Dispatches from a grape nut

June 12, 2013

By The Bottle issue number two is out

by Geordie Clarke

After several months of hard work, we were able to bring the second issue of By The Bottle to iPad and iPhone users just a couple of weeks ago.

If you haven’t downloaded it yet, I implore you to give it a try. And if you are a Mandarin speaker, you’re in luck because our latest issue is bilingual. When viewed in portrait mode, it shows the English version. Turn your device to landscape mode and it is in Mandarin.

In the latest issue we have upped the ante a little by not only publishing informative articles from wine experts like Gus McLean, Ben Grosvenor and Joss Fowler (Gus writes about carmenere from Chile, Ben gives us the lowdown on what tannins are all about and Joss discusses why the world’s most expensive wines are worth the only), but we also have a how-to guide on wearing colourful trousers, the dos and don’ts of visiting a wine shop and so much more.

This magazine is about enjoying wine and having fun, and we hope we have achieved that. We have some lighthearted pieces that should bring a smile to your face, but we know how to be serious and informative as well.

Ever wondered if there is a discernible difference between the way wine tastes out of two different glasses? We have it covered. Ever been curious about New Zealand’s wine scene? Kat Wiggins gives us her first-person account. And have you ever wanted to know how to make an Old Fashioned or the best crumble? Look no further.

If you think we’re missing something, let us know. Is the content not up to snuff? Do you want to read about something specific? Your feedback will allow us to tailor the magazine to your needs.

Okay, that’s my spiel over. I will resume usual service shortly. Soon to come will be a blog about the wineries of the Okanagan Valley.

1 comment

June 4, 2013

Father knows best: A Meritage without merit

by Geordie Clarke

It had all the hallmarks of being a disappointment, but I just didn’t see the signs before it was too late.

While shopping in the unhelpful minefield that is the typical B.C. Liquor Store, I unwittingly walked out with a wine that, had I been of sane mind and acted with pragmatism in my buying strategy, would never have come home with me.

But lacking facts and relying on advice offered to me by store employee whom I now have determined knows no more about wine than I do internal medicine, I took the plunge and ignored those initial reservations that had bubbled in the back of my mind when I first spotted it on the shelf.

It wasn’t long before I realised I had made a terrible mistake. This was a wine that ticked all the wrong boxes.

Let’s take a look at what was wrong with this particular wine:

Virtually unknown winery? Check.

Arbitrary use of the word ‘reserve’? Check.

Silly name? Check.

Unforgivable critter label? Double check.

And so here I am, two days later, staring at a still-not-yet-finished bottle bearing memories of a couple nights before, which, it has to be said, consist mainly of my recoiling at its rough flavours and remorse over the money wasted.

The wine in question is Red Rooster Meritage Reserve 2010. I have no idea what makes it a reserve other than the fact it seems to have been reserved for fools like me, but that is only a guess.

For its price, at about $24 Canadian, it is a blasphemy, no more enjoyable than the wine my father selected, a $9.99 Californian Cabernet sporting a carefree pair of flip flops on its label. There was no question he liked his volume-produced plonk more than mine given his attitude toward wine is one of indifference as long as it doesn’t burn his throat as it does down the hatch. But the worrying indictment here is that I preferred his wine to mine as well.

For those keeping track of the score in the game of life and wine buying, it is: Father 1, Geordie 0.

This is one of those wines for which Miles in Sideways said “there better not be any fucking merlot” even if two-thirds of its contents are other grape varieties. It has a sharp smell of red fruits, but also a nose-burning chemical odour reminiscent of those cheap grape juices we were forced to drink at school when we were kids.

In the mouth I can only describe this wine as regretful. Thin, watery, all over the place but nowhere specific. They say it “overflows with aromas and flavours of red and black fruits balanced by vibrant acidity.” But if it were balanced I would not be staring at a partially consumed bottle that no one in this house wants to finish off — at least no one who is sober.

4 comments

May 15, 2013

Not going out: A lament for London wine bars

by Geordie Clarke

A quick thought today about wine bars in London.

Out of the blue on Saturday night, a friend’s text message interrupted my slumber: “Okay, Gordon’s Wine Bar is officially crap,” he said.

