Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [77]
The practice of silently topping up a wine with the output of another, usually inferior, vineyard is sometimes known as “stretching.” Unless the end-product is labelled something like French Red Wine, the word is “fraud.” But cynics would call it nothing more than part of the normal run of manufacture.
At some point on the price scale you presumably start getting what you’re paying for, but nobody knows, or is saying. Certainly cheaper wines are all too apt to be adulterated, or at least treated. Even one of my favourite Italian wines is mostly pasteurized now, as a colleague remarked the other day. Still, if a glass of wine tastes reasonably pleasant, doesn’t hurt the digestion and has some cheering effect, who cares? I do, but not much.
The adulteration of wine is not a popular subject with wine drinkers, and especially not with wine writers. In all my vast library I can find only a brief encyclopedia entry: “Adulterated wine . . . wine which has been treated with unauthorized material or excessive amounts of permitted substance.” I like that “unauthorized material.” Perhaps the writer was thinking of the products of figs, tea, banana skins and other vegetable elements, along with whole racks of chemicals, periodically found in wines of high repute and detonating one of those breathtaking scandals that set the wine world reeling—but somehow never bring anyone to book or provide any assurance for the future.
Such “treatment” must be less widespread than the practice of topping up the local vintage with other wines, sometimes from a neighbouring but inferior region, often from a thousand miles away. Algeria was the French wine manufacturer’s friend in need for many years, but now she produces less and sends most of it to the Russians to cheer up their plonk, he must look further, to Eastern Europe, especially Greece. So along the length of the Mediterranean chug the tankers, bearing wine not good enough to be offered Greeks as it stands, but okay for the French blenders. And this while the law sternly forbids Greek wine to be sold in France in bottle unless clearly marked “Greek wine.”
Nobody knows, or is saying, how much of it goes on. What is known is that a great deal of wine is more or less openly tampered with by the maker, subjected to “treatment” without being actually adulterated. The process of chaptalization consists of adding sugar to the grape juice before fermentation. The added sugar will all be turned to alcohol, so you’re out to make the wine stronger, not sweeter. Very useful in thin years, illegal in California, semi-legal in France, which means in practice you’re only allowed to do it when you need to. Many wines, including some Italians and young Burgundies, are pasteurized, boiled to kill off all the organisms and render them stable.
Now I don’t mind this kind of thing much, as I said, so long as the result is palatable, harmless and alcoholic. But it makes me doubly uncomfortable with wine chatter. When I find someone I respect writing about an edgy, nervous wine that dithered in the glass, I cringe. When I hear someone I don’t respect talking about an austere, unforgiving wine, I turn a bit austere and unforgiving myself. When I come across stuff like that and remember about the figs and bananas, I want to snigger uneasily. You can call a wine red, and dry, and strong, and pleasant. After that, watch out. . . .
To some people, a taste for dry drinks is a sign of sophistication. This is so firmly entrenched that it often goes against personal preference. In such cases it’s the idea of dryness that’s attractive, whereas the old tastebuds actually prefer a touch of sweetness. This little peculiarity, which the Americans go in for at least as doggedly as we do ourselves, is well enough understood and allowed for by the makers of drinks. You can see the tendency in the labelling of sherry and champagne, where “dry” can be far from bone dry and “medium dry” or “demi-sec” will almost