This has been a tumultuous summer, featuring as it has a World Cup of football, a great deal of cricket and also my first ever new kitchen, whose arrival has been accompanied chez CF by quite a bit of wall-destruction, giant-steel-girder-insertion and assorted major disruption.
The last five months – five months! – have whizzed miserably by under a constant deluge of decision-making and reheated microwavable dinners. Lights, plug sockets, paint colours, back doors, front doors, flooring, roofing, all of them and so much more had to be researched and ranked, pondered and picked. By the time I emerged from this cloud of clutter I realised that summer was nearly over, just as I found myself desperate to stretch out on a sun-kissed lawn, book in one hand, glass of something cold in the other. Sod it, I can relax next year. At least now I can cook.
My indulgence – and every new kitchen surely needs one – has been an ice-making fridge. I’m a man who likes cold drinks to be really cold and hot drinks to be drunk exclusively by other people, and my days of lukewarm water are now over. By pure coincidence the very week I put in the order for my ice-producing fridge I received a bottle of sparkling wine intended to be drunk on ice. Perfect, I thought, I’ll try that in a few weeks when the fridge is installed.
Four months later, it got opened.
To say I had low expectations of this particular wine would be to massively overstate how good I expected it to be. The bottle looks hideous, enrobed as it is in a white plastic shrink-wrapped sheath, and the whole thing had not so much a faint whiff as an overwhelming pong of gimmickry about it. And it therefore gives me no great pleasure to report that it’s basically terrific. True, it does not taste enormously winey. It is redolent of wine, clearly wine-ish bit not all the way there. If told that it had been created in a laboratory using entirely artificial ingredients by researchers working on a drink less reliant on nature, less subject to vintage variations and containing considerably less grape juice than actual wine you perhaps wouldn’t be enormously surprised, though you’d certainly have to concede that those scientists had done an absolutely terrific job. But for all that, if you can throw your preconceptions aside this is a thrillingly successful wine-related adult-oriented sparkling party-beverage.
It doesn’t taste of very much, and smells of even less, which probably adds to its appeal. It is reassuringly like wine, but with none of the complexities that might get in the way during large-scale relaxed social gatherings of the type intended for its consumption. Its lack of flavour leaves your brain to fill in the gaps, by finding within it anything it wants to find. Those who would like to be drinking Champagne will find a vaguely Champagney substance in their glass and be relatively content, while those who would like to be drinking a white wine spritzer, or lemonade, or water will find a vaguely spritzey/lemonady/watery substance in their glass and be relatively content. It is a light, bright, mildly alcoholic (11%) fizzy wine-style potation and I don’t see any reason why, so long as you disguise the bottle, it wouldn’t go down fabulously well at any gathering except the most wine-geeky.
It’s not my favourite sparkling wine, or even my favourite sub-£10 sparkling wine, but I do think it’s extremely good at doing what it’s supposed to, and I’d be happy to serve it to my friends and expect them still to be my friends afterwards. What’s more, I wonder, if you took a representative group of, say, 100 Britons and gave them all a glass of this and a glass of, say, Pol Roger Cuvée Winston Churchill, which glasses would be emptied first. There’s nothing here to dislike – it’s a simple, thirstquenching drink, a bit like water only fizzier and less suitable for young children, and all the better for it.
Finally we come to its ice-friendliness. In the press release accompanying its launch JP Chenet boasted that it was “uniquely crafted to be served over ice without dilution”, but to the best of my limited scientific knowledge the only thing genuinely capable of being served over ice without dilution is water. Perhaps “uniquely crafted to be served over ice without dilution” is just a rather more impressive-sounding way of saying “doesn’t taste of much”. This entire launch could simply be an exercise in master spinnery, forced upon the company by a large batch of relatively tasteless off-dry fizz that they didn’t really have a way of selling. Whatever, consider my cap doffed. There was a time when turning water into wine would have been enough to get a religion named after you; now you might get a pat on the back and a decent year-end bonus. Whoever’s responsible, I’m a disciple.
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