Uh oh. Surely he has it all wrong, I thought?

Until recently, I would have defended Gordon’s Wine Bar and given harsh words to anyone who described it in such vulgar terms as “crap”. Surely such language should be reserved for that will that comes out of the barrels at a Toby Carvery rather than the cellars of a bar staffed by people who have at least a vague understanding of how proper wine ought to taste.

My instinct was to tell this friend he was wrong. That he needed to lighten up. That he needed to embrace this London institution for its charms, its foibles and, ultimately, its fun side. It’s rough and ready. Dark and romantic. Cozy and comfortable. Surely?

Perched on the edges of the Victoria Embankment between Charing Cross and Embankment stations, the sheer volume of people walking past means it absorbs customers as quickly as their bloodstreams absorb Rioja.

Mention you’re going to Gordon’s and people’s eyes will perk up with fond memories of previous bouts of debauchery in its vaults and unspoken desires to be going there with you that moment.

But for some time now I’ve felt Gordon’s has a couple of serious problems. It’s always heaving. And the wine isn’t actually all that great.

A busy bar is good for the bartender but murder for the drinker. In Gordon’s case, its location and a lack of other visible options means everyone on a date or having after-work drinks falls in there naively thinking they can cozy up in a corner and sit out the evening.

Instead they contort against a wall or sit shivering over the sangiovese on a brick wall outside.

Just as a glass of warm wine sends my blood boiling, little is less enjoyable than drinking wine that matches London’s frigid spring breeze.

Then there is the wine list. Good on them for offering a list with a wide rang of modestly priced wines. But just look at that list. Go on the website and download the PDF. What is that lurking on its pages but off-licence wine in the name of Concha y Toro Cabernet Sauvignon? £17 for a forgettable bottle that goes for less than £8 in your local offie.

Or how about El Coto White Rioja? Yet another £8-or-less bottle, but selling for £21.

We want a bargain, but it isn’t a bargain if we’re being given run-of-the-mill bargain-basement wines for more than twice their value.

Where else do we go? There is Vinoteca, of course, but beware it gets busy too. But at least their wines command the prices they charge.

If you’re after an Italian wine bar there is Negozio Classica with outlets in Notting Hill and Primose Hill. Rather than rough and ready it’s slick and modern. But the wine is good. The food as well. But really, it is a place you go only when you find yourself either in Notting Hill or Primrose Hill. Or if you live there. But if you’ve spilled out of work or are trying to get to know your date a bit better, they might not be within reach.

Whenever I ask friends to name the best wine bar in London, I am given a flurry of options. You can look on Jancis Robinson’s Purple Pages for her listing of wine bars, or you can check out a similar list of UK wine bars compiled by Matt Walls on Tim Atkin’s website.

More recently I’ve been impressed by the simple coffee shop-cum-wine bar known as Notes on St Martin’s Lane. The fact I lost track of what we drank and how much is testament to how much I enjoyed it. If my memory were complete, it would mean I stopped things short and cut my losses.

But the bar everyone seems to rate is Cork & Bottle on Leicester Square. I’ve heard more praise than put-downs. It couldn’t frustrate me more than Gordon’s, could it?

3 comments

April 29, 2013

Picnic pal: Vino2Go sippy cup for wine

by Geordie Clarke

All great inventions are founded in some form of genius. Whether it was the creation of Velcro many years ago or the telephone before that, someone, somewhere, came up with a great idea that no one else had.

Today we are surrounded by phones and just about everything seems to have Velcro on it, likely keeping someone’s shoes on their feet or a jacket closed. While they might have started out as curiosities, their undeniable usefulness eventually turned them into ubiquitous items in our lives, the sort of things we can’t imagine living without.

Some great ideas take an existing invention and make it even better. Some don’t. Take, for example, a Dyson vacuum cleaner. The world had no shortage of devices designed to suck dust out of our carpets, loose change from our couches and all those impossible-to-replace pieces of your eight-year-old’s Lego Millenium Falcon that he neglected to pick up off the floor despite being nagged about it four times.

And then we have Vino2Go, a travel ~~mug~~ cup for wine that arrived on my doorstep recently. I said I would give it a try and post an honest review about it, so that’s what we have here. I gave it the full Dispatches From a Grape Nut treatment for your benefit, which means we all can rest assured I’m unlikely to be sent anything to review ever again.

