One of the things I have always loved doing is sitting up in the quiet of the night, on my own, and having a drink. True, I do also love drinking before dinner and during dinner – more of which later - but if I was forced to make a decision and pin down one of the things in my life that makes me most happy, it is the time I spend on my own at the end of the day with a drink.
The house is quiet. Helen is usually pootling about upstairs doing the endless things that women do before getting into bed. Magic the minxie mog will be curled up on the sofa next to me. There is no more work to be done today and I may or may not be smoking a cigar; it doesn’t matter. If it is winter, the fire will be slowly dying in the grate; if it is summer the window will be open and the birds and the cows will be arguing over who can say goodnight the loudest. The telly will be on but I won’t really be watching it because, like Brick in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, I am really just listening to myself and waiting for the click in my head that tells me everything is all right, the day is done and I can go to bed.
Not that I am drinking to try and forget about my dead and unrequited gay lover you understand. Nor am I pouring bourbon down my throat at the rate of a bottle a day. But, like Brick, I am waiting for that moment of calm to descend, a calm brought about by the gentle haze of alcohol, a calm that tells me I have worked hard, I have done what I needed to do and now I am having - were I to use an expression from the women’s magazines - a bit of ‘me’ time. Some choose sun beds, some choose gyms, some like hot stones and massages, some like to curl up in bed and read with a mug of cocoa. I like to sit on the sofa, on my own, quietly drinking a few glasses of something nice, whether it be wine, scotch or cognac. And when the click comes, I will turn to the cat and say, ‘Well then, Magic. Time for bed’, and I will get up, turn off the light, turn off the television and mooch upstairs to wrap myself up in the warm loveliness of my wife.
I have liked to do this for more years than I care to remember. Throughout my adult life I have always enjoyed the hour at the end of the day and, when circumstance has dictated that I have not been able to indulge myself – through illness or adverse domestic circumstances - I have missed it terribly. I know I love it because every night, throughout my adult life, if I have been able to do it, I have done it.
But now it has to stop. It has to stop because the simple truth is, I drink too much.
I have always drunk too much and it has never really bothered me if only because I have never really worried about how much is too much? Well, more than 28 units a week for a big bloke like me, so the government say, but who takes any notice of them? Health officials are endlessly telling us stuff that the vast majority of the population routinely ignore because if we didn’t, life would be so intolerably regimented and dull. I know a lot of people who can do 28 units a day without worrying about it too much. I am one of them. Not every day, of course, but if you count up the units involved in a not abnormal day of a couple of large gins at 6pm, a bottle of wine during the evening and a couple of scotches at bed time, it clocks in at seventeen units. Have a good drink up at the weekend and you can be looking at a hundred units a week. Don’t get the wrong impression: that isn’t every night or every week, but it gives you some idea of how people like me – people like you – can drink a huge amount of alcohol without being alcoholics, without being drunk, without having hangovers and without having the slightest problem getting up in the morning and going to work.
But now it has to stop because I drink too much. It didn’t matter when I was younger. It didn’t matter when my intake was not quite so high, but the simple truth is that over the years the amount I drink has gone up and the years have taken their toll. Blood tests show my liver function is not what it should be. And my heart keeps going wrong.
About eighteen months ago, I had an atrial flutter. Not life threatening (usually), but something that requires hospitalization and either drug or electro therapy to put right. I had my first one while on holiday in Cornwall and it was terrifying because I didn’t know what it was: the palpitations and shortness of breath and the tightness in the chest obviously led me to believe I was having a coronary. Diagnosis took a couple of hours and treatment was swift and efficient: an IV bag of a drug called flecianide and the correct electrical rhythms of my heart were re-established and I was sent on my way. ‘Why did it happen?’ I asked. ‘Because it does, sometimes’ was the answer. ‘Alcohol is definitely a factor, usually in women, usually binge drinkers, but sometimes it just does.’
But then, at 6.15am last Monday, it happened again. I was standing at the kitchen sink contemplating the fact that it was the day my wife was due to give birth as well as the fact that I had 17 exam scripts to mark before work, when I got a familiar feeling in my chest. Imagine if you will a palpitation that doesn’t go away. I recognised the symptom straight away but hoped that it might put itself back in to rhythm. I coughed hard, which sometimes works. I sat quietly at my desk and tried to ignore it, but the fact was the top chamber of my heart was not able to send the correct signals to the bottom chamber and so, in a state of some confusion, my heart started to beat at about 120 BPM in a wild and erratic fashion. It is the wild and erratic nature of its beat pattern that makes an atrial flutter relatively easy to diagnose: if an ECG shows irregular irregularities, chances are that is what you have got.
So I woke Helen up and asked if she would be so kind as to drive me to hospital. She was, because she is, indeed, kind.
On arrival, because I had effectively self-diagnosed, I was spared the spray of GTN, the emergency dose of aspirin and the sense of panic but also the ‘no one dies on my watch’ determination of your average emergency room registrar that does rather push one to the front of the queue. Last year, when they thought I might be on my last legs, the sense of urgency was extraordinary. I was wheeled past a Cornish woman who appeared to have had her leg crushed by her horse who was plainly in some severe discomfort. But she wasn’t dying, so ahead of her I went, giving her a cheery wave as I did so.
This year, there was a more relaxed atmosphere and after ten minutes or so I was called through to a cubicle where my shirt and shoes came off and I was hooked up to the ECG machine whose wild needle readings confirmed in short order that I was indeed having an atrial flutter so no one was going to be in a terrible hurry to see to me. I have no beef with this. I just knew it was going to be boring.
And so it was. Over the next two hours, someone periodically came in and checked I wasn’t having chest pains, wasn’t feeling different etc, and then, having given me some pills that didn’t work, they and I knew that it would have to be IV drugs, so the A and E doctor put a canula in and took some blood and said I would have to have a chest x-ray. So far, so standard. Then, a somewhat bored looking fourteen year old house officer (or so he seemed to me, but he must have been twenty seven I suppose) came in and did the whole tongue out, say ‘ah’, let’s listen to your chest routine. He was from the medical ward and would make an initial assessment and recommendation as to a drug regime. Almost as an aside, he asked me how much I drink. I told him, honestly.
His eyes widened and a look somewhere between shock and pity, as if he had just been asked to treat George Best or Oliver Reed, came over his face. ‘How much do you drink in the morning?’ he asked.
‘What? Morning? Nothing!’ I said. ‘Ever. I never drink before 6pm. Except at Sunday lunch, of course.’ I was amazed. Mornings? I don’t drink in the mornings! People who shout at themselves and smell of wee drink in the mornings. He was assuming I was an alcoholic.
He went off to speak to his registrar on the phone to get some advice and I heard him say ‘blah blah blah heavy drinker blah blah blah.’ Heavy drinker? Me? I’m not a heavy drinker. I am a classy drinker. A serious drinker, perhaps, but not a heavy drinker. I have a rich cellar, full of good claret and some excellent Rhone Valley wines. I like to talk about wine, read about wine, think about wine and, yes, drink wine. And good sherry. And I like London gin. And XO Cognac. And single malt whiskies. Maybe I drink a little too much perhaps, but heavy drinker? It makes me sound, oh I don’t know, working class I suppose. Somehow uncouth. Whatever, it certainly made me about as comfortable as the niggling canula in my arm.
It got worse. A couple of hours later, I landed up on the Coronary Care Unit, an oasis of calm in the otherwise hectic hospital. Another bag of drugs was put up and another doctor stood in front of me. I answered all his questions. And then he asked me the question too and I told him and his eyes nearly came out on stalks like in a Warner Brothers cartoon.
‘But you’re from Pakistan’ I thought (he had told me; I hadn’t made some appalling assumption), you’re more than likely a Muslim who hasn’t progressed beyond a ginger beer and a packet of crisps while sitting in the back of your mum’s car. He gave himself away by not really knowing how many units a bottle a day is. I did the conversion for him, at which point – again much like in a cartoon – his hair stood on end and his eyebrows left his forehead.
