fruit. She gestures with a packet of tomatoes towards the basket which I am holding. I make a play of indifference. She equally indifferently lobs the tomatoes in the basket before peering at the cooked meats and coleslaws, things in which she normally has little interest but which on these occasions can be pressed into service as indices of mute disgruntlement.

Wordlessly, I select a twin pack of Scotch Eggs and let her know through the medium of mime that I have a twin pack of Scotch Eggs. I sense her disdain. She piously fondles a reticule of small oranges. I motion towards the full-fat yoghurts with Westcounty Fudge flavourings. Impasse.

The Co-Op's instore radio is big on the Eighties and I start to feel sentimental, mostly about myself, as I stand next to the biscuits section. Eventually I say,

'We need milk.'

'Yes,' she says.

'And water.'

The basket is now almost full, so, increasingly martyred, I carry the two large bottles of fizzy water pressed against my chest with my left arm, like a pair of scuba tanks.

I need a treat. I start to look around for the wine. There is some. It's not a big shop, so the booze has to earn its keep. Which is good, because it also boils the agony of choice down to no more than three wines, an ideal number in which price is the alpha and omega of the decision-making process, with a small space in the middle in which to be swayed by the perceived quality of the label design, shape of the bottle, nature of the closure, grape variety.

And what do you know? They're doing an offer (that magical £5+) on a Les Jamelles Syrah 2011, about which I know nothing other than that it has a slender bottle, a screw cap and a very clever label with nicely-finessed curly lettering and artisanal undertones. I somehow find a free hand and sweep the bottle into our pile. My wife's silence on the matter is eloquent as we stand sullenly at the check-out.

But I have the last laugh, figuratively at any rate, four hours later as I sample the Les Jamelles and find it to be a Syrah without vindictiveness, a playful Syrah with enough pepper and tannins to make a go of it, but otherwise highly approachable. My inarticulacy is touched with gold from that point on.

Why am I going on like this? Only because we're off to Corsica in a week or so, and I can see this tableau being replayed over and over, like something out of Alain Robbe-Grillet, in the heat and inconvenience and ruinous expense of that island, with us standing in a succesion of dust-filled Corsican minimarts, failing to communicate. Will there be anything as obliging to drink as the Les Jamelles Syrah? Will there be air-conditioning? Will there be Scotch Eggs? If we don't learn from today's psychodrama, how are we going to get through two whole weeks of the same?

I meditate on this as the Syrah begins its priestly ministrations. My wife finally pipes up and says,

'So what was that all about?'

'Ah, well,' I say, admiring the glass and, mollified by the Syrah, not wishing to seem churlish, 'it's really not a bad red. Not bad at all.'

'That?' she says. 'Don't talk to me about that.'

CJ