Anyway, when it comes to the Vino2Go, think travel mug for coffee except clear so you can see the contents – that is what we have here. In fact, very little separates it from its coffee-bearing cousin, except the interior is shaped like a wine glass so that, when you pour your vinous fluid into this vessel, it looks like the top of a wine glass has been suspended in a container.

So far, so good, right? Just like a coffee cup, it has snug lid with a flap to prevent fluid leaking out – just in case it tips over, either on your picnic blanket or anywhere else you might be drinking (hopefully not your car’s cup holder, however).

I can only imagine this ‘handy’ device came into existence to solve that age-old problem: spillage when using any other type of glass or cup when you’re busy getting sozzled at a sun-drenched picnic. Proper wine glasses? Not only can they tip over easily if you have anything but a flat surface, but they can break, too, which is never any fun if you have a tendency to prance barefoot through the grass.

Plastic or styrofoam cups? Again, they can tip, but they also have a predilection for tasting like plastic. While I don’t expect the average person would sip a glass of Le Montrachet from a plastic cup, but one person’s unattainable wine is a Russian oligarch’s picnic plonk – so you never know.

Made of BPA-free acrylic, this spill-resistant cup is unlikely to add nasty flavours to your tipple, but don’t take that as a guarantee that your wine will taste splendid, either. I tested this one out with Les Dents de Lion Viognier 2011 from Laithwaite’s and, well, it tasted much better out of my Riedel glasses. Not that this should come as a surprise. If you’re going to drink out of one of these you’re probably better off selecting something more rough and ready from your wine merchant’s lower shelves.

And then there are the detracting points.

First, you’re still drinking out of a plastic cup, one with a wide rim at that, which means it’s unlikely to maximise the flavour profile of whatever you’re sipping. Second, you’re drinking wine from something that looks like a children’s cup, which means those glances you’re getting have nothing to do with people thinking you have something cool and everything to do with them wondering what on earth you’re doing.

Finally, this thing costs £14.99. I know it defeats the purpose to say you can buy a half-decent Riedel glass for that money, but I’m going to say it anyway: you can buy a half-decent Riedel glass for that money. In fact, you can buy more than one if you find a good deal.

But hey, if you have £14.99 to spend and absolutely must drink your wine out of something that will prevent spills at a picnic while also keeping your drink of warming up too much, who am I to tell you what you can and can’t do?

Just remember not to confuse it with your coffee mug when you’re driving to work.

April 15, 2013

Hard lessons: Tesco Express wine shelf letdown

by Geordie Clarke

I should have known better. There I was on Tuesday evening last week, standing in what could have been the world’s most depressing wine aisle, searching for a bottle of red wine match a pizza and a Bradley Cooper film.

What had originally been (loosely) planned as a small celebration of achieving my permanent residence in the UK fell to the wayside when we went to the pub directly after work and then straight to a house in a neighbourhood where the best wine merchant has “Tesco” written above its door.

Having been despatched to find us a ‘good bottle of red’ I walked into the Tesco Express [Note: I previously incorrectly identified it as a Tesco Metro – for shame!] full of ambition and determination. “This is Tesco,” I told myself. “They have an enormous wine range. Not all of it is that 2-for-1 swill they so often peddle to the masses. What could possibly go wrong?”

Everything. This was a Tesco Express like no other. When I rounded the corner of the drinks aisle, I walked past the red wine shelf without even noticing it. I walked two laps around the shop before realising I had walked past it the first time. Turning back to the drinks aisle for the second time, I spotted the display – about three feet wide at most and tucked in at the end – then asked the shop assistant, who was stocking its shelves, if this was all they had.

“That’s it,” he said nodding in its direction. His demeanour suggested few people ever ask about the wine section in this shop. The sheer volume of beer and alcopops in the chiller suggested wine is an afterthought in these parts.

With my instincts in the right place, I scanned the top shelf for the finest wines. Jacob’s Creek Shiraz Cabernet. £9.99.

My heart sank. That was as good as it was going to get.

