Yrom the Wood
By TONI ADRIAN
NEW vistas of wine-drinking are opened up by a simple device I saw demonstrated the other day. It is a gadge which preserves wine in the cask for any thing up to four months and I see in i possibilities of wine-drinking on a trul yin ordinaire level for the first time.
Rather like an upturned tumbler Ho with amber fluid, it is a plastic attacItment fitted to the bung in the side of the barrel and its function is to pass alcoholised ai into the barrel whenever wine is drawl from the wood. '
It is the invention of M. Jean Marous a volatile, middle-aged French wine shipper Frustration with our stringent off-licenc restrictions led him to work on a device fo preserving wine. His original idea was ti rent an empty shop in the West End, fil it with forty-eight-gallon 'hogsheads' any run it as a jug-and-bottle venture. But at off-licence quota was fully taken up so, back in France, he set to work witl chemists on the invention he now calls 'fh, bubbler.'
For a restaurant to serve a reasonabl selection of wines by the glass usuall means about 25 per cent. wastage throng] souring. There is also the charge fo bottling, delivery and disposal of empties These costs, M. Maroux estimates, worl out at 5s. a dozen bottles today.
'Wine from the wood' tits out many o these overheads. It means a large glass o good carafe Burgundy can be served fo less than Is. 6d. in a restaurant. The cos price is ninepence a glass.
Customers—both 'trade' and retail—cal order from a fairly comprehensive list 0 French wines and, in addition, there is 1 deposit of £3 3s. on the barrel, 'bubbler and tap. The response has far exceeded till expectations of the firm—Comptoirs de Vins and Co. Ltd.—and there is at preset' a delay of two to three weeks on orders One popular restaurant has alread brought the price of wine by the glass (low' from 2s. to Is. 4d.
I tasted an excellent carafe Burgundy, which sells at 29s. 6d. a gallon (six bottles), and a good 1954 Chateauneuf du Pap (36s.). Both were from a cask which hal been in use for nine weeks and were it excellent condition served cold. At root' temperature they would have been eves better. A white Macon emerged witl bouquet intact.
Now M. Maroux is busy with his chemists again, hoping to work out method for preserving sparkling wines.
But not champagne. That, he says, woull be like trying to preserve the taste of a kiss
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