‘Wow’ he said. ‘That’s too much.’
Honestly. He said ‘wow’.
The new bag of drugs was due to go in over 23 hours, but after just three, I got teary and panicky. My wife was due to give birth today and it was supposed to be her in bed and me supporting her, not the other way around and I felt selfish and shitty and started to cry. The nurse took the bull by the horns, sympathised with my dilemma and said that they would proceed to an electrocardioversion. No more drugs, just electricity to get my heart rhythm back to normal. ‘I’ll just need to inform the consultant as he has to oversee the procedure.’
Twenty minutes later the consultant came on to the ward and talked me through what was to happen, likely side effects (‘a major stroke, but don’t worry, it’s rare’), got me to sign the consent form and went away to make the electricity or whatever it is he had to do. Two minutes later, he was back.
‘They tell me you are a drinker. How much do you drink?’
I told him. He didn’t say wow. His hair, eyes and eyebrows stayed firmly in place. Instead, he fixed me with a steely gaze and he spoke to me in the stern voice of one who knows what he is talking about and who wants to get his message across to an idiot who isn’t listening.
‘You drink way, way too much. You have to stop. Now. Your heart cannot cope with it. If you don’t stop, you stand a good chance of dying young. I will get your heart beating correctly but when you leave here you have to stop drinking. Will you stop drinking?’
Blimey. He meant it. It wasn’t exactly blackmail: he would have to shock me anyway even if I said ‘no’, but I could tell; he was being serious. And I believed him. I believed him because to have one atrial flutter is unlucky, two is suspicious. I believed him because I have spent too many days and nights of my life in hospital to want to spend anymore. I believed him because I wanted to go home and look after my wife and be a good father to my unborn child and not die an unnecessary and early death.
‘I’ll stop.’
‘When?’
‘Today.’
And so he put pads on my chest, a drug in my arm and hit me with 200 joules of electricity that felt like a thunderclap going off in my head but it got my heart back to beating like it is supposed to. Ten minutes later, I woke up and the monitor showed a steady 49 beats per minute so they took the line out of my arm and took all the sensors off my chest. I stood up and put my trousers and shoes on and said thank you to Kate and Claire who had been so kind to me. As I walked off the ward, the doctor was standing at the nursing station. ‘Thanks’ I said.
‘No problem.’ He said. ‘Did you mean what you said?’ He asked.
‘About stopping? Of course.’ I replied.
‘Good. Then you can have a glass of wine at the weekend. It will be good for you.’
And I got home and I did not have a drink. Nor did I on Tuesday, nor on Wednesday, nor on Thursday. As I write, it is Friday and it is ten past six. I put a bottle of Domaine Testut 2007 Chablis in the fridge a couple of hours ago.
I am going to have a glass and then put the cork back in and when Helen goes to bed tonight, I shall go with her.
David Izod
Friday, 17 June 2011
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
I thought my love affair was over, but it's all right now.
In 1980, when I was fifteen, I went to France for the first time. I went to stay with a French family in Annecy on the school exchange and was immediately absorbed by, and into, the French way of life. I marvelled at the fact that everybody had two hours for lunch and everybody went home to eat an extraordinary meal that the matriarch of the family prepared in what appeared to be a matter of moments. I was amazed that there were only three types of car on the road: Peugeot, Renault and Citroen and everybody who smoked either smoked Gitanes or they smoked Gauloises. I loved the fact that every single person, from 10 – 100 years old, drank wine with every single meal and it was perfectly acceptable to add water to make a refreshing lunchtime drink. I loved the sense of national and regional pride and I loved the enormous sense of difference there was about the place.
Over the years, my love for France grew. I learned to love the heat of the Midi and the grace of Paris. I learned to love the beaches at the edges and the mountains in the middle. I learned to love and understand about the cuisine, about how eating was bound up with family and the seasons and a sense of place, and then, about seven years ago, I fell under the spell of the wines of the Medoc.
I can remember precisely the moment of my bewitching. For years, I had been carting back cheap table wine and for years, my friend Alastair had been taking the mickey out of me and telling me that I really did need to develop a better palate. So one year, I did bring back some half decent bottles of Bordeaux and, one night, in October 2003, sitting in my chair in my old house, I discovered that with each mouthful the wine was getting more and more interesting. The taste was changing and developing according to what I was eating and how long it had been in the glass. This wasn’t just a wine to drink; it was a wine to think about. So I did think about it, and read about it and learn about it and drank an awful lot of it until I was entirely under its spell and had to go and see for myself where it was made.
The Medoc is the region of France that sticks up north of Bordeaux, bounded by the Gironde River on the one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. Here, many of the greatest of the Bordeaux region’s wines are made. The peninsula is about thirty five miles wide at it widest, narrowing to a point fifty miles north of the city. The western two thirds is made up of boggy pine forest that has little agricultural value but plays an excellent host to a range of wildlife, while the eastern third is dominated by a vast sea of vineyards that grow Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc together with tiny quantities of Malbec and Carmenere. There are no major towns and only a few places that could be called anything more than villages. There is no industry of any kind which means that the air is stunningly pure: the Atlantic brings in beautiful fresh breezes that pick up nothing but the scent of pine before wafting around the vines. The coastline is an unbroken line of golden sandy beach protected by dunes that stretches all the way down to the Spanish border.
On my first visit, I was so excited I was like a kid in a sweet shop. As I drove along the ‘routes des vins’, I was amazed to actually see the places that had, until then, only existed on labels or in books. From the village of Arsac in the south to St Cristoly in the north, I drove up and down, with my jaw dropping as the famous names presented themselves: Giscours, Lascombes, Margaux, Latour, and even the smaller chateau that I could afford and happened to be my favourites, places like Tour St Bonnet and Moulin Rouge. I loved pulling up in my car at the latter of these and meeting the man who had been making the wine all his life, taking over as he did from his father and his father before him, stretching back in an unbroken line to the Seventeenth Century. I loved his passion (and his hysterical accent when he tried to speak English) and I loved him letting me taste his wines, including the new wine still in the 225 litre oak barriques that, over the period of a year or so, turn the wine from grape juice into something magical and unique.
Most, if not all, serious wine drinkers fall under the spell of the wines of the Medoc and for most, they remain the benchmark wines. Yes, Burgundy. Yes, the Rhone Valley and we might, at times, even drink some ‘foreign’ wines like a Rioja or a Chianti, but everything is judged by the standard of claret, everything is compared to claret and if it is Christmas or a birthday or some other big day, then it is always claret that will grace the table. So, to actually be there, to be able to get out of the car and wander, at will and liberty, into the vineyards of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, was a wonderful thing. If you then factor in that the beaches are wonderful and empty, the food is cheap, the sun is shining, and Bordeaux is one of the world’s great cities (as recognised by UNESCO), you have a recipe for a truly wonderful holiday destination. So, after my 2004 visit, I returned again in 2007, found I loved it even more and so returned for my third trip this summer.
But this time it just wasn’t the same. I know that familiarity breeds contempt, but that is far too simple an explanation. Yes, it’s true that the first flush of my love affair had definitely passed. I had anticipated that: I knew it would no longer be good enough for Mistress Medoc to simply flutter her chateaux at me and expect my knees to go weak as they once did. But my sense of disquiet was based on something a little more fundamental. There were things about the place that were actively disappointing.