The selection was a motley crew of the usual suspects in the old 2-for-1 swindle. There was Jacob’s Creek, masquerading at twice its actual price for all £9.99 of my British pounds. Then I spotted the Chilean Isla Negra Merlot Reserva. £9.99 again. But wait, on the shelf below was another Isla Negra, this time the Isla Negra Reserva Cabernet Sauvignon. For £4.99.

Stepping back a few feet, I took in the entire display and discovered that every bottle before me was part of the 2-for-1 marketing scheme, a perpetual pawn in the 50-per-cent-off game, a ploy to get you to buy not just one bottle of wine you didn’t want, but two.

Pile it high, sell it cheap.

I looked back at the shop assistant, who was unloading clinking wine bottles from their cardboard boxes with the care and attention of a longshoreman, and asked, pointing at the Isla Negra cabernet sauvignon, “So are these always on some sort of 50 per cent off deal?”

Unsurprised, he nonchalantly replied, “Always. Last week it was the merlot. This week it’s the cabernet sauvignon. It will probably be the merlot again next week.”

Knowing I couldn’t win here, I grabbed a bottle of the Castillo San Lorenzo Rioja, itself at 50 per cent off at £5.99 and, full of rational thought at that point, decided I should also buy a bottle of Tesco Cava for a fiver.

Because if I’m going to get ripped off, I might as well make it feel like a celebration.

1 comment

March 26, 2013

Supermarket subterfuge: Roc de Lussac 2010

by Geordie Clarke

Down the road from my house is a row of shops like so many others in Britain. It is lined with the obligatory small and shabby “supermarkets” and newsagents, their front doors flanked by wilting lettuce and shrivelling lemons.

It also has those take-away outlets that cook meat on a skewer, and those spartan cafés with harsh fluorescent lighting and melamine tables.

And then there’s the Sainsbury’s Local. It popped up a year or two ago, its slick signage standing out among the messy ‘supermarkets’ with the bruised fruit out front.

These days it isn’t fashionable to shop at major supermarkets like Sainsbury’s, but I confess I take more comfort buying from the retailing giant on this particular high street – mostly because I prefer to buy my food in date. And, let’s be honest, if I need an emergency bottle of wine, it probably won’t do me wrong. Right? Right.

Plus I swore off buying wine from random corner shops long ago. That was after a bottle of French white wine from a newsagent in Hoxton turned out to be the colour of iced tea and tasted mostly of mop bucket water. Never again, I said.

So when I was wandering the aisles of my Sainsbury’s Local recently, I couldn’t help myself when I spotted this bottle of Roc de Lussac Lussac-Saint-Emilion 2010 on the shelf.

Its label, with its traditional typeface and charming coat of arms, looked the part. It looked serious, traditional, well-made. What could possibly go wrong?

Even better, the shelf tag told me it was 50 per cent off. Normally £15.99 marked down to £7.99. At that price, we’re laughing, right?

And that’s not all. It’s from the 2010 vintage, one that is widely regarded as among the best in recent memory. In which case we’re really laughing.

If you aren’t familiar with Lussac-Saint-Emilion, it is one of the satellite appellations of Saint-Emilion, lying on the right bank of the Garonne and Dordogne rivers. Lussac itself is a commune about nine kilometres from Saint-Emilion lying among the vineyard. I’ve been there and can say it is a pleasant but tiny place with the requisite village bakery and corner shop – and little else.

The wines from Lussac and the other satellites, such as Montagne and Puisseguin, are made in the image of Saint-Emilion but overall they are considered to be of lesser quality and, therefore, are mostly cheaper to buy. Perhaps it is the terroir. Perhaps it is something else.

Nevertheless, knowing the satellites are a great place to find value Bordeaux I thought I couldn’t possibly go wrong with Roc de Lussac.

So, when the day came to open the wine, I had high hopes. It’s worth £15.99! I only paid £7.99! It must be great, right? Well.

Here is a tale about supermarket subterfuge. As they say, what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Or even better, as Donald Rumsfeld, former US secretary of defense, once said,

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

As has been written about so many times recently, supermarket discounts are rife. It would be fair to say no wine sold at a supermarket for 50 per cent off its full price is ever actually worth that ‘full price’.

