the absence of any recognisable wines in their shops.
And then there is an almost emotional element to browsing – imagining the wine, the flavour, the occasion. Simply being in the presence of wines you are trying to understand, may never be able to afford, and sometimes find it hard to believe even exist. Have you actually seen a bottle of Screaming Eagle, which is allocated only to those on its waiting list? Or a 1961 claret, one of the greatest vintages of the last century? People thrill to first editions not because they want to read the contents, but because that’s how the book first appeared. Surely wine’s even better, because every vintage is a first and only edition.
There are plenty of things people simply look at, without ever using them for their intended purpose. No one spends their coin collection. People wander around commercial art galleries without the intention (or indeed the wealth) to buy the items on display. Secondhand bookshops depend upon browsing, and people flick happily through the racks in record shops without anyone feeling the need to offer fatuous advice. (‘Looking for a record beginning with B then, sir?’)
I am not a timewaster; except in the sense that the only person’s time I am wasting is my own. I won’t waste the staff’s time, because I don’t need to occupy their time. So if you happen to recognise yourself as the chap who runs Pompous & Disdain (Wine Merchants), may I suggest (ever so ’umbly) that the phrase ‘Let me know if you need any help …’ is much better. I will indeed let you know, and may then actually buy something.
But sometimes it’s hard. On a recent trip to Paris I made a pilgrimage to Les Caves d’Augé. Opened in 1850, it’s the oldest wine store in Paris, and was Proust’s local. I’ve always loved the French phrase for window-shopping – lécher les vitrines or, literally, to lick the windows – and that’s about all one can afford to do in Paris these days. But in Augé, it’s actually quite hard even to browse. It’s two wonderful old, crowded rooms, each piled to the ceiling with dusty bottles, like being in someone’s actual cellar. The phrase ‘kid in a sweetshop’ comes to mind, and any parent knows just how long that kid will take to make up its mind.
But the staff hover expectantly behind you, watching every move as you shuffle between the cases. Even hiding behind the language barrier isn’t enough to dispel their attention. No, I am not going to lift that bottle of Ausone 2005 at €1380 and give it a shake. Like saintly relics, it’s enough just to look, to revel in the presence. Leave me alone!
I began to think it impossible to browse wine in Paris. But then I passed La Maison des Millesimes, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, offering a truly spectacular collection of Bordeaux. The shop is off-puttingly bling, but my desire to just see such wonderful vintages overcame its froideur. However, when I shrugged off the inevitable offer of help in my poor French, the salesman responded in conversational English; it turned out he was a young Lancastrian, who responded to the presence of a genuine wine enthusiast even if I couldn’t afford their spectacular wines.
‘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
