A word in your ear: Chinon, Domaine du Colombier

Psst! Dancer’s Delight, at Kempton, 3.30. Oh, and Chinon, Domaine du Colombier, at Sainsbury’s, 7.00.

That’s how I sometimes feel about wine recommendations. It’s like being offered a racing tip. Or an insider steer on the stock market. “Blue Horseshoe loves Annacot Steel”. It’s still a gamble, but at least if it doesn’t turn out well there’s someone else to blame.

CJ lost faith in recommendations a long time ago. During a vain attempt to buy some highly-publicised orange wine he finally acknowledged “one of the most basic rules of wine-buying: that anything publicised in a newspaper will be unobtainable the moment you take an interest in it. I know that.”

Because of course, wine’s a limited commodity. You can’t simply produce more, like a well-reviewed book. So if everyone rushes to buy it, it can leave the shelves as bare as an Iron Curtain grocer’s. Although despite the increasing popularity of wine, I think we’re unlikely to see recommendations inducing a Black Friday brawl over the Pinot Grigio. 

And often, the columnists find and recommend wines which are off the beaten track – or, as we prefer to say, aisle. Or they recommend something which, even if affordable by the bottle, has to be ordered from somewhere remote, or is only sold by the case. So a £10 bottle which you might have tried becomes a rather more daunting £120 punt.

Sometimes, though, it all comes together. A credible critic, a wine available by the bottle, a reasonable price, and a retailer I can get to. As in the Observer, where David Williams recommended this bottle of £7 Chinon from Sainsbury’s.

Like any inside tip, I kept this information to myself, plus a few hundred thousand Observer readers. I sidled nonchalantly into my Sainsbury’s wine aisle, to avoid alerting the other shoppers and inducing the shopping frenzy of an IKEA opening. Easy, easy, nothing to see here…only to find that the supermarket itself had stuck the recommendation on to the shelf.

I presume this is because you’re being tempted to try something which costs £7, a relatively expensive purchase by Sainsbury standards, let alone CJ’s. There’s little point them putting up reviews of, say, hummus, because you’d only be spending 90p. And if you consumed seven quid’s worth in one go, you’d probably end up the colour of a sandy beach.

Or is it because critic, supermarket and winemaker all recommend this as a red to be drunk chilled – and if only one of them said it, your average Sainsbury customer would refuse to believe them? “Great for chilling down”, it declares, although there are those who might be confused as to whether that refers to the wine, or the mindset.

(“If there’s one thing I know, Doris, it’s that you don’t drink red wine cold.” So no, chum, there isn’t even one thing you know. Let me get to the checkout first, before you try and pay with a ten shilling note.)

Incredibly, despite the review, the price, the persuasively authentic-looking label, and presenting on the eve of a heatwave the advice about drinking it chilled, there was some Chinon left. People, as Jim Morrison said, are strange.

My bottle spent one of the hottest days of the year chilling in the fridge. And it was a perfect summer evening drink; bright in colour, a slight aroma of the ferme, and a peppery, cherryish flavour. Chilled down like that it was light, refreshing, and it tasted authentically French, in that way that New World wines do not. For £7 it transported me to a French table far more cheaply than the Eurotunnel. And the queues were shorter.

But of course, it’ll all be gone by now.

PK

Dry Land. Some Californian Red

So the wife and I are just back from our sailing trip, filthy, bruised, exhausted, scorched by the wind and sun to the point where we both now resemble Julio Iglesias, and quite literally the first thing I do is sit down and ponder Sediment.

Only problem is that for the last three and a bit weeks, wine has been so far down my list of priorities as to be virtually invisible. All that matters in a cruise to the West Country is making it to the end of the day without falling overboard or freezing to death. What you put in your mouth after that - and I can now tell you that a baked ham will not last three weeks in an ageing boat fridge without developing at least some mould - is starch, fat, and narcotics with a light top dressing of prayer.

You might ask why I put myself through this experience. Truth is, the wife really likes sailing, and I was doing it to keep her happy, an occasional weekend potter around the Solent not being enough as far as she's concerned. Also, the West Country in June can be - indeed, was - quite lovely, the little harbours at which we turned up all glazed with solstice light and beauty. So it is not without reward. Equally, it is not an existence that PK would understand. It is not about dinner parties and tablecloths and decanters and social gênes and all that crap. It isn't in the least winecentric.

In fact, the only time wine made it onto my front page was with a Calfornian red which I am convinced in retrospect was an own brand which we bought at the Co-Op in pretty St Mawes, Cornwall. It had a gee-whizz label, that's for sure, broadly hinting at Rodeo Drive and botched facelifts, and was made from, I think, Malbec and Petite Sirah.