People who know this but buy it anyway are buying a known known, but choose to ignore it because they like a good deal. People who buy it but think something might be fishy are buying a known unknown. And people who don’t know this at all are buying unknown unknowns because they genuinely think they’re getting a good deal.

For £7.99, Roc de Lussac is perfectly serviceable, if still a little more than I would want to pay. Not great, not complex, but correct to its grape variety and very obviously a right bank Bordeaux. But it did have a slightly unpleasant dusty – almost chalky – side to it, a texture common to wines that are made with oak chips.

Of course, the big giveaway this wine was never worth more than a bottom-shelf red was the final line on the back label, which read, “Ready to drink now or will last for up to 3 years from vintage date if carefully stored.”

Considering it spent most of those three years in a warehouse or standing upright in a supermarket, I am left wondering how it is physically possible for this wine to be “carefully stored” at any point in its life.

And I can’t help but think £15.99 is highway robbery when I could buy Chateau Labat or Caronne Ste Gemme – both considered genuinely great-value – for at least £1 less.

4 comments

March 5, 2013

Pichon-Baron: When growing old isn’t so bad

by Geordie Clarke

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Growing old, while a bit of a bummer when your knees give out and your bowels begin to misbehave, has a few advantages.

For instance, the things that might have embarrassed us when we were young no longer matter. We’ve not only given up on vanity, but we’ve given up caring what other people think.

Once you are north of a certain age, you have decided that everyone else in the world is crazy (because we’re never the crazy ones, are we?) and any love interest you meet now has probably just settled for you. But that’s okay.

They say everything improves with age like a fine wine, but I’ve never really bought that theory.

This is because only the best wines improve with age. When it comes to people, well we don’t so much improve with age, we just learn to ~~love~~ live with our quirks and foibles – and those of others.

If we’re lucky, we can use this knowledge to our advantage, such as attracting women who find it endearing when, say, you fall over comically on the bus after one too many glasses of Sauternes (I still haven’t perfected this, but I’m sure it will work for me some day).

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This was all front of mind the other night when I donned my wine geek’s hat at a wine tasting held by Axa Investment Managers for members of the finance press.

You see, Axa, French insurance giant, also owns Axa Millésimes. Which owns Chateau Pichon-Longueville Baron (and many more). And I’ve been dying to try it.

On this occasion we tasted Chateau Suduiraut 2006; Suduiraut’s dry white, S de Suduiraut 2011; Chateau Pichon-Longueville Baron 2004; Les Tourelles de Longueville 2010, the second wine of Pichon-Baron; Chateau Pibran 2007; and Disznókö Tokaji Aszú 5 Puttonyos 2007.

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This tasting was a lesson in the virtues of growing a bit older, even if the wines themselves were relative babies. While we had the younger 2010 and 2007 vintage, it was the 2004 – not considered a spectacular growing year – that impressed.

So here’s the boring, wine bore part of this post. This was a tasting that offered so much of what I loved. The S de Suduiraut was a little oaky, loaded with citrus and grapefruit, as well as being waxy and rounded. I could see myself sipping this on a sunny patio in Bordeaux or, more likely, in front of my television watching Food & Drink or something equally banal.

From here we moved on to the red wines. First was Les Tourelles de Longueville 2010. Obviously this is the baby Pichon, but it was deep and brooding, a heavy wine full of dark fruits, oak, liquorice and caramel. It’s a good candidate for decanting.

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Next we skipped back three years to Chateau Pibran 2007, which was again very deep in colour, starting to show a bit of age at the rim but still youthful and classic cabernet through and through. Lots of toasty oak, a vegetal nose, green peppers with plenty of tannin and dark fruits.

Now, one of my favourite wines, Chateau Tertre de Belves, comes from this 2007. Granted, the Belves is cheap and cheerful, loaded full of rustic charm and comes from the do-whatever-we-like region of Castillon, but the sentiment is the same: these vintages are becoming more charming as time goes by.

Then we had what we were all waiting for, the Pichon-Baron 2004. And it was at this point in the evening my note-taking took a turn for the worst.

