The Wines That Made Us (8): Martini

Martini is a mystery. It's one of the most familiar brands in the world, it's given its name to the most famous of all cocktail drinks, for some of us it still rings a distant answering bell as the quintessence of a certain kind of Eurotrash High Life, but how often have I ever drunk the stuff? How often have you? I mean, it's culturally ubiquitous but at the same time invisible. Just last weekend I made some - though I say so myself - killer Dry Martinis. The gin was Silent Pool (terrific) and the vermouth was Dolin (ditto). Plus a twist of lemon, not an olive, that's the way I roll. But not a drop of actual Martini. Maybe I should have announced these beverages as old-fashioned Gin & Frenchies but does anyone do that these days? And why do I feel no compunction at all about not using original Martini vermouth?

A five-minute trawl of Google reveals not much about the business behind the drink - Martini & Rossi - except the unsurprising truth that Martini began as an Italian vermouth company in the mid-nineteenth century, reaching the New York market in the late 1860s. The first Dry Martini cocktail arrived, probably in New York, at the start of the twentieth century - although the drink's name may actually be a corruption of Martinez, the guy who first mixed gin and vermouth together. Since then, interest has mostly swirled around the exact ratio of vermouth to gin, plus whatever interventions (brine for a Dirty Martini; olive or twist; vermouth mixtures, like two-stroke petrol; ice or no ice) the mixer may or may not be keen on. I am not much better off for knowing this.

So I go out and buy a whole litre of the stuff, in a blousy screwtop bottle slathered in Martini-isms and try it out. I know I've drunk it before, somewhere, but a kind of guilt obliges me to get the taste authentically, here and now. It's the Bianco, the one you're supposed to take long, with a mixer, or as it comes, with a lump of ice. I pick the latter, try and few mouthfuls and, yes, there are botanicals swirling around, plus an aromatic headiness, not necessarily in a good way, more like stale perfume on a cashmere sweater, but I suppose there might be times when that's the experience I might crave, plus a tough terminal coating on the back teeth. The label suggests drinking it long with tonic water but it's already sticky and sugary enough as it is and anyway, if I want to drink Sprite, I can. And now I have 90cl of Martini Bianco bulging away on the liquor tray and I can foresee the awful stuff going with me to the grave, endlessly undrunk, brassily insistent, and I paid £10 for it, on offer.

So it's not the taste and it never has been the taste. Which only leaves one thing to account for its bothersome presence in my mind and indeed in the mind of PK and others of our generation: the adverts. You know what I'm talking about, they're all over YouTube, It's the left one...it's the right one...it's Martini, we used to sing, back in the Seventies. Somehow these ads appropriated a particular iconography all for themselves - the Mediterranean sunlight, the fancy blondes, the fast cars, the megalithic tumblers chinking in close-up, the James Hunt costumed morons leering at the controls of a speedboat, the promise of a brown fortified wine to set your day straight. No-one else came close. And when this cataclysm of kitsch wasn't blaring at us in the cinemas we had it silently reproduced in full-colour magazine ads, a kind of top-up before the next time we went out to watch Diamonds Are Forever or Shaft. And yet - adverts and motor racing sponsorship: is that really all it came down to?

The answer has to be yes: so far as I can see, no encounter with basic, raw, Martini is ever going to be anything other than puzzling and inconsequential. Trouble is, I can't think of anything else - even allowing for the intercessions of time and senility - whose essence has been so mediated by the publicity that went with it - that exists, basically, as a thing advertised rather than as a thing. David Bowie? National Savings Certifcates? NATO? Fondue? Quadrophonic hi-fi? Any time, any place, anywhere...There's a wonderful world you can share... I'm wondering, could we just leave it at that? Keep these imperishable sentiments without having to tangle with the vermouth? On this occasion, isn't the advertising the thing with the real value?

CJ

The Wines That Made Us (7): Paul Masson

There’s one thing which people particularly remember about Paul Masson wine, and it’s not the flavour, or the advertising, or the fact it was American. It’s that it came in a carafe.



