111
Election gripes
WHEN, the other day, I was invited to a water tasting on a barge in St Catherine's Dock, I wondered whether this was the cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, heralding a revolution in civilised drinking habits. Friends who have been in New York recently tell me that at a dinner party for eight it is common to find just a single bottle of wine surrounded by six-packs of Perrier and Badoit. Yuppies, sniffing coke in office lavatories, shun the mellow slowing-down effects of alcohol. They can- not afford to have their dealing skills and telephone manners to be blurred by hang- overs. At the same time, the quality of tap water in industrialised countries is becom- ing less and less acceptable. It all adds up to a gleaming future for the purveyors of the fizzy, non-alcoholic stuff in green and blue bottles.
I know that some people consider wine tasting to be an absurd and pretentious business, in which solemn individuals per- form a weird ritual of gargling and spitting in order to justify their use of incompre- hensible jargon. What such people would have made of this water tasting, 1 shudder to think. The common complaint of scof- fers about wine tasting, that it is 'all subjective anyway', which I would normal- ly counter by claiming that wine tasting is no more subjective than, say, musical appreciation, did on this occasion seem to hold some H2O. The white-faced organis- ers told us when they had collated the results, we (a panel of regular wine- writers) had completely reversed the re- sults of all other known water tastings. Especially embarrassing was the fact that the water in which the organisers had an interest had come second-last out of 15.
The sales manager of Ramlosa, the Swedish mineral in question, was stunned and amazed. All his supply of steady, sparkling words seemed spent. 'You have been looking for something different from all previous panels of water tasters,' he finally informed us, mentally striking our names off all future invitations to water tastings set up by Ramlosa, 'Your criteria were special, unique, unprecedented.' How does one taste water? In this water tasting, we were asked to put down com- ments under three headings: appearance ('e.g. clarity, appearance of bubbles'), taste(`e.g.neutrality or flavour, soft or hard, slatiness or mineralness, general acceptability') and digestibility (`effect on palate, amount of gas, effect on stomach'). I have to say that these left something to be desired. All the waters were clear (I cannot imagine much of a demand for muddy or murky waters) but as for the appearance of the bubbles, this seemed to have more to do with the glass than the water inside. Soft and hard sound like cast-iron categories, but they are analytic rather than orga- noleptic terms — in other words, hard water can taste 'soft' and vice versa. As for effect on stomach, this was audibly signal- led at regular intervals by one of the panel, whereas others kept quiet on the subject. There was a discussion on whether or not spitting should occur, but it was decided that in order to answer the third heading swallowing was essential.
Some waters do have a marked flavour or odour. Our beloved Thames valley tap water (which, incidentally, has scored highly in other blind water tastings) has a distinct whiff of chlorine. Of the waters we tasted, Vichy and Apollinaris were de- finitely salty, the former almost suggestive of Alka-Seltzer. One might find this pleasantly medicinal (I did) or rebarbative. The most flavoursome of all the waters we tasted was Spa; in fact I marked it down for being too tasty to be typically watery. The trouble with Ramlosa, on the other hand, was that it was just too neutral ( I almost said boring). It had no faults, it was clean, bracing, moderately effervescent, but one could hardly say it was characterful. Ram- losa was not the only well-publicised brand of water to score badly. Perrier, (`too bubbly, nothing special', I noted) came very low, and bottom of the entire pile was the trendy Badoit (`characterless, not very interesting'). The best marks went consis- tently to native British waters, with Bre- con, Abbey Well and Sparkling Malvern coming first, second and third. Over a delicious lunch with the traumatised orga- nisers, we drank some excellent white rioja and better 1978 St Emilion. With these quite acid wines, it was generally agreed, nothing could have gone down better than soothing, slightly alkaline RamlOsa. I al- ways knew that water is something to be drunk strictly on the side.
Ausonius
Previous page