This is what I managed to record before my pen made pulled a disappearing act: A deep, dark wine, orange hints of maturity at the edge, nicely integrated oak, vegetal nose, tertiary aromas of leather and tobacco, plus cedar and mint. More importantly, it was showing very well and proved that even if 2004 wasn’t a blockbuster vintage, there were some great wines and they are maturing better than first predicted.

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After the Pichon-Baron, I lost it completely. Never mind the fact there were two more wines to follow the Pichon-Baron – Suduiraut 2006 and Disznókö Tokaji Aszú 5 Puttonyos – I just gave up on my notes at that point.

None of this surprise me. Nearly every time I go to a wine tasting, it is only a matter of time before the pen makes a disappearing act. As a result, I don’t really know what the final two wines were like.

I can say, however, that I remember the Sauternes was wonderful and the Tokaji sublime. But whichever aromas they offered up, the flavours they expressed, were never recorded.

And it must have been true, because while I was headed home I fell over on the bus and didn’t feel remotely embarrassed. But it didn’t attract any women either.

As I said earlier, I’m not so much improving with age but instead learning to live with what I’ve been given.

3 comments

February 20, 2013

Wine shop Where’s Waldo? (Wally if you’re British)

by Geordie Clarke

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I don’t like to admit it, but I’m a stereotypical man when it comes to shopping. Confronted by myriad options, I panic and try to rush the process, usually to my own detriment.

I have a long-running track record of coming home with bags full of new clothes only to discover they are all the wrong size.

Plus I am easily swayed by salespeople. If I tell them I want to buy product X, somehow I walk out with product Y instead – and then regret it later.

Twice now I have walked into a wine shop to buy a bottle of Au Bon Climat (they have a terrible website, by the way) only to walk out with something I probably didn’t want.

For me it seems bottles of ABC are as elusive as the Holy Grail was to Monty Python’s Graham Chapman.

It’s safe to say the buying process can be a struggle for me, so I find it unhelpful if the bottles of wine are arranged though the shop is managed by Rob Gordon from High Fidelity. Imagine if the bottles were arranged autobiographically rather than by country, region or colour.

These shops exist. Because I’ve been to them.

Finding what you want in these places is impossible without seeking help an employee. And I think that is part of the tactic, because whenever I’ve come in looking for X, they always seem to steer me, through subterfuge and sensory overload, to something else. Something more expensive. Something that, in my cynical mind, probably isn’t selling fast enough.

Now, you would think arranging a few bottles on a wine shop’s shelves is straightforward.

All you need to do, really, is have a different shelf for each country and then separate the white wines from the red wines. Then on other shelves you have space for Champagnes and sparkling wines, dessert wines, Ports, sherries and anything else.

Simple. So simple, in fact, wine shops up and down the country do exactly this, from the cavernous Majestic Wine Warehouse to the neighbourhood vintner and even the fusty merchants like Berry Bros & Rudd and so on.

Even the supermarkets – known for their efficiency at delivering products to customers’ hands – dare not meddle with this system. They know what’s best.

Yet there is always someone who thinks there must be a Better Way™ to do things.

I can think of two shops within shouting distance of my home that have shunned the conventional layout.

Offender number one has no signs on the shelves at all. It simply has all the whites on one side and all the reds on the other. After a few confused minutes of staring blankly at all the bottles, it eventually occurred to me which ones were white and which were red.

Then a few minutes later I figured out they were, in fact, arranged by country – but not in anything that resembled alphabetical order.

Last I checked Germany comes before Spain in the alphabet. Unless they’re referring to the country as Espana. But if you’re going to use Espana on the one hand, you had better be using Deutschland on the other.

The other shop I visit takes it a step further and arranges everything by grape. Yes – by grape.

If you want to tell prospective customers they’re really not welcome in the shop unless they are knowledgeable to identify what they want by its constituent grapes (and it better not be any fucking merlot), you know you’re dealing at the higher end of the market.

But how helpful is this for the average consumer? Think back to a time before you knew much about wine. Think back to when you knew the wine only as St Emilion or Saumur, as Rioja and Chianti. A time when you couldn’t name the grapes used to make them.

Merlot? Cabernet franc? Tempranillo? Sangiovese? Would you have thought to head for the shelf with those grapes labelled at the top? Handy for those of us who wake up and say, “Today I’d like to buy a bottle of chenin blanc and I want the shop to arrange all of the world’s chenin blancs together in one place so I can compare and contrast.”