Were we once really naïve enough in our wine drinking to find wine which came in a carafe more appealing than wine which came in a bottle? Did we believe that wine from a carafe was somehow more authentic? And as we grasped and hoisted it by the neck, just like a real carafe full of really decanted wine in a real “continental” restaurant, did we feel somehow more authentic?



Visit any student’s room in the late 1970s, and you’d see an empty Paul Masson carafe sitting on a shelf. Perhaps it was waiting to be used as a flower vase – of which, as they used to say, there were two chances: fat, and slim. Perhaps it was waiting to be reused as a carafe, in the unlikely circumstance that one would buy either a wine so good that it needed decanting, or a wine so bad that one wanted to pretend it was Paul Masson.



Or perhaps, without displaying the serried empty bottles of a dipsomaniac, we simply wanted to tell visitors that hey, I’m one of these new, cosmopolitan, worldly young Brits you’ve been hearing about – who drink wine.



The fact that this wine was American almost passed us by. For one thing, in those days, producers could throw around French terms like Burgundy and Champagne with impunity, so we didn’t really know what it was that we were drinking. A Rare Premium California Burgundy? If you say so… 



And also, the brand played itself off against Europe in its marketing. “Paul Masson is America’s best-selling premium wine in Europe,” ran one ad. “And you can’t fool Europeans about wine.” Well, back then you could stick wine in a carafe, and pretend that it’s the sort of thing served to a table in a continental café, and you could certainly fool us.



But they mainly used another, more famous advertising slogan: Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time. Was this really such a selling point? Just where exactly was all this immature wine we were being threatened with? Would we even have recognised immature wine if someone had sold it?



Paul Masson used Orson Welles in their advertising, a man whose girth was rapidly increasing in inverse relation to his reputation. In those days, tasting notes appear to have been refreshingly basic, but even so they were ripe for a sort of “cut through the bullshit” ad campaign. “Experts say Paul Masson Cabernet Sauvignon is a mature, complex wine with nice wood”, said Orson. (Perhaps “nice wood” is not a choice of words one would use today.) 



“What they’re trying to say is…it tastes good.”



Orson was eventually relieved of his duties, leaving behind an immensely entertaining outtake of one of his TV ads,  showing what happened when too much of Mr Masson’s product had been consumed. Or had it? One story is that Orson was abruptly fired for admitting on a chat show that he never actually drank their wine. But an account executive contended that Welles was dropped when Paul Masson introduced ''light'' wines: ''Obviously, that would not be appropriate.''



He was replaced by John Gielgud, repeating his role as a disdainful butler from the movie success, Arthur. Sir John took a $1 million fee, on condition that the ads would not be shown in Britain, a condition which YouTube now entertainingly flaunts. Gielgud is quoted as finding the filming sessions “exhausting and somewhat humiliating”; but the great actor said that in addition to the colossal fee, he found further compensation in the way that the Paul Masson agency paid “full attention to my comforts in the way of limousines, suites at the Savoy, flowers and cigarettes provided!”



Astonishingly to me, I could still find Paul Masson wines in their carafes today. Not in a suite at the Savoy, no, but in a convenience store in Hammersmith. The carafe used to have an embossed glass seal on the shoulder, presumably dropped as being too expensive now, but which reduced the container’s distressing similarity to a bottle for a medical sample. (This was particularly important with the white wine.) And the carafe seems somehow cruder, thinner, cheaper than I recall; I found myself tapping it with a finger to check that it is still, actually, glass.



The simplicity of the formerly oval, type-only label has also been replaced, with an awkward, assymetric job bearing an image of the original Paul Masson winery, where the wine is no longer produced. And there’s a plastic lid which you push off with your thumbs, and can pop back on. Am I alone in remembering a tear-off foil seal? I certainly can’t recall any resealing requirement back in the day…



The wine itself initially has the nose of a decent, fruity Pinot Noir. Hello, I thought. But that fades rapidly, and a taste of bitter cherries tips over into plain bitterness, a sort of wrestle between liquorice and a chewed aspirin. 



But the most disturbing aspect? It stained the carafe. It stained the carafe!! I don’t know whether to blame the wine, or the carafe, but… Yes, my liver’s suffered a bit of wear and tear, but can I let you know if it actually needs redecorating?



