Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [46]
These local vodkas have two basic jobs. One is to replace gin in established gin drinks for the benefit of those rather second-rate persons who don’t like the taste of gin, or indeed that of drink in general. Anybody who calls for a vodka and tonic in my hearing runs the risk of that imputation. Other such gin-derived drinks are the Moscow Mule (vodka and ginger beer), and the Vodka Martini. This last is a softened version of the orthodox Dry Martini, the gin cocktail I described recently.
The other job for vodka of this sort is as a kick-imparter for Bloody Marys and summer coolers, which it does ideally well. Let me throw in here a recipe for a cooler I had no room for in my article on the subject last month. Take a bottle of good tough red wine, one with plenty of flavour, like something not too pricey from the Rhône or that Hungarian Bulls Blood stuff, pour it and a bottle of vodka over some ice and drink the result. If you want to sweeten the mixture, the quickest way is to stir in a glass of some sticky liqueur. Will add interest to even the lousiest leg of the World Cup.
After being filtered through several yards of charcoal chippings, British vodka is a very pure spirit. What has been taken out of it is those substances which impart flavour and also give you hangovers. So the tastelessness of vodka is connected with its harmlessness. At the opposite extreme are impure drinks like cognac and malt whisky. And in the middle, with the best of both worlds, a pure spirit richly flavoured with innocuous or beneficial botanicals, stands gin.
This year, UK drinkers will probably get through about six million litres of champagne and just over twice as much sparkling wine of other sorts. It may be a bit down on that following general trends, but it may be a good deal up because of the incalculable amount of royal head-wetting going on this week (there was a big surge last 29 July).
The growth of sparkling wines, other than champagne, has been noticeable over the last few years. Today there are between eighty and ninety brands on the market. I have not tasted all, or even most of them. Before I mention any, I think it fitting to offer a small amount of science.
Most sparkling wine of any kind is the result of two successive fermentations. The first one produces ordinary still wine which could quite well be drunk as it stands; the second one puts the bubbles in. There are two main methods of doing this, the champagne method, in which the process goes on in the individual bottle, and the cuve-close method, in which it takes place in a huge sealed tank before final bottling. The champagne method is supposed to produce finer wines, and certainly the bubbles from it last longer after opening and pouring, a more important point than it sounds. The cuve-close method is cheaper.
Some non-champagne sparklers are made by the champagne method and others by comparatively expensive refinements of the cuve-close method. Nevertheless, champagne, the real thing, stands at the top end of a large price gap. You would have your work cut out to find a bottle of champagne at much under £6.50, whereas most sparkling wine retails in the £2–£3.30 range. In paying the extra you’re paying for the quality, true enough, and you’re paying for the name, fair enough. But you’re also paying through the nose, as more and more people are beginning to feel.
Anyhow, among sparkling wines the brand leader is and has long been Veuve de Vernay, made by the cuve-close method from grapes from the Bordeaux area. I’m not the best judge of this sort of thing, but I doubt if anybody would find it less than perfectly drinkable and wholesome, and the fizz is always festive. And that, after all, is about as much as one wants from any sort of sparkling drink—a jolly blast-off to the party, and supplies for toasts and people’s aunts. Any kind of serious drinker will soon look elsewhere.
The only one