Here’s a word of advice for couriers. Wine is like a baby – better delivered when due.
Fortunately, I was not in the toilet. Also fortunately, I was closer to the front door than Mrs K.
Speed was of the essence. ‘Anything to sign?’ I asked brusquely, anticipating one of those ridiculous handheld electronic devices they ask you to ‘sign’ with a stylus. (Few of us have experience of writing on glass, apart from the ‘yoof’ who etch tags on to bus windows, and they are more likely to be recipients of a custodial sentence than a wine delivery.)
‘Just this piece of paper. They asked me to have one of those electronic things, and I said, “How’d you expect me to hold that and a case of wine?”’
Well, let’s not get into that on my doorstep right now, thank you very much. Last month we had 15 metres of skirting board delivered, and that chap managed it, but to be honest I just want to get this case inside and downstairs, before …
‘Is that something for me?’ Mrs K’s dulcet tones precede her steps downstairs. I am caught in the hallway, case in hands, like a dog with a string of sausages.
‘What?’
‘That box.’
I think I would be pushing my luck were I to retort, ‘What box?’
‘Ah. No. It’s just, er, a case of wine actually …’
‘Oh! A case of wine. A case.’ This emphasis does not mean that she suffers any category confusion about the actual concept of a case of wine. No: it is to convey that to her, ‘case’ suggests a suspect level of both consumption and expenditure.
Fortunately, my salvation is staring me in the face – almost literally, since I still have a case of wine clutched to my chest. On the top of the box is a sticker. In most cases, I would be embarrassed by it, since obviously I aspire to be the kind of person whose cases are labelled something like ‘12 x Latour’. However, this one reads ‘Under £6 Reds’.
I gesture towards it with my chin. Mrs K observes, then moves on, with a departing, descending ‘Hmmm …’, which, roughly translated, means ‘All right – this time …’
I take the case downstairs, and stash my embarrassingly cheap bottles away. But I wonder: why not save us all a load of trouble, and put those stickers on every case …?
CJ
One: So here we are, back in the South of France, just under the shoulder of Mont Ventoux, and our chums say, Let’s go to this cave, they’re advertising Champagne, no, not méthode Champenoise but actual Champagne, so we say, Fantastic, we haven’t been to a cave since almost this time last year, with you, as it happens, and off we go, down a deeply rutted French track, throwing up dust and gravel, sweltering slightly insanely in the heat, before drawing up in front of a nobly proportioned but apparently derelict château with an industrial crane sticking out of the top.
But what do you know? This is a work in progress: and yes, as we step over some power cables and a length of hose-pipe, it turns out that the Château la Croix des Pins is indeed in business, and has set out its stall in a freshly painted antechamber, formerly the private chapelle of the château – with, as a token of lingering piety, a couple of plaster seraphim on the wall behind the cash register.
What’s more, the instant we clear our throats, a very soignée young woman bursts out of a side door and starts flogging us the Château la Croix des Pins wine range, plus the champagne they seem to have the concession for down here, plus some gluey-looking stuff from Tunisia. She tells us a tale of decline and rebirth: the previous owner of the winery dies, the house starts to fall down, some bright young gunslingers with a hand in other wine-producing regions (hence the heterogeneous mixture) take over, they rebuild and re-invigorate the brand, and their stuff costs €7 and upwards a bottle. Her rhetoric is so seamless and so determined that we lapse into an admiring stupor as she collects more glassware, plus a bucket, plus more wines which we taste, repeatedly extending our glasses for a refill.
Actually, she (correctly) identifies me as the lustreless goob of the party and soon stops my refills, concentrating her energies on our markedly smarter friends. Who, in due course, buy some red and some champagne, and we all go home. And the red (not that it’s my place to criticise) tastes fine in what I think of as a light, Grenache-y way, nothing to make you tear your shirt off, but fine.
Two: I wander into my local Majestic Wine Warehouse. I am the only person there (a Monday morning, admittedly, and raining) but I am mercifully left to dicker around with the tasting wines, including a 2000 Chinon, a wine about which I know less than nothing, and which I consume in kingly solitude, noting that it is a) pretty nice and b) too expensive. At no point does anyone attempt to tell me the story of the chilly West London shed which Majestic have made their own. Nor does anyone slyly withhold the glassware from me at the tasting stall. There are no soignée young women, just a bloke in fishpaste-coloured shorts. Mildly glowing with Chinon, and glad to have been left alone, I scale down my pretensions and buy some 2009 Domaine Les Yeuses Merlot/Syrah Pays d’Oc.
This reveals itself later in the day to have a nose full of tar and tobacco, a mild cluster-bomb effect on the palate and gums, and a pleasingly cough-mixture finish. In other words, at £7.49 a bottle (including discounts) it is approximately £2 over my Platonic price point, but still worth it.
The problem, insofar as there is a problem, lies back in France, in their interpretation of tasting, the dégustation et vente you see all over the wine-growing regions.
How? Well, I used to cling to the idea that dégustation et vente allows you to try a wine and meet its producer without the same mercantile pressure that you experience when buying something in a wine shop. Of course, in a cave, there’s no escape from being eyeballed by the hungry proprietor, but I still like to imagine it as a meeting of individuals, rather than doomed participants in an ineluctable transaction.
And when we rocked up at Château la Croix des Pins, frankly, I was desperate to buy some drink, any drink, if only because it’s a cuddly, touristy thing to do and I wanted that kind of transaction, that escape from the Anglo-Saxon condition, that intimacy (however fake) with the wine-maker.
Instead it became one of those typically French encounters in which the proprieties are at least as important as the product itself. One has this feeling of being cleverly manipulated by a high-end salesman – however nice and Frenchified one’s hostess is, however much she fans out her fingers and elaborates the magical story of the vineyard – and that one should appreciate the privilege.
Which leaves me wondering, what is a tasting, a dégustation, anyway? Is it a chance to try out new stuff and attempt to talk wine with an expert? Or is that too naive? Wouldn’t it make more sense just to assume that the dégustation isn’t really happening and face up to the fact that it’s all about the vente and and everything else is a bonus?
PK
The festive season had taken its toll upon my wine cellar. I clearly needed to replenish what I like to think of as ‘her infinite variety’. But the season had also taken an equivalent toll upon my bank balance. The obvious, simplest thing to do was to buy a mixed case of a dozen cheap bottles. But ay,