Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [20]
11. Do not enjoy the wine much yourself when you come to drink it.
Now let me contrast the procedure when serving beer:
1. Do nothing at all before you get to table, beyond ensuring you have enough.
2. At table, inquire, “Anyone not for beer?”
3. Subtract the number so signifying from the total sitting down.
4. From larder or refrigerator bring one tin of beer for each person concerned, tear off the tabs and start pouring, in the total certainty that the stuff will be all right.
5. Say, “If anyone wants any more he’s only got to shout.” Streamlined version of the above:
1. Five minutes before everybody goes “in,” put one tin of beer at each place.
2. Let the sods open and pour themselves.
The point is that wine is a lot of trouble, requiring energy and forethought. I would agree without hesitation that (if the comparison can properly be made at all) the best wine is much better than the best beer, though many would not, at least in private, and many more will bless you under their breath for giving them a decent Worthington or Double Diamond instead of what they too often get, Algerian red ink under a French label. And this is the other half of the wine/beer comparison: a lot of beer is probably better than a lot of wine, in this country at any rate.
Those who take this view are in a difficult position. The pro-wine pressure on everybody who can afford to drink at all is immense and still growing. To offer your guests beer instead of wine (unless you are serving a curry, a Scandinavian cold table, eggs and bacon, etc.) is to fly in the face of trend as well as of established custom. It looks—and in some cases it no doubt is— neglectful and mean. Worse, it may seem affected, bogusly no-nonsensical, as who should say, “Tek thi ale and be glad on it, lad; it wor good enough for mi dad home from pit and mi mam home from mill”—an attitude common enough among wealthy socialists, but hardly the thing for you and me. Lastly, for every secret beer-drinker you may please by your policy, you will displease at least one open wine-drinker. The latter may not be able to tell a Chablis from a Château d’Yquem, be entirely motivated by snobbery, but, under that old basic rule, if he thinks he likes wine, he likes wine. What is to be done?
I said right at the beginning that you cannot give your guests good drinks without taking a lot of trouble, and even though the trouble you have to take about wine is extra troublesome, and differs from the kind of trouble you take with (say) a dry martini, in that sufficient trouble over a dry martini guarantees a good dry martini, whereas a hell of a lot of trouble over wine is in itself no such guarantee—even so, we have to soldier on with the stuff, relieving our feelings every now and then with such things as the not very balanced or temperate outburst near the start of this section. I have therefore devised
THE WINE - RESENTER ’S SHORT HANDY GUIDE
1. Keep saying to yourself (what is true) that really good and properly served clarets and red burgundies are the best drinks yet devised by man. (I have admittedly never had the chance of tasting, among other things, kumiss, the drink made by the nomadic Tatars out of fermented mares’ or camels’ milk, but I doubt if it is even as good, let alone better.)
2. Always drink wine, except with curry and so on, when you eat out in restaurants and especially at your friends’ houses. You may learn something: see (4) below.
3. At least serve white wine at home whenever the food permits. It needs only to be served cold, though not too cold (an hour in the refrigerator is about right), and you are exempted from those horrible moments of discovering that you ought to have opened it three hours earlier. My advice would be to stick to hocks and moselles, which everybody likes, and avoid white burgundies, which some people prefer to almost anything, but which others will