Once, it was as if there was another, wonderfully stylish world of carafes and the like waiting somewhere across the English Channel. Forty Years On – and we are so sophisticated, so continental ourselves, that “a carafe of red” is a routine offer in UK restaurants. But hopefully, it will not bear a Paul Masson label.



PK

The Wines That Made Us (6): Nicolas

Was Nicolas the first wine I ever drank? Could well be. It appeared at the family dining table four? five? decades ago and I was encouraged, in the French manner, to try it with water, half-and-half, as a way of developing a taste for wine without becoming a dipsomaniac before I'd even reached my teens. It's horrible, of course, red wine and London tapwater, but I went through with it because if that's what the French did, then it was not only the right thing to do, but the right Gallic thing, like the subjunctive mood. I wanted to be cool enough to be French, was what it came down to.

I still don't really know who or what Nicolas Wines is or are. They started in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century - this much they claim on one of their websites - and were bottlers and distributors of their own brands as well as being merchants for other people's wines. Which makes them sound like one among thousands of others. The only difference being that in Britain, or at least in our morose trench of the North London suburbs, they were France itself, a metonymy which drove us wild over the roast beef and two veg when their product started to make its presence felt at mealtimes.

How did we know that Nicolas encapsulated the entirety of everyday French culture? Because the ads told us so. The Sunday supplements - in themselves an invitation to a new world of heightened awarenesses - ran these full-pagers depicting what looked like a Parisian milk float doing the rounds of an arrondissement - only instead of milk from the Unigate Dairy, it was delivering a litre or two of Nicolas, the stuff which, it seemed, kept every Parisian household en forme for the rest of the day. Nicolas' Vin de Table or Vin Ordinaire - terms which have tragically more or less vanished from the world of wine drinking - thereby combined the idea of wine - a costly, hedonistic rarity for most Brits - with quotidian necessity in a way which we'd read about or seen in the movies, but had scarcely, if ever, encountered. It was breathtaking in its relaxed, winey, maturity. Better yet, it was authentic in a way the other competition for our minds and stomachs - Blue Nun, Mateus Rosé, Goldener Oktober - could never manage. It even had a plastic bung rather than a cork: that's how real it was.

But then, back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, France still had a stranglehold on the theory and practice of the good life. Any Gallicism you could think of was a glimpse of better things: savoir-vivre, couture, insouciance, crème de la crème, liaison, tendresse, Belle Époque, entre nous, avant-garde, chic, soigné; I could go on. A scant twenty miles across the Channel, the French were so different, so highly-developed, that the Lyons (as in Joe Lyons) coffee company actually advertised, in British publications, its fresh ground standard roast with the words Une recette qu'on ne trouve pas dans les livres de cuisine, a sentence now impenetrable to almost everyone. At the same time, French cinema still mattered, the true haute couture was French, gastronomy took its cues from French haute cuisine, the Citroën DS was still in production, the South of France was home to Picasso and Chagall, and Francis Poulenc had only recently died, in Paris. Nicolas was an ambassador, in its way, to all this. Did it even matter what it tasted like?

All of which would be fine, except for one problem. I'm starting to wonder if perhaps I haven't remembered more than there was to remember: that I'm indulging a false memory. For a start, can can you still get Nicolas? In this country? Well, yes, there are still Nicolas shops, but the things they sell under their own name are generic-looking Chardonnays and Sauvignon Blancs and Côtes du Rhônes, nothing to shout about, no sign of the big old bottles with the plastic bungs. Nor can I find any evidence of the advert which changed my life - the one with the wine float trawling the backstreets of the arrondissement. I've got one (see above) which ticks some of the right boxes, but it's not the wine float, it's just a bottle and a Duralex and a newspaper. And a piece of baguette. Which is good, but beyond that? Added to which, no-one I have mentioned the imperishable late Sixties Nicolas to, has anything like the same recollections of it, if any.

My memory is an undependable ally at the best of times and it's starting to look as if my whole wine-drinking life may be premised on an initial lie. Which then raises the question: do I prefer the lie to whatever the truth may actually be? How much do I want to cling on to this misapprehension? On this occasion, I think I'm going to have to say quite a lot.

CJ