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, there’s the rub.
Because to me, mixed cases are a suspect entity. They are the libertines of the wine world, offering carefree promiscuity over serious commitment.
We don’t purchase mixed selections in many areas of consumption. We commit to a particular variety. We never quite know which sandwiches we’ll make during a week, but we don’t buy loaves of bread comprising two slices each of white, wholemeal, seeded and rye. We are not offered a bag of mixed meats, six white and six red.
And selections have always troubled me, because they invariably contain some things you don’t want. Like Christmas hampers; the providers lay out all of the contents like a wedding photo, and somewhere in the back row you can just spot the things that no one actually wants – the dodgy preserved fruits, the iffy jar of chutney, the tin of pineapple in syrup.
Like boxes of chocolates, hiding their Yardley-flavoured crème centres, which taste as if you’ve just licked your gran. Or like ‘variety’ packs of cereals which, to my intense childhood irritation, and carefully hidden on opposite sides of the multipack, always contained two packets of boring corn flakes. Thanks to such instances of selection abuse, I have always had a suspicion of mixed cases of wines.
I know I am a cynic, for whom the light at the end of the tunnel must be seen as a train coming the other way. But wouldn’t any merchant take this opportunity to offload his duff wine in a corner of a mixed case? The overpriced non-seller, whose subsequent discount will make a mixed case look more of a bargain? Or the simply shoddy plonk, which a customer might then forgive as one bad bottle out of twelve?
And what the mixed case suggests about the merchant is nothing compared to what it says about the purchaser.
Everything about the mixed case suggests failings. That you are ignorant; you simply don’t know enough about wine to assemble a case yourself that suits you and your lifestyle. You feel some kind of middle-class obligation to have wine in the house, and a mixed case is the easiest way of acquiring a small selection. That you can’t be bothered to go through a list yourself and select a dozen bottles. Or that you want the scapegoat of a merchant upon whom you can blame any dud bottles which are subsequently mocked by your guests. ‘Oh, I didn’t choose that one, it came in a mixed case …’
And then there are people who are drawn by price and ostensible savings rather than contents. (No names, CJ …) Indeed, for those who don’t give a monkey’s about what they are buying as long as it’s discounted, there are now ‘mystery cases’, where you don’t actually know which wines you’re getting, just that they’re supposedly a bargain. It’s ‘a lucky dip you cannot lose’, one merchant says, as if you’re buying your wine at the fairground.
(The latest I was offered was a case for £79.99, ‘with contents worth at least £94.99, and possibly up to £140.99’. I admire the judicious use there of the word ‘possibly’ …)
Anyway, the point of all this is that, in a moment of desperation, to replenish my depleted cellar with modest degrees of both breadth and expenditure, I succumbed to a mixed case.
My excuse was a lack of time in which to assemble a case of my own; my reassurance lay in enjoying the mutuality of The Wine Society, that ‘merchant’ which exists solely for its members, and so has no reason to palm anything off.
The Society offers a mixed case of six reds and six whites, all under £6, a price threshold so low I’m surprised anything successful apart from a limbo dancer can get under it.
And yet I have found myself drinking eagerly through a variety
