Empty statements – what your recycled wine bottles say about you

I’ve been looking into my neighbours’ recycling boxes. I mean, not looking into them as such, not really looking per se, just sort of… glancing as I pass.

I can’t help but be interested in the empty wine bottles they contain. Ooh, I think, they’ve been drinking a lot of champagne, wonder what they’re celebrating?... That’s a bit of a low rent red…Hmm, fell for that one, did they?...Now that’s a bit nice…etc.

Wouldn't you? Don’t you? Worst of all, is someone doing it to me?

We don’t normally have to make a public declaration of our wine drinking. What we’ve drunk, and how much of it, in the past week. But the glass recycling box, sitting outside your house, does exactly that. And if like me you’re concerned about what a wine says about you as a host, it stands to reason that you’re worried about what neighbours think of the wines you’ve been drinking.

In my case, there’s quite a range. There are the occasional indulgences, that I hope someone passing recognises I had the knowledge and good taste to buy. There are the midweek supper wines, which might indicate a certain shrewd balance of quality and price. But unfortunately, there are also the appalling offers, discount fiascos and bottom-shelf bargains to which I’ve fallen prey, which I hate to think my neighbours might consider to be my wines of choice.

There’s the inevitable judgment about consumption. With a weekly collection, there is no hiding place. The neighbours don’t know that I sometimes keep empty bottles for weeks, to refer back to the labels because I’m writing about them. I do. But I have enough trouble sometimes persuading Mrs K that not all of my recycled bottles were drunk in the last seven days. So my neighbours must inevitably assume that they are looking at my weekly consumption. 

And then there are the cases, because cardboard goes in another recycling box, and there’s the flattened case for a dozen bottles of this, or half a dozen of that. Immediately, of course, passers-by are thinking aha, there’s someone who’s sufficiently into wine to buy it by the case. To consume it by the case. And Mrs K is thinking aha, I didn’t see another case arriving…

I think anyone would be suitably indignant if the council said that you had to put up a notice outside your house every Tuesday, detailing just what you had drunk that week. It would be a pretty serious posted declaration; hardly Martin Luther, but still. I’ve bought it so I’ll drink it is one thing; but I’ve bought it, drunk it, and I’m happy to tell every passer-by is quite another.

I could, I suppose, take them all to a bottle bank. Unlike a weekly collection, this has the advantage that no-one knows how long you have been hoarding up your bottles. It also has the childish attraction of hearing the bottles smash inside the bank, as you shove them in. Smash! Smash! It’s like state-sponsored vandalism.

But therein lies its fault; shoving bottle after bottle in, one by one, is a pain in the…arm. And somehow, you always stain your cuff with a little dribble of red wine from one bottle which runs out and up your wrist. 

Or I could try recycling them myself. I have seen bottles turned (or “upcycled”, as I believe they say in craft markets) into tablelights,  chandeliers,  flower vases, distinctly hazardous wall lamps , and, er, things. 

There is one simple but significant drawback to these items. They’re all horrible. Deeply, deeply horrible. I am not about to jeopardise years of acquired good taste, not to mention a happy marriage, by decorating my home with what are still clearly old bottles.

And this do-it-yourself business is all very well, until “yourself” is “me”. I am not remotely convinced that I could cut drinking glasses from a wine bottle without the need for an ambulance. Readers of a certain age will remember television ads for the legendary Ronco Bottle & Jar Cutter, a tool which in my hands could only lead to reconstructive mouth surgery. 

So you find me, out in the dark, stockinged feet, rearranging my recycling box. Trying to move the contents around quietly. (Here’s a tip: you can’t.) Pushing the bargain bottles out of sight. Turning bottles around so that the labels don’t show. 

And probably suggesting to the neighbours far more about my sanity than any empty wine bottle ever could.

PK

Transitional: Morrisons' Chardonnay

So I went to a Morrisons supermarket and bought a bottle of their own brand South African smooth and fruity Chardonnay. It cost £4.99. So what?

Only this. A couple of weeks ago, Morrisons caused a minor panic in the world of food and drink retailing by announcing a new and aggressive price-cutting strategy: so aggressive, in fact, that their profits would halve over the next few years, as the price war took effect. This in turn knocked £2 billion off the value of all listed UK supermarkets (Morrisons included), as the announcement sank in: the race for the mainstream, it now appeared, would be straight to the bottom.

Why are Morrisons putting themselves in this position? Because they've concluded that the supercheap German invaders - Lidl and Aldi, basically - have won the battle for Everyman's wallet, and that there is no longer any point in attempting the we-do-everything rationale which has driven supermarket growth over the last twenty years. Rationalised product lines, great value, stark simplicity, no tiresome coffee machines - that's the plan, apparently, and the price-wise British are going to break down Morrisons' doors in their eagerness to get at the goods. Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury will look on in horror, and, to a lesser extent, given their higher-end clientéle, Waitrose - leaving Morrisons supreme.

Thing is, do I believe them? After all, Morrisons have always been a funny kind of enterprise, not least because Ken Morrison, the man who made the chain huge in the north of England before taking them south at the turn of the century, insisted on having a dedicated pie counter in every store: a typically belligerent Yorkshire antirefinement which made me want to sneer out loud every time I read about it. Here in the south they were unknown until suddenly they were everywhere, often in absolutely huge supermarkets which they'd bought off Safeway. The old northern Morrisons was a byword for good business practice and strong growth; the new, national, Morrisons became known for a shortage of interesting product lines, a failure to invest in their IT systems, scant online presence, and a general sense of having overreached themselves. Reinvention is going to be hard.

