Saturday 13 November 2010

The seven shelves of man

Cometh the hour, cometh the special offer at Sainsburys. A mere £3.45 per 75cl equivalent on own label wine, packaged in one and a half litre bottles. I have finally discovered a use for those European bureaucrats whose job it is to instruct nations on the acceptable degree of bendiness in a banana and related labeling matters. They have enabled committed drinkers to estimate the most cost effective way of getting pissed, without recourse to a calculator. Ominously, the grape is not specified beyond being 'red' and the plastic bottle looks like its been recycled a few too many times. Those are small prices to pay, however, for dispensing with the inconvenience of having to locate the corkscrew after the first 75cl has been glugged. You watch, I'll be drinking wine from boxes before the year is out, possibly without the aid of a glass.

The trajectory of my path through life to an apogee that could most politely be described as 'nice try but decidedly sub-orbital' and subsequent ignominious fall to a place that I have a horrible feeling I'm not going to like when I get there, could be written in terms of the shelf to which I have instinctively reached when buying booze. I have ranged up and down seven shelves in the course of my life to date, an appropriately Shakesperian number.



All those years ago, when I started putting my liver through its paces, I didn't even bother to let my eyes wander above the Bulgarian cabernet sauvignon on the floor. Oz Clarke said it was OK and that was good enough for me. I think it cost £2.29 a bottle, which puts the £3.45 I'm spending now in context. Conveniently for the analogy implied in my title, this was the shelf responsible for the most mewling and puking in my journey towards oenological oblivion.

By the time I figured out that one's spending need not necessarily be limited by one's income, I allowed myself to stray occasionally to the knee high shelf, where wines whose contents were more valuable than their containers were to be found. I cringe to think that I probably thought myself quite sophisticated at the time. ‘Pretentious wanker’ is how my friends usually put it.

When I started my first proper job, I discovered to my joy that I was earning enough that I no longer needed to consider the trade-off between eating and drinking, when doing my shopping. This activity was conducted mainly on the shelf at pelvis level, where the categories available branched out from ‘red’, ‘white’ and ‘Chardonnay’. Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling entered my world.

The first time I spent ten quid on a single bottle while still sober I was, inevitably, trying to impress a girl. I took it (and the girl) to a party at my boss's house and she put it ostentatiously and immediately in a cupboard that clearly contained stuff she didn't want people to think she had bought herself. Damn, it must have been from the chest high shelf too.

I think I was probably 28 or 29 before I could regularly buy wine that I didn't have to stoop to read the label. This was also the era of when I bought the Good Food Guide, and used it regularly. My toes curl with embarrassment to this day, as I recall the first time I spent £50 on a bottle in a restaurant, La Tante Claire, on Royal Hospital Road. I do believe I actually asked the sommelier to steam off the label, so I could keep it as a souvenir.

Then came the glory years (or were they glory months, I can't remember) when I was able to reach, unembarrassed and unafraid, for the hitherto forbidden delights, dusty and generally corked, paraded across the top shelf. These were wines that came in boxes made of actual wood. All the porn in Lithuania couldn't hold a candle to the pleasures to be found there.

The fall has been an accelerated version of the rise and I may even have skipped a shelf or two on the way down. Frankly I'm happier drinking stuff hauled out of the wine lake in buckets than the crap on shelves two through four, but that is obviously just my bitterness speaking. They say you can’t find happiness in a bottle but few can have exceeded my diligence in trying.

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