Firstly, the simple fact is that France is no longer a cheap country to visit. The exchange rate doesn’t help of course, and neither did the introduction of the Euro that saw a rise of 20% or so of the price of everything, but the fact is , even leaving these factors to one side, prices have simply gone up. Fuel used to be cheap. Fifteen years ago, I would drive to Andorra to fill up with diesel because it was – and I jest not – cheaper than bottled water. Now, petrol on the motorway is £1.35 a litre. When you factor in motorway tolls, simply getting there is now a serious percentage of the holiday budget. And when you do get there, things are expensive and not always of the quality that you would immediately associate with Continental living. One of the main reasons for this is that the French have been seduced by the supermarket to an even greater extent that we in England have. Just like here, the society has been cheapened by the embracing of so called ‘cheap’ food that has gone a long way to wipe out small independent producers so that even in middle sized towns there is very often no way of accessing the produce that is being grown in the fields less than fifty km away. At home, I know the origin of the meat and vegetables I eat and the vast majority of them come from within fifty miles of my house and they have not – as supermarkets dictate – then gone off to Wigan or wherever the central distribution point is. It is hard, if not impossible to do that in France, which would not be so bad if the quality of the produce in the supermarkets was excellent, but it very often isn’t anymore. I remember, in previous trips, being almost overcome by the smell and flavour of the white peaches of Roussillon: they were unlike anything we could hope to encounter in England. Now they are often unripe and often bland. And they are expensive.
Eating out too is not now the virtually guaranteed pleasure that it once was. It, like food shopping, is expensive, quality is unreliable and imagination sadly lacking. The days of each small town having two or three eating places (usually a family run restaurant, a brasserie and maybe somewhere a bit more fancy) that sold good local food at reasonable prices, have gone. Restaurant menus are now routinely 25 Euro a head for distinctly average food: French cooking has lost so much ground over the past ten years or so that the average British pub meal is now often half the price and twice the quality of yet another French offering of ‘steak frites’ with greasy chips and an anonymous piece of meat sourced from somewhere in Holland, or more often these days, Ireland.
Also, the French attitude to food and wine is changing. There is a creeping, insidious Americanisation of attitude that is starting to undermine what used to be a wonderful attitude to the dinner table. The French are turning their backs on their own table wines and are ‘drinking less and drinking better’. They are worrying about making sure they eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day (who the hell came up with that? My generation grew up on less than five portions a week and we seem to be doing ok) and are having to put up with endless messages on every advert telling them to be careful with what they eat instead of just heaving down the fois gras with gay abandon like they used to. President Mitterrand’s last meal was said to be of Ortolan, a tiny bird that is captured alive, force-fed, then drowned in Armagnac before being roasted whole and eaten that way, bones and all, the diner having first draped a linen napkin over his head to hide such an indulgence from God. Now, as shameful as such a meal may be, I can tell you now I am in awe of a country that could come up with such a dish and would certainly want to follow its gastronomic lead rather than go down the path blazed by the nation that brought us the Zinger burger. But it is to America that France continues to look, even if the Americans –as Homer once said – consider them to be nothing more than ‘cheese eating surrender monkeys’.
Can you believe that only 15% of French people aged between 15 and 75 now drink wine every day, with 37% drinking wine only ‘occasionally?’ Now I am prepared to accept that if this means that the lorry drivers are no longer guzzling half a litre with lunch before getting back into their thirty tonne lorries, this is probably a good thing, but that is not really where the reductions are coming from. The French as an entire nation have slowly been lowering their consumption for forty years (it has halved since 1970) and yet the intake of anti-depressants has doubled in the same period. The media and successive governments have done their best to virtually criminalise the daily drinking of wine, despite the fact that the French have always had astonishingly low levels of heart disease despite a somewhat fat rich diet. Part of the decline can be explained by wine no longer being the populist, blue collar ‘everyman’s drink’ but the main reason is that the middle classes have gone into an American style health panic, driven by highly influential anti-alcohol lobbies. The middle classes have been seduced by the ‘it gives you cancer’ argument, wine sales are plummeting and France is becoming the sort of country that only Daily Mail readers would want to live in: a place that embraces blandness because blandness is better than the terror that will be unleashed if we take absolutely any pleasure out of life whatsoever.
And just to make me feel really at home, the traffic was a nightmare. It didn’t use to be, but it is now. Really, a nightmare. On one occasion, I left our accommodation to pick up a pre-ordered pizza (because we couldn’t afford to go out to eat every night) from the place in the local town, about 4km away. It took me half an hour to get back. The traffic was solid, nose to tail, like the M25 on a Friday afternoon. One Sunday we tried to drive to Cap Ferrat for a bit of lunch, but gave up because the queue to get into town was 21 – I repeat, 21 – Km long.
But.
On our last night, we had an excellent picnic supper and then walked out of our apartment, through the garden and straight into the vineyard of Chateau Clarke that was planted right up to the lawn of our chambre d’hote. It was after nine and the sky was a dark blue, flecked with the last bits of pink reflected against a blob or two of cloud. I stood amongst the vines and listened to nothing but the sound of the grapes ripening, the crickets doing their thing and the buzz of a motovelo somewhere in the distance. The air was warm in that evening way that evenings are only ever warm on holiday: fragrant and fresh and clear and still. The street light came on on the telegraph pole on the road up to Listrac adding another layer of light and colour. It was our last night in Moulis en Medoc and the truth was, that despite it all, I didn’t really want to go home. As I looked out, all I could see in three of the four compass points was nothing but vines. Row upon row of vines gently turning from green to black, waiting to be harvested and transformed into great wine, wine that I can still afford even though I have to look harder and dig deeper to find the smaller, better producers. Which is, of course, part of the fun. I walked into the region six years ago with my eyes only on the names I had seen on the price lists of the big importers and in the text books written by American critics, but over the years I have learned that the joy is in keeping your ear to the ground and buying wonderful wine for 6 Euro a bottle made by a man and his wife that will never be sold outside the village limits. They are there. You just have to find them. And they do taste just as good at home.
And we had found one place to go for an excellent lunch: 12 Euro for three courses of well cooked, simple dishes, with wine. So we went for lunch regularly and enjoyed the fact that there was no menu, just a choice of two home cooked dishes at each stage which just goes to show again that you just have to look harder for what was once everywhere. They haven’t completely forgotten how to do it.
And as I stood there and soaked it up I wondered if the problem was just with me and my ageing, jaded eyes but I decided that it didn’t really matter and it didn’t really need thinking about: all I needed to do was stand and listen and watch and enjoy my last moments in a place that is unique on the face of the earth. And I know that everything looks better when viewed through the romantic glasses of a last night on holiday, but it was good enough for me and, much like a successful marriage, despite the niggles and the frustration, I knew that I was still very much in love and I knew that I would be back.
David Izod August 2010
Over the years, my love for France grew. I learned to love the heat of the Midi and the grace of Paris. I learned to love the beaches at the edges and the mountains in the middle. I learned to love and understand about the cuisine, about how eating was bound up with family and the seasons and a sense of place, and then, about seven years ago, I fell under the spell of the wines of the Medoc.
I can remember precisely the moment of my bewitching. For years, I had been carting back cheap table wine and for years, my friend Alastair had been taking the mickey out of me and telling me that I really did need to develop a better palate. So one year, I did bring back some half decent bottles of Bordeaux and, one night, in October 2003, sitting in my chair in my old house, I discovered that with each mouthful the wine was getting more and more interesting. The taste was changing and developing according to what I was eating and how long it had been in the glass. This wasn’t just a wine to drink; it was a wine to think about. So I did think about it, and read about it and learn about it and drank an awful lot of it until I was entirely under its spell and had to go and see for myself where it was made.
The Medoc is the region of France that sticks up north of Bordeaux, bounded by the Gironde River on the one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. Here, many of the greatest of the Bordeaux region’s wines are made. The peninsula is about thirty five miles wide at it widest, narrowing to a point fifty miles north of the city. The western two thirds is made up of boggy pine forest that has little agricultural value but plays an excellent host to a range of wildlife, while the eastern third is dominated by a vast sea of vineyards that grow Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc together with tiny quantities of Malbec and Carmenere. There are no major towns and only a few places that could be called anything more than villages. There is no industry of any kind which means that the air is stunningly pure: the Atlantic brings in beautiful fresh breezes that pick up nothing but the scent of pine before wafting around the vines. The coastline is an unbroken line of golden sandy beach protected by dunes that stretches all the way down to the Spanish border.
