Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [76]
Some time ago I attended an admittedly most enjoyable session, masterminded by a gigantic and voluble German count, at which a specially cooked meal was accompanied by specially chosen hocks and moselles, with the object of establishing that they at least went with that food. They didn’t go at all badly, but what was established was how much better French wines would have gone, also that at some stage in an elaborate meal like that you get fed up with white wines, however good, and long for a red. At the same time the makers have been pushing their drier wines, those supposedly more suited to the table. An untoward result of their campaign in Germany has been that the public there, urged to drink wine with their food, have in many cases fastened on imports from France. Others have gone on drinking beer with their meals and sweet or sweetish German wine after and between, and no doubt before as well. That’s where I come in.
A few glasses of hock (rather than moselle, which can be a bit subtle for me) are just the thing to get me relatively undamaged through a heavy session as described last time. As to which hock, this is a question I leave to menial persons. A German wine label is one of the things life’s too short for, a daunting testimony to that peculiar nation’s love of detail and organization. If I don’t want a too-sweet wine, I say so, and if that doesn’t work where I am, I go somewhere else.
Any way it turns out, those few glasses I mentioned will hit the pocket of whoever’s paying—the fellows surely know how to charge. When you tax them with it, they moan about their unreliable weather and the high cost of labour. And, of course, their production methods are very expensive. Of course I sometimes wonder about those production methods. Or rather I don’t wonder at all.
Years ago an old friend, a wine merchant, was in Bordeaux buying for his London firm. “How much of this can you let me have?” he asked his supplier about an item he’d fancied. “I can’t say yet,” he was told. “I don’t know for sure how much I’ll be getting from Algeria.” Noticing the horrified stare this earned him, the fellow added quickly: “Don’t worry, Christopher, whatever you get will be the real thing—I just have to meet my orders from Paris, and, er, elsewhere.”
I repeated this mini-story to another London shipper, who seemed a bit puzzled that I’d bothered. I ended with a hopeful smile: “But I dare say the German wines are genuine enough,” and got the reply: “Let me ask you a question. Who are the greatest chemists in the world?”
That one comes back to mind whenever I sniff and sip a glass of hock or moselle and find everything absolutely right, impeccably balanced, in perfect condition, just on the point of being too good to be true, in fact. There’s nothing new about this—a writer of sixty years ago went off moselle because it had “a horrible suspicion of the laboratory.” I don’t think he meant he could taste chemicals, which would be the sign of failure. No, the stuff’s a great success on the nose, on the palate, in the throat, in the stomach. It’s in the head that it bothers you.
Five minutes’ investigation is enough to start coming across tales like these. It’s been known long since that after a poor summer in Burgundy the manufacturers get on the blower to their friends in the Rhône—further south, warmer, sunnier—and in no time the tankers are thundering up the autoroute with millions of litres of stronger, tastier reinforcement. The same thing happens in Bordeaux with Rioja across the Spanish border,