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