On my first visit, I was so excited I was like a kid in a sweet shop. As I drove along the ‘routes des vins’, I was amazed to actually see the places that had, until then, only existed on labels or in books. From the village of Arsac in the south to St Cristoly in the north, I drove up and down, with my jaw dropping as the famous names presented themselves: Giscours, Lascombes, Margaux, Latour, and even the smaller chateau that I could afford and happened to be my favourites, places like Tour St Bonnet and Moulin Rouge. I loved pulling up in my car at the latter of these and meeting the man who had been making the wine all his life, taking over as he did from his father and his father before him, stretching back in an unbroken line to the Seventeenth Century. I loved his passion (and his hysterical accent when he tried to speak English) and I loved him letting me taste his wines, including the new wine still in the 225 litre oak barriques that, over the period of a year or so, turn the wine from grape juice into something magical and unique.
Most, if not all, serious wine drinkers fall under the spell of the wines of the Medoc and for most, they remain the benchmark wines. Yes, Burgundy. Yes, the Rhone Valley and we might, at times, even drink some ‘foreign’ wines like a Rioja or a Chianti, but everything is judged by the standard of claret, everything is compared to claret and if it is Christmas or a birthday or some other big day, then it is always claret that will grace the table. So, to actually be there, to be able to get out of the car and wander, at will and liberty, into the vineyards of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, was a wonderful thing. If you then factor in that the beaches are wonderful and empty, the food is cheap, the sun is shining, and Bordeaux is one of the world’s great cities (as recognised by UNESCO), you have a recipe for a truly wonderful holiday destination. So, after my 2004 visit, I returned again in 2007, found I loved it even more and so returned for my third trip this summer.
But this time it just wasn’t the same. I know that familiarity breeds contempt, but that is far too simple an explanation. Yes, it’s true that the first flush of my love affair had definitely passed. I had anticipated that: I knew it would no longer be good enough for Mistress Medoc to simply flutter her chateaux at me and expect my knees to go weak as they once did. But my sense of disquiet was based on something a little more fundamental. There were things about the place that were actively disappointing.
Firstly, the simple fact is that France is no longer a cheap country to visit. The exchange rate doesn’t help of course, and neither did the introduction of the Euro that saw a rise of 20% or so of the price of everything, but the fact is , even leaving these factors to one side, prices have simply gone up. Fuel used to be cheap. Fifteen years ago, I would drive to Andorra to fill up with diesel because it was – and I jest not – cheaper than bottled water. Now, petrol on the motorway is £1.35 a litre. When you factor in motorway tolls, simply getting there is now a serious percentage of the holiday budget. And when you do get there, things are expensive and not always of the quality that you would immediately associate with Continental living. One of the main reasons for this is that the French have been seduced by the supermarket to an even greater extent that we in England have. Just like here, the society has been cheapened by the embracing of so called ‘cheap’ food that has gone a long way to wipe out small independent producers so that even in middle sized towns there is very often no way of accessing the produce that is being grown in the fields less than fifty km away. At home, I know the origin of the meat and vegetables I eat and the vast majority of them come from within fifty miles of my house and they have not – as supermarkets dictate – then gone off to Wigan or wherever the central distribution point is. It is hard, if not impossible to do that in France, which would not be so bad if the quality of the produce in the supermarkets was excellent, but it very often isn’t anymore. I remember, in previous trips, being almost overcome by the smell and flavour of the white peaches of Roussillon: they were unlike anything we could hope to encounter in England. Now they are often unripe and often bland. And they are expensive.
Eating out too is not now the virtually guaranteed pleasure that it once was. It, like food shopping, is expensive, quality is unreliable and imagination sadly lacking. The days of each small town having two or three eating places (usually a family run restaurant, a brasserie and maybe somewhere a bit more fancy) that sold good local food at reasonable prices, have gone. Restaurant menus are now routinely 25 Euro a head for distinctly average food: French cooking has lost so much ground over the past ten years or so that the average British pub meal is now often half the price and twice the quality of yet another French offering of ‘steak frites’ with greasy chips and an anonymous piece of meat sourced from somewhere in Holland, or more often these days, Ireland.
Also, the French attitude to food and wine is changing. There is a creeping, insidious Americanisation of attitude that is starting to undermine what used to be a wonderful attitude to the dinner table. The French are turning their backs on their own table wines and are ‘drinking less and drinking better’. They are worrying about making sure they eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day (who the hell came up with that? My generation grew up on less than five portions a week and we seem to be doing ok) and are having to put up with endless messages on every advert telling them to be careful with what they eat instead of just heaving down the fois gras with gay abandon like they used to. President Mitterrand’s last meal was said to be of Ortolan, a tiny bird that is captured alive, force-fed, then drowned in Armagnac before being roasted whole and eaten that way, bones and all, the diner having first draped a linen napkin over his head to hide such an indulgence from God. Now, as shameful as such a meal may be, I can tell you now I am in awe of a country that could come up with such a dish and would certainly want to follow its gastronomic lead rather than go down the path blazed by the nation that brought us the Zinger burger. But it is to America that France continues to look, even if the Americans –as Homer once said – consider them to be nothing more than ‘cheese eating surrender monkeys’.
Can you believe that only 15% of French people aged between 15 and 75 now drink wine every day, with 37% drinking wine only ‘occasionally?’ Now I am prepared to accept that if this means that the lorry drivers are no longer guzzling half a litre with lunch before getting back into their thirty tonne lorries, this is probably a good thing, but that is not really where the reductions are coming from. The French as an entire nation have slowly been lowering their consumption for forty years (it has halved since 1970) and yet the intake of anti-depressants has doubled in the same period. The media and successive governments have done their best to virtually criminalise the daily drinking of wine, despite the fact that the French have always had astonishingly low levels of heart disease despite a somewhat fat rich diet. Part of the decline can be explained by wine no longer being the populist, blue collar ‘everyman’s drink’ but the main reason is that the middle classes have gone into an American style health panic, driven by highly influential anti-alcohol lobbies. The middle classes have been seduced by the ‘it gives you cancer’ argument, wine sales are plummeting and France is becoming the sort of country that only Daily Mail readers would want to live in: a place that embraces blandness because blandness is better than the terror that will be unleashed if we take absolutely any pleasure out of life whatsoever.
And just to make me feel really at home, the traffic was a nightmare. It didn’t use to be, but it is now. Really, a nightmare. On one occasion, I left our accommodation to pick up a pre-ordered pizza (because we couldn’t afford to go out to eat every night) from the place in the local town, about 4km away. It took me half an hour to get back. The traffic was solid, nose to tail, like the M25 on a Friday afternoon. One Sunday we tried to drive to Cap Ferrat for a bit of lunch, but gave up because the queue to get into town was 21 – I repeat, 21 – Km long.
But.
On our last night, we had an excellent picnic supper and then walked out of our apartment, through the garden and straight into the vineyard of Chateau Clarke that was planted right up to the lawn of our chambre d’hote. It was after nine and the sky was a dark blue, flecked with the last bits of pink reflected against a blob or two of cloud. I stood amongst the vines and listened to nothing but the sound of the grapes ripening, the crickets doing their thing and the buzz of a motovelo somewhere in the distance. The air was warm in that evening way that evenings are only ever warm on holiday: fragrant and fresh and clear and still. The street light came on on the telegraph pole on the road up to Listrac adding another layer of light and colour. It was our last night in Moulis en Medoc and the truth was, that despite it all, I didn’t really want to go home. As I looked out, all I could see in three of the four compass points was nothing but vines. Row upon row of vines gently turning from green to black, waiting to be harvested and transformed into great wine, wine that I can still afford even though I have to look harder and dig deeper to find the smaller, better producers. Which is, of course, part of the fun. I walked into the region six years ago with my eyes only on the names I had seen on the price lists of the big importers and in the text books written by American critics, but over the years I have learned that the joy is in keeping your ear to the ground and buying wonderful wine for 6 Euro a bottle made by a man and his wife that will never be sold outside the village limits. They are there. You just have to find them. And they do taste just as good at home.
