Disorientation: Graham's 1948 Vintage Port

So what did I find when we got to India? Only that once you go south of Goa and head for the Malabar Coast, booze is unobtainable, or as good as. In one place I managed to get a bottle of Kingfisher beer, but it had to be brought to my table swathed in old newspaper before being hidden behind a curtain so as not to start a riot. The last time anything like that happened to me I was in Utah. Out of three weeks in the sub-continent, I must have spent at least nine days teetotal. No beer, no wine - although I swear I saw someone else drinking Sula red - no whisky.

The nearest we got to that was in marginally hedonistic Mysore, where there were places in which men sat in almost total darkness, consoling themselves with liquor. We stopped outside one of these dives to examine the drinks on display outside: should we get a half-bottle of Royal Stag Indian whisky, or go for a full one of Peter Scot? A man lurched out from the (packed) counter and started telling us the prices. Other men shouted encouragement through an open window. We said we'd think about it. A day later and it was back to water. I haven't felt so disorientated for years.

I tell a lie: weeks. The previous time I felt so disorientated was just before I left for India, when I met the fiendishly talented writer/photographer/cultural contrarian who runs The London Column, for a drink at the Royal Festival Hall.

'You'll like this,' he said, producing a small glass jar with a lid. Inside the jar was an amber fluid. 'Graham's 1948 Vintage Port. We've been keeping it for years. We drank most of it the other night.'

'What's the container?'

'It's an old pâté jar from Lidl.'

'The safety button's popped up.'

'I washed it out. Don't worry.'

We tipped the contents into a couple of plastic cups (see serving suggestion, above). It's possible to pay over £500 for a bottle of Graham's 1948, although perhaps less for this one, given its slightly kooky provenance: British Transport Hotels Ltd. St. Pancras Chambers N.W.1. it read on the label.

'They must have flogged it off. Perhaps it was Dr. Beeching.' He showed me pictures of the formal bottle-opening, complete with candlelight and crystal decanters. 'It was pretty good.'

Up to this point, we'd been drinking the RFH's own Les Amourettes basement red, which tasted of coal dust and paraffin and was the cheapest thing on the list. The Graham's, in comparison, was like, I don't know, a 78 rpm recording of Galli-Curci, something desperately ancient and classy, almost on the point of extinction. There were Madeira-ish overtones, raisins, cinnamon, a long finish with a nice suggestion of old carpet. Nothing like the bespoke expectorant I normally associate with mainstream port, but instead a patrician, largely geriatric, intimation of what port could be if only it made an effort.

Of course it was over in a flash on account of there only being a tiny quantity to start with - about £60 worth - and us drinking it too quickly. We looked at the now-empty pâté jar as it baked under the RFH's savage shopping mall lights.

'Well, that was nice,' I said, inhaling the fumes from my cup.

And then, a few days later, I was 10º north of the Equator, quite unable to get a drink of any sort.

For a while, I toyed with the idea that destiny had taken it upon itself to cut off my booze supply altogether, using the Graham's Port in a pâté jar as a metaphor for the direction in which my life was headed. Back at home, of course, I now appear to be surrounded by grog, as ever, and can drink as much as I want. But is that really true? I thought the whole world was liquid, once. Seems I may have over-estimated.

CJ

Good Ordinary Claret - from Waitrose. Really?

What have we here? Not just ‘good ordinary wine’. Oh no, this is Good Ordinary Claret, with all the layers of Englishness and class which that construction contains. 

And it’s from Waitrose. Ditto.

It wouldn’t work with any other wine. Good Ordinary Champagne? Most of us only drink champagne on occasions we like to think of as out of the ordinary. Good ordinary chardonnay? Sounds like a Bridget Jones session wine. Good ordinary Burgundy? Contradiction in terms.

The word ‘claret’ has been in use in England since 1400, but gradually became applied solely to red Bordeaux. And partly because of the fashion for Bordeaux among the Georgian aristocracy, the term has become associated firmly with the English upper class. (I’ve had cause before to quote the clever couplet from Blur: “Educated the expensive way/He knows his claret from his Beaujolais.”) 

The term Good Ordinary Claret was first marketed by Berry Bros & Rudd, the oldest and most aristocratic of the wine merchants who come bearing ampersands. As their video explains, they took the name Good Ordinary Claret from their records of selling wine centuries ago, when it was sold from the barrel to customers and described, not by chateau names, but simply as the merchant’s “Claret, choicest”, “Claret, finest” and the like. You imagine that their “Claret, ordinary, good” would have been perfectly palatable – as it remains today. 

You have to admire the sheer Englishness of it all. That way in which we play down any sense of quality or advantage. (We are surely the only race who actually mock intelligence; what makes someone “Too clever for his own good”? How can someone be “too clever by half”?)

