Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [73]
An under-regarded but surely powerful argument against wine is that very few of us can afford to drink quality wine with any regularity, whereas a fair number can afford reasonable amounts of the best beer available most nights of the week. It’s hard to prefer somebody’s Light Fruity red to a well-chilled can of export lager, let alone a glass of pub plonk to almost any real ale.
And yet the blighters keep insisting on wine, not just with food but before meals, after meals, any time. “Dry Martini?” you say politely to your guest, even rather proudly, having sweated at getting the proportions just right and the cocktail really cold. “Or gin and tonic? Or Scotch? There’s the Glen-livet and Long John, or dry sherry if you’d rather. Or Perrier, of course.” Pause for consideration. Then: “Could I have a glass of white wine?” he asks.
Actually it’s she who asks, more often than not. To some kinds of female, white wine is the ideal thing to ask for in another fellow’s house. First, it’s fashionable—light-coloured drinks are in, and drinks light in alcohol are in. Then, to choose wine rather than spirits shows superiority to that horrible lot, men most of them, who drink to get drunk, or at least to have a good time. Above all, white wine is the only drink the host is dead certain not to have by him on his tray or trolley—it’ll be in his fridge in the kitchen. To ask for a glass of it an hour before dinner sends him belting satisfyingly out of the room, looking for, finding, and plying the corkscrew while new arrivals stack up. Well, there we are, what?
We reached the point where a female visitor or guest of yours has asked for a glass of white wine as a pre-meal drink. Sometimes she’ll specify a small glass, sounding as if she thought she was considerately saving you the burdensome extra work involved in pouring and carrying a large glass. But in any case the stuff had better be there in the refrigerator, preferably with the cork pulled and stuck back in to improve your quickness on the draw.
What sort of stuff had it better be? First, the stuff it isn’t going to be when I’m doing the buying. By pretty rough rules, which are all you need at this stage: nothing Spanish, because too horrible; nothing Yugoslav, because too boring; nothing French, because too expensive, and often too horrible as well. The last part deserves some expansion.
Be clear that we’re talking about dry white wines. I know well enough that overall the French produce the best wines in the world, including the sweet wines of Bordeaux, which are often called incomparable and can have uncommon prices. But the dry ones are mostly too dry to suit me, whether with food or solo. That’s if dry is the right word. I mean more than absence of sweetness—I mean the quality that makes the saliva spurt into my mouth as soon as the wine arrives there. Perhaps I mean what wine experts call crispness or flintiness or even acidity, which for some mysterious reason they think is a good thing in a wine. But whatever you call it, I don’t want it. Chablis, the average white Mâcon, Muscadet, Sancerre, Pouilly-Fumé—not today, thank you. Unless, of course, you’re ready to throw your money about like a man with three arms: a very tolerable little Montrachet can be yours for £35 or so. The French wine growers are mighty clever fellows, but I think they overcharge, also overproduce, tarnishing some of their great names in the last ten years or so.
Italian wines, both red and white, are better value for money. That bottle of dry white in my fridge is most likely to contain Frascati, a famous wine from the hills near Rome, where I can claim to have consumed it in