And we had found one place to go for an excellent lunch: 12 Euro for three courses of well cooked, simple dishes, with wine. So we went for lunch regularly and enjoyed the fact that there was no menu, just a choice of two home cooked dishes at each stage which just goes to show again that you just have to look harder for what was once everywhere. They haven’t completely forgotten how to do it.
And as I stood there and soaked it up I wondered if the problem was just with me and my ageing, jaded eyes but I decided that it didn’t really matter and it didn’t really need thinking about: all I needed to do was stand and listen and watch and enjoy my last moments in a place that is unique on the face of the earth. And I know that everything looks better when viewed through the romantic glasses of a last night on holiday, but it was good enough for me and, much like a successful marriage, despite the niggles and the frustration, I knew that I was still very much in love and I knew that I would be back.
David Izod August 2010
Friday, 21 August 2009
What we drank at the weekend
I know some people were interested in my wine ramblings before Christmas, so I thought I might while a way a moment or two by letting you know what Helen and I drank over the weekend. I will put prices and suppliers etc so you can take a punt if you feel so inclined.
For Friday aperativo we had a bottle of Soave Classico made by the Pra Brothers in their Coll San’ Antonio vineyard in Italy.
This is fast becoming one of my favourite white wines. I suggested it to Jamie Broughton last year and I know he was knocked out by it. It is full of melon and pineapple flavours but shot through with a mineral acidity that means it is in no way cloying or sweet. It is balanced, structured and wonderful. You can buy it from Knightwick wines for about £9.
We were supposed to be going out to the pictures and for a pizza, but Friday was so horrible, we stayed in and ordered a curry with which we drank:
Chateau du Moulin Rouge 2004. This is one of my favourite wines and is made in the village of Cussac Fort Medoc about twenty kilometres north of Bordeaux. I have been there a couple of times and enjoyed the hospitality of the Ribeiro family who this year let us taste the 2006 out of the barrel, which was fascinating. The 2004 is still very young and a bit raw but is full of classic claret cassis flavours (alliteration anyone?) but was a bit overpowered by the curry! I bought this en primeur through 1855.com for about £7 a bottle. If you ever see this for sale in this country, particularly from the 2000/01/03/05 vintages, buy it. It is great value and a really good introduction to the wonderful world of claret.
For Saturday aperativo we drank Veuve Olivier a rose from the Aldi that cost £3.49. It was a good party wine and a perfectly pleasant way to kick off a Saturday night, but I wouldn’t form a queue to buy it.
While playing poker I drank Porton Viejo. This is available from Laithwaites by mail order for about £7. You have to be careful with Tony Laithwaite. None of his wines are bad, but not many of them are particularly good either. This one is fantastic and I recommend it to you without hesitation. It is made in the Rapel Valley in Chile from Cabernet Sauvignon and tastes like blackberries sucked through bonfire smoke on a cold November evening. Wonderful.
On Sunday, Helen was forced to go to Tesco because they are the only stockists of a particular brand of lip protector that she favours. She softened the impact of this unpleasantness by picking up a bottle of St Joseph for us to have with our Sunday lamb chops. St. Joseph is one of the Rhone Valley villages entitled to its own appellation and is capable of producing big, bold beautiful Syrah based wines that are all pepper and spice. Like most things from Tesco however, this was hugely disappointing: insipid, thin, struggling and tired. It was very generous of Helen to shell out a fiver for it (down from £7) but I am afraid it wasn’t worth it.
More again soon! Izod
I know some people were interested in my wine ramblings before Christmas, so I thought I might while a way a moment or two by letting you know what Helen and I drank over the weekend. I will put prices and suppliers etc so you can take a punt if you feel so inclined.
For Friday aperativo we had a bottle of Soave Classico made by the Pra Brothers in their Coll San’ Antonio vineyard in Italy.
This is fast becoming one of my favourite white wines. I suggested it to Jamie Broughton last year and I know he was knocked out by it. It is full of melon and pineapple flavours but shot through with a mineral acidity that means it is in no way cloying or sweet. It is balanced, structured and wonderful. You can buy it from Knightwick wines for about £9.
We were supposed to be going out to the pictures and for a pizza, but Friday was so horrible, we stayed in and ordered a curry with which we drank:
Chateau du Moulin Rouge 2004. This is one of my favourite wines and is made in the village of Cussac Fort Medoc about twenty kilometres north of Bordeaux. I have been there a couple of times and enjoyed the hospitality of the Ribeiro family who this year let us taste the 2006 out of the barrel, which was fascinating. The 2004 is still very young and a bit raw but is full of classic claret cassis flavours (alliteration anyone?) but was a bit overpowered by the curry! I bought this en primeur through 1855.com for about £7 a bottle. If you ever see this for sale in this country, particularly from the 2000/01/03/05 vintages, buy it. It is great value and a really good introduction to the wonderful world of claret.
For Saturday aperativo we drank Veuve Olivier a rose from the Aldi that cost £3.49. It was a good party wine and a perfectly pleasant way to kick off a Saturday night, but I wouldn’t form a queue to buy it.
While playing poker I drank Porton Viejo. This is available from Laithwaites by mail order for about £7. You have to be careful with Tony Laithwaite. None of his wines are bad, but not many of them are particularly good either. This one is fantastic and I recommend it to you without hesitation. It is made in the Rapel Valley in Chile from Cabernet Sauvignon and tastes like blackberries sucked through bonfire smoke on a cold November evening. Wonderful.
On Sunday, Helen was forced to go to Tesco because they are the only stockists of a particular brand of lip protector that she favours. She softened the impact of this unpleasantness by picking up a bottle of St Joseph for us to have with our Sunday lamb chops. St. Joseph is one of the Rhone Valley villages entitled to its own appellation and is capable of producing big, bold beautiful Syrah based wines that are all pepper and spice. Like most things from Tesco however, this was hugely disappointing: insipid, thin, struggling and tired. It was very generous of Helen to shell out a fiver for it (down from £7) but I am afraid it wasn’t worth it.
More again soon! Izod
Quiz
What do the Australians call Syrah?
What three grapes are allowed in the production of Champagne?
Is Chateau Latour a First or Second Growth?
What country does Rioja come from and from what grape is it made?
Work out this anagram. Clue: it is a wine making region! RNOOULSLISGEUCLDANO
In which country is the Barossa Valley?
In which ‘appellation’ is Chateau Giscours?
In which two European countries do the words ‘Reserve’ have legal meaning?
Why would you decant a wine? (Give two reasons.)
If an Italian wine has ‘Classico’ on the label, what does it mean?
What is the sweetest category of German wine?
What is botrytis?
What is the main colour of wine drunk in Provence?
The great wines of Burgundy are made from one red grape and one white grape. What are they called?
The Three Choirs vineyard is on the border of which three counties?
What do the Australians call Syrah?
What three grapes are allowed in the production of Champagne?
Is Chateau Latour a First or Second Growth?
What country does Rioja come from and from what grape is it made?
Work out this anagram. Clue: it is a wine making region! RNOOULSLISGEUCLDANO
In which country is the Barossa Valley?
In which ‘appellation’ is Chateau Giscours?
In which two European countries do the words ‘Reserve’ have legal meaning?
Why would you decant a wine? (Give two reasons.)
If an Italian wine has ‘Classico’ on the label, what does it mean?