Only the English could make something appealing by stating that it’s ordinary. By taking something from the Downton Abbey lifestyle (hence calling it claret, and not Bordeaux) and then suggesting that you are taking it for granted. If it’s everyday for the aristocracy, then it’ll be a treat for us peasants.

And so suddenly, latching on to this idea like some Johnny-come-lately arriviste, here comes Waitrose, ignorantly pushing its trolley across the croquet lawn.

Waitrose is the supermarket which likes to wave aspiration in the face of its customers. This is why the Waitrose Essentials range includes such 'essential' items as guacamole,  orchid-scented candles, and camomile ironing water. 

And here they are, selling a 'Good Ordinary Claret' at £4.99, around half the price of Berry Bros’ offering. 

Understandably, given it is their claret you are buying, Berry Bros feature themselves on their label.  Waitrose choose not to follow suit. (Perhaps because the most widely circulated picture of a Waitrose is this.) 

Instead, their claret bears a hideous pictorial label with perspective problems. It looks less like a chateau and vineyard, and more like a country cottage with a badly trimmed hedge.

On the back, they have helpfully put a little map, in case we’re not sure where Bordeaux is. They don’t have to do this at Berry Bros, because their customers have forebears who actually owned Bordeaux.

But one may say that the label is neither here nor there, since if we are drinking traditional claret in traditional claret manner, we will be decanting it. It is a matter of some concern that a proper claret jug now seems only to make an appearance as the trophy of the British Open. But of course, Berry Bros sell two – bottle size and, rather magnificently I feel, magnum size. Waitrose’s parent, John Lewis, sells an impressive 32 decanters –  but claret jugs – none. Says it all, really.

It is a matter of painful regret that I have drunk as many bottles of £4.99 wines as I have good clarets, so I feel qualified to say that the Waitrose wine falls firmly into the former category. Its initial hit of vinegar mercifully softens in the glass, but leaves behind a less aggressive but also less flavoursome wine, without any of the fragrance or finesse which Bordeaux should achieve. Its blandness makes it more drinkable than other harsher wines at the price. But I’d feel sorry for anyone who thought they were getting even ordinary claret, let alone good. And why might they think they could get that for £4.99? Because Waitrose tells them so.

At £9, Berry Bros’ Good Ordinary Claret is not cheap. But, it’s the real deal. In that now all too commonplace phrase, it does exactly what it says on the tin. Although it doesn’t come in one.

Their Good Ordinary Claret gets customer comments from the likes of Will (of course) from Shropshire (naturally). “Great wine for a boys shooting weekend,” he says.

Thanks for that, Will. We’ll tell the lads in Peckham.

PK

Song - John Dryden; Californian Wines

CJ is away this week - so, as with last year's offering from William Burroughs, Sediment takes the opportunity to present another discovery from the wine/literature interface.

John Dryden (1631 - 1700) was a man of parts: critic, dramatist, satirist, translator, Poet Laureate. He is best-remembered today for such poems as Annus Mirabilis (1667) and Absalom and Achitophel (1681) – quasi-epic in form, often tinged with satirical wit; dramas such as All For Love (1678) and Marriage à la Mode (1673); essays - Of Dramatic Poesie (1667) and Defence of the Epilogue (1672); and a host of shorter poems, some playful in tone (Rondelay; Song - Sylvia the Fair), others threnodic (On the Death of Mr. Purcell). So central was he to the culture of Restoration England, that – in the literary world at least – the latter part of the seventeenth century became known as the Age of Dryden.

This little-known Song is a relatively early work, dating from 1661: a modestly comic adversion to the perils of drink. Does it deserve a larger reputation? 

Well, while it displays some typically Drydenesque metrical daring, its effects seem, all the same, underpowered; and its reliance on Caesarean imagery, predictable. As an apprentice piece, therefore, it's bearable; but not much more.

The only thing to make it stand out is this curious anomaly - spotted by the Sediment research team a while ago: the poem is an acrostic, in which the first letter of every line, read from top to bottom, spells out a name. In this case, JACKTONE RANCH, nowadays associated with a popular Californian wine range. Coincidence? Prescience? How could Dryden have known of Californian wines, three hundred and sixty years ago? And why this particular brand? The mystery remains. As the does the poem itself:

Song

Just Caesar, whom the world obeyed,

Augustus Great, proud Tiberine

Could ne'er have drunk, sure ne'er have made

Kind Bacchus! such an ardent wine.

Tell Princes, Kings; tell France; tell Spain

Of Hippocrene

Nectarine

Empurpled as Augustus' train.

Recalling this alone:

All men are free to drown their sorrow -

Not Caesar only – and to sell the morrow

Cheap. But this once done –

How costly seems the morning sun!

JD