Drink
"Chilled red wine?" says my friend Nina with glacial disapproval. So I ask someone else to come for a drink with me. Be as unimpressed as you like, but cool red wine is, I promise, the perfect thing for the fickle English summer. And I don't just mean any old red wine made cold. The wine has to be light and young, with enough acidity to burst into life at a low temperature. Sometimes a red from Anjou or Touraine will do the trick. Beaujolais scarcely ever fails: I have enjoyed many a cool glass of Fleurie - neither too acidic like white nor too heavy like claret - after a huge dinner and it is so delicious that it's hard not to order cheese to help you drink a little more.
The red revolution must come soon. It's necessary in this climate. I spend endless sticky days with the sun blistering in the sky beyond the window, hallucinating about a glass of crisp white wine so perfectly chilled that tiny beads of liquid have condensed around the rim. But so often, at the very moment the wine arrives at the table promising to lick away the sores of the day, the weather turns dismally dull and shiveringly cold and the pleasure of white wine dies in an instant.
Chilled red wine, meanwhile, is never caught out in such a way. And I hear it's beginning to catch on. So my friend Sally and I toil across west London to Notting Hill, sure that in this hallowed, trendsetting patch of the metropolis we will find chilled red to sate our thirst. It's not easy. First we try a wine bar. They gaze blankly and offer us rose instead but that's not what we're after. We go to 192, Bridget Jones's hangout, because I've drunk chilled red in the restaurant there, but it's so packed we can't bear to stay. We wander the streets, disgruntled, trying sundry pubs and cafes but to no avail.
Notting Hill is not what it used to be. It looks like a parody of itself, all dinkily painted shops and bars filled with young people wearing very expensive clothes just casually enough to make them look slightly scruffy. We wind up in a bar we used to frequent a couple of years ago and, oh my, how it has changed. We used to be mildly intimidated by the languorous rastafarians, but now it is jam-packed with middle-class clones. Some of them are even wearing suits. I ask for a glass of chilled red wine. I have to enunciate my request several times before I am understood. There's no chilled red, however, so the barman obligingly pours me a glass of the house wine - a Cotes de Gascogne - and lobs in a couple of ice cubes.
This is what the Victorians used to do, perhaps because they were so pleased with the ice they had just begun to import from America that they wanted to use it as often as possible. In the mid-19th century they even used special jugs with pouches for ice to cool their claret - a terrible practice that one contemporary historian quite rightly labelled "barbarous".
Notting Hill has failed us. In its bars, at least, no one seems to know about the joys of cool beaujolais, but then this is scarcely surprising in a place where people are so preoccupied about how they look that even the men are wearing pashminas.
The good news is that you can do chilled red for yourself. All you have to do is buy a bottle and stick it in the fridge for an hour or two. It should be drunk a little warmer than a white. Chilling makes a virtue of cheaper reds such as valpolicella and raises the game of many Loire reds. It doesn't usually work with big Australian shiraz wines, but if you must, try chilling In The Red, a shiraz cabernet made by Lindemans.
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