And it matters because of the drink. Wine = supermarket wine, most of the time, for most of us. And the big supermarkets, with their ungovernably vast ranges and their insanity-provoking pricing philosophies, have used the fantasy of limitless choice as a way to flog us a load of indifferent wines at tiresomely inflated prices. But will Morrisons' bold new plan compel the others to ditch senseless variety and two-faced pricing, in favour of simplicity and clarity, just like you get in Lidl?

To say nothing of quality. When Morrisons made their news, everyone parenthetically raved about the great value of Lidl/Aldi produce. What no-one seemed to be saying was that a lot of Lidl's stuff is not just cheap, but good. Yes, they have a weakness for bin-ends of frogman's flippers/assorted fusewire/lengths of plastic sheeting; and as many have said, you can get some great stuff there but you can't do your week's shop. But their booze is always worth checking out - genuinely Continental in its one-size-fits-all approach. Can a bunch of chippy Northerners do the same?

Well, just to show solidarity, I went straight to my nearest Morrisons, pleasant enough store, fairly busy, helpful staff, Tescoesque punters milling around, slightly undecided wine section wrestling for floorspace with the discount ciders and jereboams of knock-off vodka. I got my Chardonnay (rashly adding a sub-£5 Chianti and a smarter Fitou at £5.99), took it home and drank it. It was okay, more dentist's rinse than Chardonnay, but served headache-cold, it passed the time. Thing is, Lidl would have had it on offer at £3.99, maybe even less. And since it's all about the price point, we can only conclude that Morrisons are at least 20% off the mark. All right, it's far too early to tell; a return trip in ten months' time ought to reveal a different store altogether.

If, by then, it is a different store altogether, can we hail the start of a new realism in cheap wine? Will Morrisons live up to their thrilling promise? Will they stop Tesco in their tracks? I'd like to think so; but at the same time, I have doubts as big as an Aldi dogfood multipack, that such a thing will actually happen in my lifetime.

CJ

Keep Calm – it's A Bottle of Red

There are certain High Street establishments which, however professional their service, seem compelled to employ a supposedly humorous title. The hairdressers, who clearly think it immensely amusing to make wordplay on ‘cuts’, or ‘crops’, or ‘heads’. The fish & chip shops, whose owners are presumably laughing so hard that they never think to see if anyone else has punned on what a great ‘plaice’ they are.

It’s a bit sad. In the same vein, I have always regarded car bumper stickers and slogan t-shirts as graffiti for people who can’t write their own. 

Perhaps it will all die out now that Twitter provides everyone with 140 characters of opportunity for wit. (Although Twitter has led to some particularly feeble product humour…) 

Some things deserve to be taken seriously. True, there is a firm of building contractors entertainingly called Underpin & Makegood. And I’m sorry to say that there is a rather good wine merchant called Philglas & Swiggot.  But where wine is concerned, that is as far as I am prepared to go.

I don’t want my wine turned into a joke. I don’t laugh at wines with names like Longue-dog, Goats Do Roam  and Chat-en-oeuf.  I doubt whether the people who get the jokes on Languedoc, Cotes du Rhone and Chateauneuf find them hugely entertaining. Except, perhaps, those who also run hairdressers or fish & chip shops.

And even they might struggle to be amused by A Bottle of Red.

In case you’ve had your head in a bucket for the last few years, the story of the rediscovery of Keep Calm and Carry On, a World War II information poster designed to be used if Britain was invaded, is detailed here. 

It became incredibly popular when our current government started using the term ‘austerity’, as if we were all going to revert to powdered eggs and ration books. And when we didn’t, and it became clear that we could still afford haircuts and fish suppers, those who thought they had a sense of humour revelled in altering the slogan to read Keep Calm and… make bacon pancakes/go shopping/have a beer/eat chocolate/do nothing…

It became so popular that you can now go on to websites, insert your own words, and create your own version to put on to mugs or t-shirts. Or, presumably, wine labels. Which is quite possibly what happened with this bunch of wine-marketing muppets.

Let’s have a laugh, they presumably thought. Let’s pinch the Keep Calm… design. Let’s package a wine as if it’s a 1940s utility product. Let’s sell it for £5, not £4.99, just to reinforce how down-to-earth it is. Let’s put government-style instructions on the labels. 

And nobody said…let’s not.

As my old school teacher used to say, it’s not clever and it’s not funny. Particularly when the actual product is as poor as their sense of humour.

They have taken the utility product “joke” on to the back label. “We reserve,” it says, “the right to restrict supplies of this product to one per household during times of national crisis.” Well, let me tell you chaps, you don’t need to worry, because once I have wiped the tears of mirth from my eyes, I shall be restricting supplies of this product myself, to the one my household had the misfortune to take in.

There are only two words on the labels which actually describe the flavour of the wine itself, and both of them are what (to continue our connections with wartime) Winston Churchill would have described as terminological inexactitudes. The wine is neither ‘soft’, nor ‘fruity’. More accurate descriptions might include ‘acrid’, ‘bitter’ and ‘singularly unpleasant’. It is a powerfully nasty wine, with little flavour but an overwhelming astringency; it does, as befits its concept, recall essential household products, but Brasso, Copydex and Airwick are not intended for consumption. 

Perhaps purchasers imagine they will get a (brief) moment of amusement, when they present this to a host, and quip “Well, you said to bring A Bottle of Red – and here it is!!” Collapse of stout party.

But sadly, after that, you have to get through something significantly longer lasting than any moment of amusement. Someone is going to drink this stuff. 

And believe me, you won’t be laughing then.

PK