But not so handy if you wake up and say, “I just want a bottle of Vouvray, whatever the hell it’s made of.”

And don’t even get me started on some of the blends I’ve seen. Cabernet-shiraz. Chenin blanc-chardonnay-viognier. Or how about Olaszrizling-furmint-hárslevelü-juhfark?

Do they have a shelf for that?

5 comments

February 8, 2013

Two Buck Chuck: If you’re going to slum it

by Geordie Clarke

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I have a few fond memories from my youth that involved experimenting with the cheapest booze I could get my hands on, but the best one involves a wine few people would admit to drinking.

A student’s budget and a general ignorance when it came to alcohol meant I tasted more than my fair share of oddities and abominations of the alcoholic kind.

But the worst of them all came into my life when my brother emerged from a B.C. Liquor Store with a bottle of red fortified wine called Bounty, a truly awful concoction with an alcohol level of about 20 per cent.

It featured a dramatic, square-rigged sailing ship on the label and a tagline that, if memory serves, suggested its contents promised us “the exhilarating taste of adventure.”

This was the sort of wine that was often seen on the side of the train tracks where the local alcoholics hung out. In fact, the only reason my brother bought it was because he spotted an empty bottle of it next to the train tracks that day, just a few steps from the liquor store.

We should have known drinking this ungodly elixir was going to be difficult. In the end, it had to be cut with a high ratio of tonic water. Even then it was still a challenge.

You would think, then, the same can be said for all cheap wine, that all of it is impossible to drink and nothing good can come from being a tightwad. And in many cases, this holds true. But sometimes you come across surprises – even if, deep down, you were hoping not to.

This came to mind when I heard the news that American grocery chain Trader Joe’s was raising the price of its Charles Shaw wines to $2.49 a bottle from $1.99.

If you don’t know of Charles Shaw, you might have heard of Two Buck Chuck. Yes?

I was sad to find out Two Buck Chuck would never be known by that name again. It was heartening to know there was a wine out there that could be bought for less than we pay in taxes alone on a bottle of wine in the U.K., which is £1.91 per bottle + 20 per cent VAT. (Annoyingly, even at its new price it is still cheaper than what we pay in taxes.)

In an absurd way, I am happy to say I got to try two of the last bottles (by last I mean among the last few million, no doubt) before the increase.

Being able to drink an entire bottle of wine for just $1.99 – or even the new price of $2.49 – is mind-boggling, although I know this isn’t unheard of in other parts of the world (I am reminded of a roadside sign in Castillon, France, advertising ‘rosé’ for €2 a litre).

The fact it tastes nothing like ethylene glycol or acetone is an achievement the Bronco Wine Company should be proud of.

Anyway, the two bottles of Two Buck Chuck (a cabernet sauvignon and a chardonnay) I recently acquired came to me by way of my friend Mel, a Los Angeles native who now lives in London. During his trip to the city of Angels over Christmas, he had the genius – and I mean genius in the best possible way – idea to buy them for me.

I always knew about this wine, but had never had a chance to drink it. It was featured on the California wine series hosted by Oz Clarke and James May, and my own father drank it when he was in California a couple of years back . From what I’d heard, it was perfectly drinkable and innocuous, albeit bland.

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The cabernet sauvignon, however, was a quantity I’d not come across before, but based on my knowledge of volume wines, I figured wasn’t going to be completely putrid. Perhaps it would be awful, but certainly it wasn’t going to burn through my stomach lining and cause me internal bleeding or anything like that.

Now, let’s take a step back here a moment. Think back to my experience with that bottle of Bounty. Or think back to your own experience with a horrendous, cheap bottle of wine.

If your first memory is that of a gagging reflex, you are on the right track.

But much to my surprise, the Charles Shaw wines didn’t burn as they went down my throat. They didn’t have obscene, rough flavours. They weren’t overly sweet like a lot of cheap New World wine. They were they were simply neutral, dry as they should be and, overall, completely inoffensive.

