Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [25]
Not that it always works: a cartoon in Punch by the late Michael ffolkes showed a peacock in full glorious display saying bemusedly to a drab and unimpressed peahen: “What do you mean, ‘no’?”
Particularly now that the more raucous Pétrus drinkers have been shown up as the very people who have, temporarily at least, brought the United States and satellite economies into the mire, we might suspect that, as with peacocks, so with men….
Is the new Beaujolais in yet?
IN 1977 Mike Leigh’s brilliant play Abigail’s Party presaged the British wholehearted embracing of upward mobility and conspicuous aspirational materialism. And wine, of course, played its part. Even more than thirty years on, the unspeakable Beverly (played in the original TV production by Alison Steadman, who managed to look like a frantic trucker in drag) continues to arouse knowing and derisive laughter from the posh part of the audience when, given a bottle of wine by the frozen, thrifty Ange, she looks at the label, cries, “Ooo, nice, Beaujolais, I’ll just pop it in the fridge, okay?”
How we laugh. Red wine? In the fridge? Honestly. These people. How embarrassing.
Beaujolais itself was, in the late 1970s, a little suspicious. In 1972 a Sunday Times journalist, Allan Hall, had issued a challenge to readers. The idea of the Beaujolais nouveau (or primeur) was originally a sort of local knees-up to mark the end of the harvest and to drink the vin de l’année, the first of the new wine. It was decided in 1938 that the new wine could only be sold after December 15, but the restrictions were countermanded by the Beaujolais growers’ union, the UIVB (Union Interprofessionelle des vins du Beaujolais), in 1951, who cannily put a formal date on the release of the new wine (which, since 1985, has been fixed as the third Thursday in November), so making it a special occasion of sorts.
Allan Hall’s challenge was simple: who could be the first to bring back bottles of the nouveau to Britain?
He wasn’t the first to have the idea—that slightly dubious honor must go to Georges Duboeuf, the négociant, who had established the idea of a race to Paris with the new wine—but Hall brought it to Britain, where it was enthusiastically taken up, despite the fact that nine times out of ten the vin de l’année was not really worth drinking. People competed in cars, on trains and motorcycles, and by light aircraft and helicopter, and every wine bar worth its salt was hung with tricolor bunting and the phrase “Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!” By the 1990s, the Beaujolais race had spread across Europe, to America and into Asia, and in due course the American market had its way and the slogan changed to “It’s Beaujolais Nouveau Time!”
All very clever—particularly for the American industry, which heavily promoted the wine for Thanksgiving, which, by luck or by providence, falls precisely a week later.
So all in all, the sales of Beaujolais rose and the reputation of Beaujolais fell.
But times change and tastes change and, back at Abigail’s Party, the hoots of laughter at her gaffe about the fridge now inspire superior smiles from the even posher part of the audience who regard themselves as the real cognoscenti. For the fashion now—and with a young Beaujolais, fruity and low in tannin, it’s a thoroughly good fashion for once—is to drink it lightly chilled.
As a footnote, at one point in the play the terrible Ange suggests, as a “very economical” dish, sardine curry. It’s not an idea to dwell on, but when we wonder what goes nicely with a curry we might indulge in some 1970s nostalgia and imagine a plate of curried canned sardines with a nice new Beaujolais straight from the fridge.
Or not.
A glass of cryogenic wine, anyone?
LET’S SAY you’re in Germany on business and you want to impress your colleagues with your familiarity with a wine list as well as with the depth of your pockets. Order a bottle of Eiswein. It is unbelievably