Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [56]
Rioja is a place, a sizeable region in northern Spain along the river Ebro. Red, white and rosé wines are made there, but it’s the reds that have scored over here. Thirty-something houses export to the UK, and the Spanish vintage system is hardly a system at all—a year on a bottle means little more than that quite a lot of the wine in it may well have been made about then. The best guide, as so often, is price, starting in the £2.25-ish range and going up to about £4.50. The more expensive Riojas are considered fine wines indeed, and no pundit dare turn up his nose at them.
The wine grape doesn’t respond all that well to strong sun, and hot-climate wines are often heavy and a bit rough, only tolerable at the place of origin with the local food. The Rioja vineyards are in the hills 1500 feet up and get plenty of rain, thus escaping this effect. Their products are often compared with those of Bordeaux. The two regions use similar methods of manufacture and are less than three hundred miles apart by tanker lorry, a jolly useful fact for any Bordeaux grower who finds his harvest untowardly down in quantity or body. It comes back to me that once at a blind tasting on TV, I identified a Bordeaux red as a Rioja, an earburning incident at the time but rather suggestive in retrospect in view of the connection.
Regular readers of this column will know that I have my likes and dislikes, even my weaknesses and prejudices. Nevertheless I always try to be scrupulously objective. As in the present case. Everything I’ve said here to the advantage of Ri-oja wines is true and verifiable. Now comes the moment for me to state my own opinion of them, which is that they are quite vile. I haven’t tried them all—who has? but my limited experience of them suggests to me that these wines are over-flavoured. None gave me any desire to try again. Perhaps those steps the Spaniards have taken to refurbish their wine trade have been misconceived. The country, when I revisited it after some years in 1980, was as delightful as ever, but about the only refreshments you could depend on were imported tinned fruit and sherry—not even the bread was reliable. And the British have been running the sherry trade for a long, long time. Sorry, señores.
Fruit-flavoured liqueurs turned up in various ways. It was discovered that you could preserve fruit through the winter by bottling it in spirits. Very soon afterwards it was discovered that it was worth your while to drink the liquor that had been round the fruit.
Putting orange peel into rough brandy to make it less rough must have started about the same time. To this day it’s liqueurs flavoured with the peel of the bitter orange, and sweetened, that dominate this part of the market. They are either orange-brownish in colour, often labelled Orange Curaçao, or white-colourless, often labelled Triple Sec. The alcoholic base is usually grape brandy or in some cases neutral spirit, made from anything, in other words, but pure and tasteless.
The most famous of the Orange Curaçao types, Grand Marnier, is an exception in being based on cognac, which comes through the sweetness of the drink. The most famous Triple Sec is Cointreau, often drunk on the rocks or as part of a cocktail, such as the White Lady, which goes back at least to the 1920s, but is suddenly popular again. This consists of gin, Cointreau and fresh lemon juice in equal parts (standard recipe) or in the proportions four–two–one (Trader Vic) or whatever you fancy. The South Africans make an excellent Curaçao-type liqueur, Van der Hum, flavoured with the peel of the