Consuming Interest
On the Warm Side
By LESLIE ADRIAN
WARMTH without waiting' goes a Gas Board heating slogan which could make even British Railways' policy of waiting-without- warmth obsolete. It looks for once as if they really have something for all those people who cannot, for one reason and another, install central heating but want to be heated centrally.
The new radiant gas convectors like the Cannon Miser (approximately £27), fitted with thermostats, time-switches like the Horstmann Gear Company's (£8), et al., draw in air one way and push it out warm another at consider- ably less cost per therm, hour, or whatever way you calculate, than that other automatic heater —electricity. So as long as you've got a gas supply and a chimney, you should be warmer, cheaper, quicker than before.
If you haven't got a gas supply and/or chimney, have £60 to £70 to spare, and are out all day anyway, then one of the more complicated night storage heaters should be cheaper to run than any other electrical appliance. Heat collected at night, and judiciously released when you want it by means of a fan, works out at about 2s. Id. a therm as opposed to the usual 4s. Bastian and Allen's ConStor is good, as is Mantle and Butterworth's Rogack, and they come in neat box shapes which make them a reasonable buy all round.
/Estheticism, of course, might mean more than cost, and in this case electric skirting convectors can be screwed in without much ado. Inferation and Maxheat make unobtrusive affairs and running expenses can be minimised, as the run- ning costs of anything electric can be minimised, by the strict and ardent use of time-switches.
The single and the excessively impecunious might be well advised to invest in Turbo-fib(s), which are strictly directional heaters. They blast a terrific gust of warm air very quickly, cut out when and if the room is warm enough, and have the advantage of blowing cool air in the summer. Braun and Hoover are among the many manu- facturers of this group and prices hover around £13. Those who remain convinced that if their feet are warm they are warm all over, will like electrically-heated carpet underlays like Therma- lay for £5 14s., a piece 6 ft. by 2 ft., and Packandeck, which puffs up warm air from carpet level at a pound more a piece. And for people who really do like radiators, the oil-filled varieties have the advantage of staying warm twenty-five minutes after they have been switched off by virtue of the fact that they take twenty- five minutes to warm up in the first place. With a time-switch this should not matter.
A visit to the as-impartial-as-you-can-get Heat- ing Centre, 34 Mortimer Street, WI, should give most people-many more ideas about non-fixture heating than they bargained for. The place is thronged with efficient and often frightening- looking appliances, and efficient and less frighten- ing advisers, who will tell you exactly what is best for your circumstances, and why to put what where.
But to my mind the best buy of the lot if you are thinking strictly in terms of running costs, as most of us surely are, is the Irish Potez oll-fired space-heater. It is like a factory furnace in domestic clothing, is comfortably good-look- ing in a nice squat, brown way, is thermo- statically-controlled, cheaper to run than gas, which is cheaper than electricity, and costs £39 15s. 3d. For halls and large rooms,' and for people who have neither gas nor electricity (or the money to install it), but who hate heaving coals, Potez is the answer.
The forecast from Jerez is, that this year's vintage is likely to be the largest for a long time. Even if the summer is not ideal, there will still be more sherry made than last year, when the quantity of wine made in Jerez was 10 per cent greater than in 1961.
This news, coupled with a general trend to- wards cheaper sherry (though not among the famous brand names), prompts me to wonder if the sherry shippers are doing enough market research. There is a deeply rooted assumption that all sherries, to sell well to the British, must be full-bodied, high in alcohol, on the swe side of 'medium' (a much ,misused word) and dark in colour. Tio Pepe, that stand-by of bar- men faced with a customer asking for dry, is designed to be the exact opposite of all these —hence its success with the would-be sophis- ticated. But a 'natural' fino, before it is dressed up for the British market with added alcohol and color, has all this and a price advantage too. Ask for a fino in most pubs and clubs and see what you get—after the blank and uncompre- hencling stare the offer of an amontillado.
The reason for all this ignorance of sherry (you've met those barmen who respond to dark and light more readily than to technicalities like oloroso and manzanilla) is the propensity for shippers to 'construct' a sherry for the market, then give it a fancy name like Clubman's Darling or Point-to-Point. They don't do it so much to manzanilla (only a cousin of sherry after all), but then not much is sold. Most .wine merchants don't know, in their long lists of proprietary sherries, where the finos leave, off and the olorosos begin. And try asking for a dry oloroso and see where it gets you. Even the splendid Harvey -list does not -contain one out of thirty- three sherries. Gonzalez Byass ship one, Nectar, that retails at 21s.,. and Saccone and Speed list Calpense, 'a perfect specimen of a natural dry Oloroso; at 19s. A natural oloroso must, of course, be dry,and fairly low in alcohol. It can therefore, be quite cheap. The one listed by the International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society costs 15s. 6d. So away with this myth (sustained by the descriptions in wine-lists like the one from Hedges and Butler: 'These wines are generally darker in colour and sweeter than the Finos') that all olorosos are virtually dessert wines. This autumn let them come in full, dry and golden—and a bob or two lower in price.
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