What is the sweetest category of German wine?
What is botrytis?
What is the main colour of wine drunk in Provence?
The great wines of Burgundy are made from one red grape and one white grape. What are they called?
The Three Choirs vineyard is on the border of which three counties?
Monday, 10 August 2009
On grapes
On grapes
The other week, a colleague at work said, when talking about what wine she and her husband preferred, ‘I like a Chardonnay and my husband likes to drink Merlot’.
This response bothered me. Not because I disagree that either of these grapes makes excellent wine. Far from it. Chateau Petrus is made from Merlot and I would love to drink that regularly. Le Montrachet is made from Chardonnay and I wouldn’t mind a glass or two of that on a Friday night.
My issue with her response is that it is indicative of a trend in wine retailing – started in the new world - that dumbs down, simplifies and ultimately reduces pleasure. Buying a certain bottle of wine because you know the grape it is made from belongs to the school of ‘I know what I like and I like what I know’, which is reductive and ultimately leads us to Tesco and Starbucks, neither of which being a place I want to go.
Selling wines by their grape variety represents cheap and easy marketing. Just look at what has happened to Pinot Grigio. Massive marketing drives have seen it rise from being a fairly obscure Italian mutant (of the Pinot Noir) five years ago to something approaching supermarket shelf and world wine bar domination. But you know what will happen: in five years’ time, people won’t be saying, when asked in the pub what they would like, ‘Oh, ABC, darling, ABC,’ but ‘anything but PG, please’, because the mass marketing will create mass demand that will see mass retailers force lower and lower prices on to producers who will in turn produce a product of lower and lower quality. Chardonnay from South East Australia is just about undrinkable as are, to my taste at least, the mega brands from California.
If you drink only according to grape variety, chances are you only know to drink red wines called Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Tempranillo, Syrah or Pino Noir. If you drink white wines you are probably limiting yourself to Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc or possibly Chenin Blanc and Viognier (but probably not). Why do this? Why not decide to divide up your Friday wine-pound into monthly blocks of a country (France in December, Argentina in January, and Spain in February etc), or a region: Loire Valley in summer, Central Valley from Chile in winter? Why not buy something you know absolutely nothing about whatsoever? The worst thing that can happen is that you have a mildly unpleasant experience that costs you a fiver (or a tenner or whatever) and the best thing is that you could have a wonderful evening with a new life-long friend.
David Izod
August 9 2009
The other week, a colleague at work said, when talking about what wine she and her husband preferred, ‘I like a Chardonnay and my husband likes to drink Merlot’.
This response bothered me. Not because I disagree that either of these grapes makes excellent wine. Far from it. Chateau Petrus is made from Merlot and I would love to drink that regularly. Le Montrachet is made from Chardonnay and I wouldn’t mind a glass or two of that on a Friday night.
My issue with her response is that it is indicative of a trend in wine retailing – started in the new world - that dumbs down, simplifies and ultimately reduces pleasure. Buying a certain bottle of wine because you know the grape it is made from belongs to the school of ‘I know what I like and I like what I know’, which is reductive and ultimately leads us to Tesco and Starbucks, neither of which being a place I want to go.
Selling wines by their grape variety represents cheap and easy marketing. Just look at what has happened to Pinot Grigio. Massive marketing drives have seen it rise from being a fairly obscure Italian mutant (of the Pinot Noir) five years ago to something approaching supermarket shelf and world wine bar domination. But you know what will happen: in five years’ time, people won’t be saying, when asked in the pub what they would like, ‘Oh, ABC, darling, ABC,’ but ‘anything but PG, please’, because the mass marketing will create mass demand that will see mass retailers force lower and lower prices on to producers who will in turn produce a product of lower and lower quality. Chardonnay from South East Australia is just about undrinkable as are, to my taste at least, the mega brands from California.
If you drink only according to grape variety, chances are you only know to drink red wines called Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Tempranillo, Syrah or Pino Noir. If you drink white wines you are probably limiting yourself to Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc or possibly Chenin Blanc and Viognier (but probably not). Why do this? Why not decide to divide up your Friday wine-pound into monthly blocks of a country (France in December, Argentina in January, and Spain in February etc), or a region: Loire Valley in summer, Central Valley from Chile in winter? Why not buy something you know absolutely nothing about whatsoever? The worst thing that can happen is that you have a mildly unpleasant experience that costs you a fiver (or a tenner or whatever) and the best thing is that you could have a wonderful evening with a new life-long friend.
David Izod
August 9 2009
The right wine in the right place.
The right wine in the right place.
Ok, so here’s a question: if we accept that good local wine should be consumed near to its place of production if you want to get the most from it (which heaven knows I am not the first person to comment on, as hordes of disappointed Sangria drinkers have noted from about 1968 onwards), what happens if you open a good bottle of claret or a top Rhone Valley village wine on a balmy evening when your skin is fizzing with sun and water, you only have plastic glasses to drink it out of and you are chowing down on an €8 take-away pizza on the terrace?
It’s a big fat waste of money, that’s what. Now I know that the beardy fella in ‘Sideways’ ended up drinking his prized Cheval Blanc out of a plastic cup in a cheesy diner somewhere, but that was more about his need to find a new philosophy, not a new way to enjoy fine wine. He might have got something out of his experience, but the fact remains the wine would have tasted better if he had decanted it, poured it into Reidel glasses and drunk it with a rare rump steak.
My lesson of learning this ‘right wine in the right location’ unfolded over forty eight hours while in Provence. Helen and I were enjoying our usual aperativo time, drinking rosé and eating olives, when our neighbour came out on to the terrace for a smoke. We had seen him arrive earlier in the day, a swarthy southern European with cropped grey hair, a twinkle in his eye and his teenaged son on the back of his hefty BMW motorbike.
It is important to stress that although Patrick and Kevin (as we subsequently discovered they were called) shared our terrace, this was hardly an inconvenience because a) I have lived in flats that were smaller than said terrace and b) we might have been close neighbours, but much like the pioneers who tramped into the American wilderness, the next neighbours beyond were a long, long way away. Like half a mile away in at least two of the four compass points and on the other side of the building on the other two compass points which effectively put them out of sight and out of mind.
Anyway, Patrick came out for a smoke and it would have been rude not to have invited him to join us for a glass and besides, he could easily decline and good manners would have prevailed. It transpired that Patrick was not a man to refuse anything. His English was good – full of idiom and expression and obviously learnt everywhere except in the classroom. His French and German were also good and his Italian was spoken like the mother tongue that it was.
Patrick liked to talk. This could have been a disaster of course. I have seen ‘Holiday Neighbours From Hell’ on ITV2, but it really wasn’t because Patrick was engaging, witty, full of stories and philosophies that he was keen to try out on us. Within half an hour we felt we had known him years and although Helen and I had spoken barely three sentences between us, he seemed to have taken a liking to us (maybe because we listened while everyone back home in Switzerland just tells him to shut up).
The following day, we were having our picnic lunch on the big table by the pool and again it would have been rude not to have invited Kevin and Patrick (who were well aware that it was odd for two Italian-Swiss to end up with Irish names) to join us. They were a little embarrassed by the somewhat meagre fayre they could bring to the table and were suitably impressed by our Victorian Country House Picnic, but they joined us anyway and a very pleasant couple of hours passed, at the end of which Patrick invited us to be his guests at a restaurant in town that night. We accepted, enjoyed a good dinner later that evening and made only the most polite, restrained attempt to do anything with the very large tab that was placed in front of our host.
Given this generosity, and given that we could not afford to return the favour another night, I decided that the next best thing would be to offer a different, but hopefully just as enjoyable experience. I didn’t want to return the favour by returning to a restaurant because there is nothing worse that worrying about the cost of every side order, extra bottle of wine and expensive Cognacs. It is no fun taking someone to dinner if you can’t give them what they want, so if I couldn’t be a good host in a restaurant, I thought at least I could be a good host on the terrace. So the following evening I went out and got some good take away pizza and went to the supermarket and bought a good bottle of Chablis to have with the aperativos, a bottle of Chateau Ferrand to have with the pizzas and a single vineyard Gigondas to have with the cheese.
