I Bought It, So I'll Drink It - The Joys (Or Not) Of Drinking Wine. Charles Jennings & Paul Keers

to look a bit familiar, pretty much like the ones you see in the supermarkets, and the prices are okay but not magical, and the draughty ambience is starting to seem less like a justifiable approach to great value retailing and more like a convention, a reflex, another bit of branding rather than the expression of an ethos. You know what I mean. It’s not exactly special.

      I like wine warehouses. My heart still quickens when I pass one. If they disappeared I would be upset, partly because it would mean losing something I was attached to and partly because the whole retail ecosystem of the country, would dwindle.

      Except, except. How sentimental can anyone afford to be? Maybe my kids will come to regard our notion of a high-street wine merchant with as much amused condescension as I grant the memory of the off-licence with my dad bumbling in on a Saturday morning to get his soda syphon refilled. If the wine merchant goes the way of the milliner and the draper, does it matter? Why shouldn’t we get everything online or from a supermarket chain? Nostalgia is a disease, so let’s embrace whatever the future might bring in as sanguine a frame of mind as we can manage. To which end, I unheedingly take another swig from my Waitrose generic Côtes du Rhône and await developments at the big old warehouse down the road.

       Befriending a Wine Merchant

      PK

      When you have sunk to the bottom, you can only go up. Even Sediment, when agitated or disturbed, will rise. In a bid to remind my palate what wine is all about I decided to find a good, complex bottle of wine that I might actually enjoy. An interesting wine.

      As an aide-memoire to what decent wine is all about, I’ve been re-reading the late Simon Hoggart’s book Life’s Too Short to Drink Bad Wine. Well, not on the Sediment blog, it’s not, old chum. Not my life, anyway.

      In between making me obscenely jealous of the wines he had tasted, Hoggart also offered advice, including the following: ‘If you have an independent merchant near you, or a good well-run branch of a chain – the sort that trains its staff and keeps them – make friends.’ Now, from my parents to my business partner, people throughout my life have exhorted me to ‘make friends’, usually with complete failure resulting in a sandpit fight. Or its adult equivalent.

      Nor can I say that I am ‘friends’ with any other shopkeepers. I have been to our local paint shop several times, but I am still treated as a stranger. Mind you, I have never gone in with what I suspect might be a memorable request for ‘an interesting paint’ …

      Nevertheless, I thought I would try out Simon Hoggart’s principle in order to purchase a wine which, in both senses, was not bad. So I entered my local merchant’s, with the lazy gait of the flâneur who has nowhere better to be, and an ingratiating grin.

      The assistant certainly looked as if he was trained – he had clearly been taught that his job description was best fulfilled behind the counter, and not outside having a smoke. Nor was he glumly perusing his P45. (‘Ah no, mate, interesting wine comes in next week – but I’m afraid I’m off to work up the road, in the paint shop …’) All systems go, then.

      I explained that I was looking for something of a treat, something complex I could drink by itself. He asked what kind of thing I liked, and I said I really liked old clarets with a backbone, like Saint-Estèphes. He immediately offered me a 2002 Médoc, which I felt smacked of the obvious rather than the interesting. Then he proposed a Tuscan, a much more stimulating idea.

      I said ‘Hmm …?’ in a quizzical manner, meant to suggest, ‘Perhaps you have something even more interesting hidden away for your friends?’ Clearly this was misinterpreted as ‘Can I spend a little more?’ It led to the offer of an extremely expensive mature rioja.

      It was actually I who suggested a Shiraz/Viognier made by Terlato & Chapoutier. I had seen this mentioned on an American website as one of the best value wines of the year. (Not cheapest, but best value, a distinction lost on certain wine writers.) And I was intrigued by whether comfortable Australian Shiraz had been lifted into something a bit more complex by a great French winemaker.

      ‘Ah, now that is an interesting wine,’ he agreed. He went on to say that it was an unoaked Shiraz, which meant you could drink it younger, and that the Viognier added primarily to the nose.

      Reasonable guidance – but what made this wine interesting to me was the union between one of the great old winemaking names of the Rhône, and an enthusiast from the New World. Like that duet between Bing Crosby and David Bowie. (Well, that was a bit ropey, actually, but you get my point.) What happens when the traditional skills of France meet the modern, affordable produce of Australia?

      He suggested opening it an hour before drinking – and added that ‘opening’ really meant pouring it into something like a glass, with greater surface area. All of which was extremely good advice.

      As he wished me an enjoyable evening, I liked to think that our exchange had gone beyond the merely fiscal. I couldn’t say he’d become my friend – but perhaps, and who can blame him, he was a little wary of the unctuous grin.

      The wine itself was absolutely delicious, and everything I wanted – a reminder of how enjoyable wine can be, and a genuinely interesting treat. And as to my burgeoning friendship with the chap in the wine merchant, I will try to remember to report whether he remembers me if I go back, or ushers me outside to avoid upsetting other customers.