White wine
Something to dream about
Victoria Mather
The answer is to stick firmly to the great indoors, savage central heating and Corney & Barrow's Château de Tracy. The sad truth is that vast lakes of white wine are pure Sharon. My Yorkshire Aunt Val, who sprang fully-formed from the pages of P.G. Wodehouse, maintained that the three most depressing words in the English lan- guage were 'Red or white?' and adhered to gin, since the white wine served at parties is usually filth. Perfectly respectable people, who are inordinately kind to children and animals, think nothing of giving their friends warm eau de cologne with top notes of banana, which is both mean and point- less. Believe me, any hint of banana is a harbinger of doom. Only pain, regret and Nurofen will follow.
Fortunately the red and white parties are now pretty much the purlieu of miserable little Conservative associations. The young favour designer beer or vodka, and real people traded up to champagne yonks ago — which makes it even more inexcusable when, at dinner or just those come-round- and-have-a-drink-and-we'll-talk-about-it times, one is given rotten white wine. The facts are that good white wine is expensive (never trust a man who tells you that he's found a marvellous Pinot Grigio for £3.99 at the local offy), the gap between good and really good is enormous and arbitrary, and people who don't know or care about wine can't cope.
And so to Château de Tracy. Well, it's irresistible, isn't it? A 1996 Pouilly Fume at £11.93 a bottle is everything it ought to be: a flinty aristocrat which is a joy to drink. In terms of elegance it's infinitely more Chanel than Tracy. I'm also very keen on Corney & Barrow's Saint-Aubin premier cru 'Dents de Chien' (as opposed to `Cheveux de Chien'), at £11.75 the bottle, also a 1996 and all buttery and proper. For me it is the clean, sharp whites that are best to drink on their own (that over- whelming, seven o'clock magnetic pull to the fridge) and the yallery-buttery ones, like Berry Bros's 1995 Jaffelin Rully Blanc at £9.95 the bottle, that are jollier with food.
It depends on the food, of course. Abso- lutely no white wine stands up to either asparagus or smoked salmon. Strange but true. A classy gewurztraminer (Corney & Barrow has a corking 1996 Bollenberg at £9.49 a bottle) is splendid with foie gras; a clean, grass-green Sancerre (Marks & Spencer's, I kid you not, has an excellent workaday Sancerre at £6.99 a bottle) is per- fect with Thai or Indian food. In order to combat the Arctic conditions, red and green curries have enjoyed a renaissance in my house. And of course Pizza Express's American hot pizza with extra cheese and pepperoni — oh yes, World Cup gourmet standards have also applied — is a white wine challenge. Berry Bros has a Chablis de Bieville (£6.90) which isn't even on their list; I think they supply it to restaurants, but ask and it shall be yours, light and pleasant and perfectly good with comfort food. A glass at lunchtime is very Bridget Jones.
Life in the fast lane of white wine drink- ing involves care and consideration. There are the known quantities, like Cloudy Bay, which even ring a bell as an ooh-aah wine with the people who don't drink wine (much like Art, the play for people who don't go to the theatre), but the tricky bit is to find the new Cloudy Bay or even an old chablis, which has suffered dreadfully by becoming a generic name by which the unconfident are seduced in pretentious restaurants. The result is usually thin coloured water with that horrid fiery after- taste, like drinking Pekingese breath. The fashionable recommendation is to turn to the New World, but this too can be fraught with hazard. Jacob's Creek is the Blue Nun of the Nineties, and anything deep yellow, called Parrot's Squawk and highly recom- mended by a nice young man in Oddbin's will be over-scented and horribly fruity.
It is the small vineyards, like Janet Holmes a Court's Vasse Felix in Margaret River, Western Australia, that yield the best results but in such limited quantities it rarely makes it as far as here. Really good Californian white wine doesn't even make it as far as the east coast of America, the price is so prohibitive. John Armit always has an impressive list of South African wines; Adam Brett-Smith at Corney & Bar- row considers the Dashwood Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc to be superior to Cloudy Bay, but I'm not so sure. It was too com- plex for me and life's so difficult I can't have a four-act play going on in my mouth.
The solution to both this summer and the white wine problem is to go to the wine rather than waiting for it to come to one. A drive to Montrachet and one can be entire- ly confident of the local plonk; there are some astonishingly cheap flights to Aus- tralia and New Zealand at the moment, and I've drunk the best South African wine of my life in Mauritius. Stay here, and one may only be able to dream of days of white wine and roses.
Previous page
