Читать книгу I Bought It, So I'll Drink It - The Joys (Or Not) Of Drinking Wine - Charles Jennings & Paul Keers - Страница 10

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 or cough syrup, for all the enjoyment there is. And the only way to break a causal connection which posits wine as a drug and not much else – and seriously modify people’s behaviour with respect to it – is to treat booze like cigarettes and price it completely out of the market.

Is this really anyone’s idea of an intended consequence? Even the British government’s?