Wine

On Saturday we bottled wine. Not this particular bottle, that's one I guzzled earlier. This is part of our life. We go down to the place, the brewing club. We pay our money and we have to go and mix the yeast in. Then it's ours and the government don't have to sell it to us. Bayou brewing do the rest, they provide the steady temperature, the big glass jars, the right conditions for fruit pulp, sugar and yeast to turn into wine. When it's ready, they call us, we go down with our bottles and......we bottle it. And here's the thing, it's good.

Why don't we have such a thing in Britain I wonder. We used to be able to buy kits, make wine, beer, cider, grow mushrooms. Yeah, no, proper eating mushrooms, not what you're thinking.
The problem with home brew was always that you had to provide the right and constant temperature in some part of your own home, ergo, it didn't always turn out right. And you had to own and keep all the bits of glassware, the big jars, the fiddly filters and what have you. You had to clean them and somehow sterilise them. You had to know the right time to pour in the isinglas to clear the wine.
My aunt used to have home brew beer kits and her bedroom always smelt of it, I don't know how she could sleep. Austen had more sophisticated home brew when he went to university and I take it back about the sleeping, people buy pillows with hops in to help them sleep.

In Britain though, I wonder whether it would be worth the trouble of making a batch of wine. Britain is right next door to France. France do wine better than anyone else in the world. I know, I know, for years friends and family have tried to educate me into believing otherwise and I do now drink wine from elsewhere - obviously since we make our own, although the must frequently comes from France - but hell, there's nothing like a glass of French wine.

Last year I was in the Schwarzwald in Germany and this is not very far from the French border. We went to Strasbourg and sat in a French cafe and ordered wine. What nectar. Wine like blood, full-bodied, warm, deeply satisfying. Contentment.

Off on a bit of a tangent, but I always wonder how someone discovers that fish bladders clear wine. You wouldn't think that a fish's bladder would be big enough to transport significant quantities around, but that's the only theory I can come up with, otherwise you're stuck with the dark ages scientist, working away in a mud hut, grimly determined to try everything on the planet to find something that makes wine clear. Herein lies madness.

But back to France. The big supermarkets and the wine merchants all sell good French wine at reasonable prices. And Britons and French alike, unlike Canadians, are not afraid of the wine box. Every counter has space for a wine box, believe me. Good importers like Stowells of Chelsea box up their vins de pays so that the stressed worker can come home and just have one glass every night if they wish.

For the southern Brits there is the wine run. In the months leading up to Christmas we hit the French hypermarkets and come back with cars loaded with good, cheap, French wine. People in the north do this too, but it takes a little longer. In the south, if you were really serious about it, you could do the hypermarket and be back in Britain for lunch. But then if you're in France just before lunchtime and you come back to Britain to eat it - frankly you're an idiot.

The French laugh at us Anglos who measure wine in terms of the grape, they think of the château, the region, the cave. But what the hell, we have a batch of merlot and another of pinot noir maturing downstairs, we're good to go. I'm no wine buff, but I am a wine drinker and my cellar (cupboard in the garage) is full. Bliss.