The chardonnay wasn’t over-oaked or flabby like many a bad California version, which should earn it a medal for that achievement alone. Meanwhile, the cabernet sauvignon didn’t have that sweet edge you would expect from, say, a Yellowtail wine, and if left to breathe for a while, had typical if uninteresting cabernet aromas and flavours, and tasted like an honest, if not complex, wine of acceptable quality.

Let’s remember here, these bottles were just $1.99. What else can you buy for $1.99? Here in the U.K., it won’t even cover the taxes.

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January 25, 2013

Chilean wine and other things I don’t understand

by Geordie Clarke

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I was listening to the radio while still in bed last weekend and they were talking about how, in the year 775, gamma rays blasted the earth with a heavy dose of radiation.

How did they figure this out, the interviewer asked? It wasn’t from eye-witness accounts, because people wouldn’t have even noticed it.

It also wasn’t from catastrophic damage caused by the radiation, because it didn’t plunge the world into a nuclear winter, nor did it blow away the ozone layer or cause people to grow extra limbs, so there was little evidence of it even happening.

Turns out the scientists found clues by looking at tree rings. And then, in order to find an answer to this, they determined it was caused by two black holes that had collided with each other.

Er, what?

Despite these explanations, I still don’t understand how they figured out that this happened at all. Or how two colliding black holes would have done it. Even more mind-blowing was the fact the entire Earth would have been fried to a crisp had it happened less than 3,000 light years away.

But, then again, I can’t even figure out why bread from Sainsbury’s toasts faster than bread from Waitrose. You can understand, then, why my brain nearly imploded when I heard this cosmic revelation.

Another thing I’ve never really been able to understand is Chilean wine. Or maybe I just don’t get along with it. Whatever it is, I’ve always felt most of the wine from the South American country has tasted vaguely of what I might want to drink, but not actually having enough character to be memorable or worth my time.

So, with those concerns in mind, this past weekend I opened a sample bottle I had been sent. It was a Montes Outer Limits Sauvignon Blanc 2011.

When it comes to typical sauvignon blanc, most of the time I expect one of two things to happen. On the one hand, it will be pungent and grassy with plenty of acidity like those from New Zealand. On the other hand, if it’s from, say, the Loire, it will be a little more restrained and offer up citrus aromas with a drier, more mineral and flinty mouthfeel, hitting the back of my throat with its dryness and acidity. I particularly enjoy that.

And then there is Chilean sauvignon blanc. In this particular case, that bottle of Montes Outer Limits. Its faux-weathered label featuring scrawled text and a figure that looks like a drifter certainly lived up to this wine’s ‘do-anything’ new world attitude.

But its contents confused me. It was a lot like the first time I walked into a French public toilet and, rather than find a familiar porcelain toilet, I found the flush equivalent of a hole in the floor staring back at me. This wasn’t what I was after.

To be fair to this wine, and a lot of Chilean wine in general, the problem is probably more with me and not the wine. I expect a certain type of wine when it comes to sauv blanc that isn’t always going to be met.

So, as expected, this one had that gooseberry/cat urine smell, much like Kiwi sauv blanc. It also seemed to have a spritz or a fizz to it, but then it mellowed down into tropical fruits (pineapple, passion fruit, etc) and a fairly round finish. It seemed full and fruity, but it didn’t whack the back of my throat with acidity or minerality, which disappointed me slightly.

It was good, sure, but it wasn’t a wine I’d seek out again. Something was missing. It just seemed a bit too easy. And I am not someone who likes easy. If I liked easy, I would take the train or the bus to work each day. Or even ride my bike. Instead I choose to walk, which takes an hour, because it’s less easy than the other options. I would crawl on my hands and knees, but I don’t have all day.

When it comes to sauv blanc, I want a wine with a real character, not something that tries to taste a little like New Zealand and a little like France, which is what so much Chilean wine seems to be about. And I’m a bit tired of the cat wee smell the Kiwi stuff gives off. My housemate’s cats already do their bit to fill my world with the hum of feline pee, so its presence in my wine is overkill.

Mostly, I like my sauvignon blanc in the spirit of something like, say, Domaine Michel Thomas Sancerre. Call me old school. Call me boring. Call me set in my ways.

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by Geordie Clarke

by Geordie Clarke

by Geordie Clarke

by Geordie Clarke

by Geordie Clarke

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