Drink - Victoria Moore
My kitchen shelves offer up a ludicrous and mostly useless selection of mouldering pesto, Thai fish essence, buckwheat flour (bought at the height of a blinis craze) and truffle sauce, as well as a comprehensively eclectic range of musty herbs and spices, used once in a flighty passion and abandoned to gather dust for eternity.
Then there are the wine bottles, on opening found to be corked, waiting to be returned to the shop. I will never take them. Unfinished bottles of port, their contents now undrinkable, loiter beside them, flanked by unsavoury looking wines brought by "friends".
With such wasteful clutter comes an onerous burden of guilt. I suffer a sudden yen to be thrifty; to stock the freezer with containers (old yoghurt pots, naturally, although as I do not much like yoghurt I will have to buy some specially) filled with cheap wine to use for cooking. And so on.
Thus deluded - buying one of those contraptions to squash veiny slivers of soap into a single bar that unites the residues of a thousand baths feels like progress - I chance upon the oddly named W** Upgrade. "Use with wine to enhance taste and regulate acidity," sings the packet. (Apparently, it "purifies" water, too, but I am not interested in that.) Such a British sort of a thing. Waste not, want not: with a little care, the most foolhardy purchases can be redeemed. I order a packet of 18 sachets - enough to treat 18 litres of wine - for £4.99.
I do not feel thrifty pouring my bottle of cheap, taste-bud-killing wine into a jug and adding the upgrade teabag. I feel like someone whose idea of an "adventure" is to put ploughman's pickle on cheese on toast. In a trendy Moroccan restaurant the next day, the embarrassment of excavating my handbag in search of a sachet to regulate the mandatory Algerian wine is tempered by the manicured authenticity of the place. The lighting is dim, price tags hang ostentatiously from heaps of rugs and rickety lights to create the mood of the bazaar and the delicious food tastes as though it has been transported by camel from the Djemaa el Fna. Messing about with the wine seems virtually obligatory.
A pity, then, that W** Upgrade does little to improve the drink. My latest love, required to test two unknown samples at home, hazards that both are in fact the same, before deciding that he prefers the unadulterated version. The other is "watery", he complains. Neither are very nice but, if pressed, he would choose to stick with the one that screams across his palate because at least it's got something to it.
In the restaurant I, too, prefer my wine pre-tampering. Post-sachet it acquires a damp flavour and seems dredged of all richness.
Whatever is in these teabag things, and I hope it is not sewage ("the ingredients are derived from naturally found coastal deposits"), it is not doing a great deal of good. It is not hard to see why. The whole premise of the wretched thing is utterly misguided. It works by settling the pH balance of the liquid it is placed in to "around 7.5 to 8.5", just the alkaline side of neutral. And yet the pH range of most wines is somewhere between 2.9 and 4.2. Wine is supposed to be acidic.
As we have discovered, and as the Oxford Companion to Wine explains, wines "with high pHs taste 'flat' or 'flabby'".
Perhaps W** Upgrade (which also promises to reduce chlorine levels) is a helpful addition to unpleasant tap water but, when it comes to miracle-working, wine into water is not the direction I am headed in.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
