‘Look at this!’ he said conspiratorially, and pulled open a drawer to reveal a 1947 Sauternes, its wine the colour of honey, its label held on with clingfilm. We stood there for a moment, just looking at it together, grinning. Just looking.
And then I left.
CJ
Straight to the point: Baron Saint Jean is – or was – a vin de pays built out of what are conscientiously known on the label as regional grapes, incorporating Grenache and Merlot and a couple whose names I couldn’t read, plus possibly some more, not specified. Good with toad in the hole a cardboard sign above the shelf announced at my nearest branch of German supermarket giants Aldi, which made a refreshing change from all those reflexive nods to game and cheese, but how do we feel about such candour while we’re shopping for wine?
Anyway. I wanted to like this drink for all the obvious reasons – screw top, very cheap, red, unpretentious Aldi sales environment, a general ideological predisposition in favour of modern affordable mass-produced everyday wines – but I have to say that I was getting nervous as I tumbled out into the car park in order to drive my loot away. Why? Because I am starting to acquire a degree of nervousness about very cheap booze in this country, and am wondering if, long-term, I have the constitution for rock-bottom wines. And the Baron Saint Jean was a bit of a test. Handled with extreme care, it was just about drinkable. The first gusts from the neck of the bottle practically blinded me, and if you didn’t give it time to shake off the cellulose and vinegar fumes while it was sitting in the glass, your mouth would pucker up like a drawstring pouch. Sipped respectfully, it turned into a blackcurranty kind of sluicing narrowly covering the roof of the mouth, followed by a hot gas blast in the back of the throat, an impression of plastic adhesive, ending with a flourish of underarm deodorant spreading down towards the lungs. Not great, but not something you could feel indifferent towards, either.
Why, then, was I drinking it at all? Apart from the usual reasons? Well, the British government keeps deciding that something must be done about binge drinking in this country. And what it has recently decided is that there ought to be some kind of minimum price attached to alcoholic beverages, to deter people at a certain level in society from buying too much of the stuff and going out and barfing all over town centres.
A closed world to me, obviously, because I’m too old and pathetic to go out drinking and fighting and barfing but: what struck both myself and PK (quite independently) was the fact that when this story broke, a bottle of red wine was displayed on the BBC News as Exhibit A in the government’s case for the prosecution, and this bottle purported to cost no more than a wildly irresponsible £2.09. Yes, £2.09 for a full 75cl bottle of some kind of red grape-based adult beverage.
That was pretty cheap, it must be said (although the inhabitants of Spain, France, Italy, Greece and so on would find it provocatively oversold, given the likely contents) and yet I’ve never seen anything quite as bargain-basement on sale in London. Can you only get this stuff in Doncaster? Nuneaton? Sunderland? Cardiff?
So: how far do you have to go to get near this price in the South-East; and what’s the stuff taste like when you’ve found it?
Clearly a job for me rather than PK but given that I didn’t feel much like exerting myself, I cut to the chase and expedited a bottle of red at Aldi, going for £2.99. The price was near enough – that magical £2-and-something price point – and all I had to do was go to Hounslow to get it.
As for question 2? Obviously (see above) it wasn’t good. I normally welcome mass-produced tanker wines as opening up a world of accessible non-elitist cheap’n’cheerful wine drinking. But even I couldn’t get on with the Baron.
What, then, is this stuff for? This kind of drink is not a drink anyone would want to drink. It is a means to an end: just there to get you into a different psychic state. Which poses another question: if the government were to slap a few more pence in duty on the price of a bottle of (say) the Baron, would it really put off a determined, impecunious, undiscerning wine drinker, whether they wanted to consume the Baron with a nice plate of toad in the hole, or neck it in ten minutes flat and go out and break something? Anyone who drinks this grog from choice will not be easily deterred by an extra 30 or 40p on the price.
I thought I’d never say this, but the problem is less to do with the price and more to do with the terrible quality. The harmfulness of the wine lies in the fact that it’s extremely difficult to treat as wine, to develop a more-than-utilitarian relationship with it. You might as well drink anti-freeze or cough syrup, for all the enjoyment there is. And the only way to break a causal connection which posits wine as a drug and not much else – and seriously modify people’s behaviour with respect to it – is to treat booze like cigarettes and price it completely out of the market.
Is this really anyone’s idea of an intended consequence? Even the British government’s?
PK
What is that clanking noise? It is the sound of the indulgent wine drinker, rushing to enjoy a supermarket discount off six or more bottles of wine.
You know when supermarkets are running one of these sporadic offers, ‘25 per cent off any six bottles’, because you will be passed in the street by someone bent almost double, arms like a baboon, clanking like Ernie the milkman. Me.
The sound of clanking has a particular resonance in the world of wine. In the days before security constraints, the clanking of bottles was the soundtrack of the airport departure lounge. People were always lugging back multiple bottles of cheap plonk they had bought on their holiday, ignoring suggestions that ‘it won’t travel’ with a determined ‘Yes it bloody well will!’ They would then struggle to stuff into the overhead locker a barrel bag containing half a dozen bottles of wine, all going in different directions like cats in a sack.
Nowadays, the clanking is the sound of multiple purchase, which has to be disguised when you get back from the shops. You can try the CJ tactic, of calling out as he arrives home, ‘I got some more olive oil …!’ But clanking is what we in the drinking game call a bit of a giveaway.
I presume that when it comes to these six-bottle offers the supermarkets are imagining one of two scenarios. Perhaps you will have the wine delivered – but I shall write anon of my problems with wine deliveries, which invariably come when I am either out or in the toilet. Or perhaps you are simply going to add half a dozen bottles of wine to your trolley of weekly shopping? This is really not advisable when my spouse is pushing said trolley. If you think there are arguments over HS2 …
So I set off solo to Sainsbury’s on a quiet afternoon to benefit from their offer. Now, you can’t really stride back up the High Road with a case of six bottles under your arm. It’s that bit too heavy, and that bit too big, and a cumbersome shape to carry as well. And you look like a looter.
But if you unload it into shopping bags, it clanks and clonks as you walk home, announcing to everyone that you buy your booze several bottles at a time.
Oh yes, we know it’s going into the cellar to drink over weeks and months ahead, but it sounds to everyone else as if you consume in such quantity that you just had to buy half a dozen bottles, there and then. If it was for a special occasion, they think, you would have made a special