And we sat on the terrace as the sun went down and the crickets started their orchestrations and we had a rare old time. The artichoke hearts out of the packet were great as a starter. The pizza and salad were excellent, the cheese hearty and strong.
And the wine? The Gigondas just about held its own (and interestingly came from the closest geographical location) while the Chablis and the claret were lost, like autistic ‘A’ grade scholars forced out of their routine who can only manage ‘C’s. There was too much scent in the air to need it in the glass, too much warmth in the evening to need it in the wine.
We all agreed. There was only one solution. Bring on the rosé!
David Izod
August 2009
Ok, so here’s a question: if we accept that good local wine should be consumed near to its place of production if you want to get the most from it (which heaven knows I am not the first person to comment on, as hordes of disappointed Sangria drinkers have noted from about 1968 onwards), what happens if you open a good bottle of claret or a top Rhone Valley village wine on a balmy evening when your skin is fizzing with sun and water, you only have plastic glasses to drink it out of and you are chowing down on an €8 take-away pizza on the terrace?
It’s a big fat waste of money, that’s what. Now I know that the beardy fella in ‘Sideways’ ended up drinking his prized Cheval Blanc out of a plastic cup in a cheesy diner somewhere, but that was more about his need to find a new philosophy, not a new way to enjoy fine wine. He might have got something out of his experience, but the fact remains the wine would have tasted better if he had decanted it, poured it into Reidel glasses and drunk it with a rare rump steak.
My lesson of learning this ‘right wine in the right location’ unfolded over forty eight hours while in Provence. Helen and I were enjoying our usual aperativo time, drinking rosé and eating olives, when our neighbour came out on to the terrace for a smoke. We had seen him arrive earlier in the day, a swarthy southern European with cropped grey hair, a twinkle in his eye and his teenaged son on the back of his hefty BMW motorbike.
It is important to stress that although Patrick and Kevin (as we subsequently discovered they were called) shared our terrace, this was hardly an inconvenience because a) I have lived in flats that were smaller than said terrace and b) we might have been close neighbours, but much like the pioneers who tramped into the American wilderness, the next neighbours beyond were a long, long way away. Like half a mile away in at least two of the four compass points and on the other side of the building on the other two compass points which effectively put them out of sight and out of mind.
Anyway, Patrick came out for a smoke and it would have been rude not to have invited him to join us for a glass and besides, he could easily decline and good manners would have prevailed. It transpired that Patrick was not a man to refuse anything. His English was good – full of idiom and expression and obviously learnt everywhere except in the classroom. His French and German were also good and his Italian was spoken like the mother tongue that it was.
Patrick liked to talk. This could have been a disaster of course. I have seen ‘Holiday Neighbours From Hell’ on ITV2, but it really wasn’t because Patrick was engaging, witty, full of stories and philosophies that he was keen to try out on us. Within half an hour we felt we had known him years and although Helen and I had spoken barely three sentences between us, he seemed to have taken a liking to us (maybe because we listened while everyone back home in Switzerland just tells him to shut up).
The following day, we were having our picnic lunch on the big table by the pool and again it would have been rude not to have invited Kevin and Patrick (who were well aware that it was odd for two Italian-Swiss to end up with Irish names) to join us. They were a little embarrassed by the somewhat meagre fayre they could bring to the table and were suitably impressed by our Victorian Country House Picnic, but they joined us anyway and a very pleasant couple of hours passed, at the end of which Patrick invited us to be his guests at a restaurant in town that night. We accepted, enjoyed a good dinner later that evening and made only the most polite, restrained attempt to do anything with the very large tab that was placed in front of our host.
Given this generosity, and given that we could not afford to return the favour another night, I decided that the next best thing would be to offer a different, but hopefully just as enjoyable experience. I didn’t want to return the favour by returning to a restaurant because there is nothing worse that worrying about the cost of every side order, extra bottle of wine and expensive Cognacs. It is no fun taking someone to dinner if you can’t give them what they want, so if I couldn’t be a good host in a restaurant, I thought at least I could be a good host on the terrace. So the following evening I went out and got some good take away pizza and went to the supermarket and bought a good bottle of Chablis to have with the aperativos, a bottle of Chateau Ferrand to have with the pizzas and a single vineyard Gigondas to have with the cheese.
And we sat on the terrace as the sun went down and the crickets started their orchestrations and we had a rare old time. The artichoke hearts out of the packet were great as a starter. The pizza and salad were excellent, the cheese hearty and strong.
And the wine? The Gigondas just about held its own (and interestingly came from the closest geographical location) while the Chablis and the claret were lost, like autistic ‘A’ grade scholars forced out of their routine who can only manage ‘C’s. There was too much scent in the air to need it in the glass, too much warmth in the evening to need it in the wine.
We all agreed. There was only one solution. Bring on the rosé!
David Izod
August 2009
Local wines for local people
Local wines for local people
When Helen and I go on holiday, we have an informal policy of trying to find at least one good, local, wine. In an effort to do so, we have to try lots of different wines of course, some of which we will dismiss, some of which we will buy and enjoy, but we always try to find one wine that stands out, warms its way into affections and stays there. This year it was Domaine La Bouverie and it is quite the most exceptional rosé wine either of us have ever drunk. As far as I am aware, it is not available in Britain, so you are going to have to travel to Provence to get it (or come to my house over the next two months until our stocks run out) but should you get the chance to try it, I really would.
We found it like this:
After a long drive south from our over night stay in the town of Langres in the north of Burgundy, we arrived in the small Provencal village of Roquebrun Sur Argens at around five in the afternoon. Driving up to our chambres d’hote, we discovered that we had spent that snowy day in February trawling round the internet looking for somewhere to spend our honeymoon, rather well. Villa Bali is a little piece of paradise. One hundred Euro a night buys you peace and quiet, a beautiful ‘infinity’ style pool that is set against the backdrop of the dramatic Alpine outcrops and surrounded by palm trees and waterfalls, as well as an excellent breakfast every day shared with, at the most, the six other guests that see the place fully booked.
On our arrival, our host offered us a drink and, being thirsty after the long drive, we asked for a beer. Sitting on the terrace, in the 35 degree heat, we talked of this and that while we chugged our beers and he sipped from a glass of very, very pale rosé. Within five minutes, we were joined a mahoosive grey cat (called velvet) and, not necessarily prompted by his arrival, the topic turned to wine. We talked of how promotion to full AOC status in 1977 lead to a general improvement in quality in the region and how although there were a couple of decent producers of red and white wine in the locality, the truth is that if you are in Provence, then rosé is king. I asked what he was drinking and he said ‘Domaine la Bouverie. It is 10km from here and I think it is the best rosé in the whole of the region. Would you like to try some?’ I thought about replying with ‘Does the Pope shit in the woods?’ but wasn’t sure of the translation (Est ce que vrais que Le Pape prend un merde dans le foret? was the best I could do) so I went for the more prosaic ‘merci beaucoup’.
Our host returned momentarily with a bottle that indicated to me immediately that he brought his stock in ten litre containers and decanted it himself. He pulled the cork, offered Helen and I a glass, which we swirled, sniffed and drank.
Two days later, we made the short drive in land to visit the place where the wine is made. Visiting wineries is something I love doing and something I don’t think I will ever grow out of (and it is worth noting that you can’t visit a place called Merlot or Viognier, although you can visit the village of Chardonnay from whence the grape got its name if you so wish). We drove into the village of La Bouverie and bought bread to have with our picnic lunch and then turned left out of the village and followed the hill up, first on a road and then on a track until we were driving through the rows of vines, approaching a large and impressive looking house.