Drinking-wise, on the other hand, it was so ape-like that I actually recoiled from the glass after the first swig, and stared at it as if it was throwing out cinders. Spangles and Drano came to mind, followed by a kind of dust-devil in the back of the throat, ending with a sensation of deep personal loss. And this after a day spent getting stuck in a ghastly fog bank at the entrance to Dartmouth: a long moment of terror topped off with a glassful of garbage.

The good news, though, was that this horrible drink eventually turned out to be sound enough, at least within the ethos of boat wine - two days of spiteful neglect, including some heavy-handed churning at sea, doing wonders for its approachability, taming the stuff to the point where I could drink it without crying. I even got quite fond of it. It was, it turned out, a rebel child, one whom no laws could control, but also a rebel who understood that sometimes we were all in this damn thing together, and that there were times when a chronic inability to play nice could transform itself into a steeliness, an inner resolve which compensated for any rough edges, any spontaneous belligerence, a wine with more heart than at first appeared, Godammit, it was a man's wine, that's what I'm trying to say.

The rest of the time? Gin and whisky, as much of them as I could lay my hands on. Not Lieutenant-Commander Tommy Woodrooffe level, but near enough. Right at the end we even acquired a sack of ice cubes. And some limes. If I'd been able to get some rum, Royal Navy style, I'd have had that, too. I mean, who ever drank a glass of wine as a sundowner? Just look at the picture, if you're not persuaded.

CJ

4 Bad Wine Drinking Habits

For most of us, nervousness about surveillance is not based upon its possible revelation of our major crimes, but of our minor ones. We’re not worried about a CCTV camera capturing us killing our spouse, but of it filming us picking our nose. And like all activities, wine drinking has its bad habits.
 
You know how it is. At the start of a dinner party, you’re obliged to give everyone an initial, equal portion of the really nice wine you’ve brought out especially for the occasion. But as the levels go down around the table, you notice that someone in the corner has hardly touched their glass. Perhaps they’re driving, perhaps they just don’t like powerful old clarets (there are, I am told, such people); but they politely accepted the first pour you offered, took one sip and drank no more.

And so, after the goodbyes have been said, and the arguments about Uber have subsided, you notice that there’s still a good portion sitting there on the table. A good portion, of a good wine.

So, what do you do? It seems almost blasphemous to pour it down the sink. Be honest;  there’s a terrible temptation to drink it there and then, to help fuel the clearing up, and to ease the tense discussion about why on earth you had to bring up that particular subject over the cheese.

in our e-book, Wining & Dining, CJ was scathing about this bad habit. Writing about the process of clearing up after a dinner party, he insisted that “You will not finish up any of the dregs, not unless you are actually sixteen years old.”
 
But what if we're not talking about “dregs”; what if we're talking about more than half a glass, about significant remains? As Dylan almost said, you just kind of wasted my precious wine. So, what about pouring significant remains back into the bottle for consumption the following night?

I mean, waste not, want not and all that. Do it quickly, before anyone notices, and it becomes just leftover wine in the bottle, to be acceptably polished off next day. Does it matter that it has been on a circuitous route via someone’s glass?
 
Here’s my final one. Reusing last night’s wine glass. It’s a regular night, you’re off to bed and, because your wine glass doesn’t fit in the dishwasher, you put it to one side to wash up the next day. Then, next day, one thing leads to another, yet surprisingly none of them leads to the sink. When it comes to supper time, you have half a bottle of wine to finish off – and the previous night’s glass is still sitting there, unwashed.

It has a little red stain in the bottom of the glass. A smidge on the rim. A speck of sediment maybe. Slightly crusty. But, with a twinge of guilt, you go ahead and pour in tonight’s helping of last night’s wine.

It would take more than a rinse to clean the glass. And anyway, a rinse would get water into the wine. And…it’s the same wine.

Oh, you could go into some saving-the-world number about using less water. About the folly of firing up a boiler to wash a single glass. About the waste of detergent. About unnecessarily dirtying a second glass.

But it’s just as much about laziness – although given today’s political obsession with “hard-working people”, laziness is presumably no longer acceptable, let alone a domestic ambition.

Perhaps there’s a touch of nostalgia in all of this, for those student days when so many of our habits were bad. Like sniffing your socks before you put them on?  Or, as Martin Amis wrote of the bachelor lifestyle, blowing your nose into a coffee filter?

And it could be worse. You could be swigging wine directly from the bottle. That would be a bad habit. No-one would do that.

PK