We parked, got out and envied the hammock and the day bed on the porch – testament to the fact that this part of France gets 300 days of sunshine a year. We tried to engage the attention of two friendly looking dogs (one big, one small), but they were monumentally uninterested in us. We looked at the house and wanted it, wanted it for its lavender purple paintwork, its position, its size and the fact that it was slap bang in the middle of a really lovely vineyard.
Next to the house was a cool barn, where a woman was working. We walked in and said ‘bonjour’ and she replied ‘Hello’. I hate it when they do that. I hate the fact that my accent is so bad that it is so completely obvious that I am English even though I am speaking French. I said to her, ‘Is it that obvious?’ She replied, in a strangely American accent ‘I heard you talking to the dogs outside. The small one is a rescue dog by the way. I pulled him out of a rubbish bin that was on fire. There were three others but they died.’
Reeling slightly from this story, I diverted my attention away from the thought of burning dogs by commenting on the fact that her accent sounded somewhat American. ‘That’s because I’m from California,’ she said. ‘I am here helping out a friend.’
Her job was simple but important: she organised the stock and sold it to the steady stream of people who drove up and came in through the barn door, the vast majority of whom were local. She also offered tastings and even though we knew what it tasted like, we thought it rude not to have a little glass, especially when she offered us a taste of the ‘grand vin’ of the domaine, the wine made from the oldest vines. It was only sold in bottles (for six Euro) and it was excellent, delicate yet rich with a substantial texture and a good grip of flavour in the mouth. We then had a small glass of the ‘ordinary’ rosé that we had tried before – which is sold only in five or ten litre boxes for 14 or 27 Euro respectively – and it was as good as we had first thought with its oily texture and rounded, rich flavours. We then tried the white, made from the Ugni Blanc and Rolle grapes (not ones you see on labels in the supermarket), and thought it sensational, perfumed, elegant and light with a rich fruity core.
We bought three bottles of the white and twenty five litres of the rosé, to enjoy with our picnic lunches over the coming days and to cart back to England to enjoy in Worcestershire over the coming weeks.
Except of course, it won’t really be the same, will it? The wine, being preservative free, is physiologically not designed to travel, but more importantly it is not designed to travel from a psychological perspective. It is designed to be drunk young and fresh, on the terrace, in banging heat, with perhaps a little local charcuterie while the scent of the garrigue wafts down from the hills. It was simply not designed to be chugged on a wet, post working week Friday night in Worcestershire while falling asleep in front of Jonathon Ross. But we’ll give it a go.
David Izod
August 2009
When Helen and I go on holiday, we have an informal policy of trying to find at least one good, local, wine. In an effort to do so, we have to try lots of different wines of course, some of which we will dismiss, some of which we will buy and enjoy, but we always try to find one wine that stands out, warms its way into affections and stays there. This year it was Domaine La Bouverie and it is quite the most exceptional rosé wine either of us have ever drunk. As far as I am aware, it is not available in Britain, so you are going to have to travel to Provence to get it (or come to my house over the next two months until our stocks run out) but should you get the chance to try it, I really would.
We found it like this:
After a long drive south from our over night stay in the town of Langres in the north of Burgundy, we arrived in the small Provencal village of Roquebrun Sur Argens at around five in the afternoon. Driving up to our chambres d’hote, we discovered that we had spent that snowy day in February trawling round the internet looking for somewhere to spend our honeymoon, rather well. Villa Bali is a little piece of paradise. One hundred Euro a night buys you peace and quiet, a beautiful ‘infinity’ style pool that is set against the backdrop of the dramatic Alpine outcrops and surrounded by palm trees and waterfalls, as well as an excellent breakfast every day shared with, at the most, the six other guests that see the place fully booked.
On our arrival, our host offered us a drink and, being thirsty after the long drive, we asked for a beer. Sitting on the terrace, in the 35 degree heat, we talked of this and that while we chugged our beers and he sipped from a glass of very, very pale rosé. Within five minutes, we were joined a mahoosive grey cat (called velvet) and, not necessarily prompted by his arrival, the topic turned to wine. We talked of how promotion to full AOC status in 1977 lead to a general improvement in quality in the region and how although there were a couple of decent producers of red and white wine in the locality, the truth is that if you are in Provence, then rosé is king. I asked what he was drinking and he said ‘Domaine la Bouverie. It is 10km from here and I think it is the best rosé in the whole of the region. Would you like to try some?’ I thought about replying with ‘Does the Pope shit in the woods?’ but wasn’t sure of the translation (Est ce que vrais que Le Pape prend un merde dans le foret? was the best I could do) so I went for the more prosaic ‘merci beaucoup’.
Our host returned momentarily with a bottle that indicated to me immediately that he brought his stock in ten litre containers and decanted it himself. He pulled the cork, offered Helen and I a glass, which we swirled, sniffed and drank.
Two days later, we made the short drive in land to visit the place where the wine is made. Visiting wineries is something I love doing and something I don’t think I will ever grow out of (and it is worth noting that you can’t visit a place called Merlot or Viognier, although you can visit the village of Chardonnay from whence the grape got its name if you so wish). We drove into the village of La Bouverie and bought bread to have with our picnic lunch and then turned left out of the village and followed the hill up, first on a road and then on a track until we were driving through the rows of vines, approaching a large and impressive looking house.
We parked, got out and envied the hammock and the day bed on the porch – testament to the fact that this part of France gets 300 days of sunshine a year. We tried to engage the attention of two friendly looking dogs (one big, one small), but they were monumentally uninterested in us. We looked at the house and wanted it, wanted it for its lavender purple paintwork, its position, its size and the fact that it was slap bang in the middle of a really lovely vineyard.
Next to the house was a cool barn, where a woman was working. We walked in and said ‘bonjour’ and she replied ‘Hello’. I hate it when they do that. I hate the fact that my accent is so bad that it is so completely obvious that I am English even though I am speaking French. I said to her, ‘Is it that obvious?’ She replied, in a strangely American accent ‘I heard you talking to the dogs outside. The small one is a rescue dog by the way. I pulled him out of a rubbish bin that was on fire. There were three others but they died.’
Reeling slightly from this story, I diverted my attention away from the thought of burning dogs by commenting on the fact that her accent sounded somewhat American. ‘That’s because I’m from California,’ she said. ‘I am here helping out a friend.’
Her job was simple but important: she organised the stock and sold it to the steady stream of people who drove up and came in through the barn door, the vast majority of whom were local. She also offered tastings and even though we knew what it tasted like, we thought it rude not to have a little glass, especially when she offered us a taste of the ‘grand vin’ of the domaine, the wine made from the oldest vines. It was only sold in bottles (for six Euro) and it was excellent, delicate yet rich with a substantial texture and a good grip of flavour in the mouth. We then had a small glass of the ‘ordinary’ rosé that we had tried before – which is sold only in five or ten litre boxes for 14 or 27 Euro respectively – and it was as good as we had first thought with its oily texture and rounded, rich flavours. We then tried the white, made from the Ugni Blanc and Rolle grapes (not ones you see on labels in the supermarket), and thought it sensational, perfumed, elegant and light with a rich fruity core.
We bought three bottles of the white and twenty five litres of the rosé, to enjoy with our picnic lunches over the coming days and to cart back to England to enjoy in Worcestershire over the coming weeks.
Except of course, it won’t really be the same, will it? The wine, being preservative free, is physiologically not designed to travel, but more importantly it is not designed to travel from a psychological perspective. It is designed to be drunk young and fresh, on the terrace, in banging heat, with perhaps a little local charcuterie while the scent of the garrigue wafts down from the hills. It was simply not designed to be chugged on a wet, post working week Friday night in Worcestershire while falling asleep in front of Jonathon Ross. But we’ll give it a go.
David Izod
August 2009
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