Squidgy on the Inside

Some major wine producers are starting to use plastic bottles.

There really is nothing new in wine plastic containers, as we have all on occasion transferred wine from a box bladder to our own. I am not the world's biggest fan of box wine or 'casks'. They do not pour in a gentle flow, the wine jets out with a vulgar gush with more enthusiasm than an emergency comfort stop at a motorway service station, creating an almost foamy head in the glass, and often the floor. Wine brutalised by the bladder.

While we think we appreciate the sizable positive environmental impact of lightweight easy to produce recyclable plastic wine containers, there are other factors to consider before we all turn into Von Hagens plastinated people simply because it is more convenient.

Plastic wine containers are permeable and let in oxygen over time, which makes them vastly inferior to glass (oxidization is mostly bad news for the delicate structures of wine). Tests show that seeping oxygen can adversely change the character of unopened boxed and 'PET' plastic bottled wine from roughly eight months onwards. This means limiting the naturally recommended window to drink wine even more. The wine has barely taken its first steps before it has to be released into the wild. Admittedly most wine in these sorts of containers is designed to be drunk straight away, but the forcibly shortened drinking window bothers me.

Nobody blinked when milk went plastic, but milk has a very short shelf life and is a very different beast. If you are an obsessive milk sniffer, then this is maybe a great transferable skill for plastic bottled wine, which will probably also have a sell by date stamped on it like the box wine.

These new layered plastic containers can have oxygen 'scavengers' in them. Unfortunately they only work for 12 months or so. As I am no scientist my mind thinks of 'PET plastic scavengers' and has a picture of some tiny bloated spikey creature with a pot belly, languishing in the dregs high on wine and O2.


Boxed wine is not hermetically sealed, contrary to popular belief, but once opened, if you are lucky most of the wine will expel without letting any oxygen into the bag. The last glass or so can be problematic, and often this is when you let the air in with a unpleasant ripple of belching (or maybe that is the replete oxygen scavenger being flatulent). The short term advantage of boxed wine is that once opened it can last for a long time (four weeks plus), whereas PET plastic bottles not only have a short shelf life, but also are as susceptible to air as their glass counterparts once opened.

Where does all this new packaging technology leave us?... In an world of ugly inconvenient convenience in my opinion.

With the slow removal of the permanence, authority and glamour of glass, wines may take on the appeal of a sort of boozy grape smoothie, chosen indifferently by hurried shoppers over a mango, kumquat and coconut juice.

The good news for glass lovers is that current plastic technology is not up to the job of keeping your treasure chest of Bordeaux safe for several years, so glass will be around for a long time to come.

Now back to the environmental impact. Yes plastic is lighter and therefore greener to transport, but that is not the whole story. Apparently unlike glass, plastic cannot be recycled over and over again because it degrades significantly in the recycling process. Therefore the ideal image you have in your head of your plastic bottle being turned into another one is just fantasy for now. More likely a bin bag. Producing and recycling plastic bottles also releases lots more toxic nasties than glass bottles.

Suddenly this new form of bottle seems even less appealing.

Perhaps plastic bottles are only good for the producers who can save on shipping and manufacturing costs.

I suppose to be thorough you need to work out the carbon (and other) emissions in manufacture, transport and recycling of glass bottles vs plastic taking into account the degradation of recycled plastic. Sounds too complex a job for me and my maths. Anyone?

Pounds, Shilling and Wine

I recently had to find cheap wine in bulk for an event.

Where on earth do you start?

If you are just a normal casual wine drinker like me then your experience of different grape varieties, regions, vintages and producers will be a tiny thimble full in the bewildering, aggressively brand led choices out there.

You walk into the supermarket wine aisle and the walls become the Dan Brown cryptex, the wrong choice and you and your guests will end up wallowing in vinegar. Lots of eye catching labels draw your eye, known brands mesmerise you with familiarity and confidence. The Old World French wines sit there elegantly, tempting you with their labels that look more like a wedding invitation from the producer. The possibility of impressing your guests with a relatively unknown Burgundy excites you, until you see the price. Over to New World and you spot Oyster Bay and think it looks like a bargain, until you remember that you have confused it with Cloudy Bay, the brand that demands the big bucks. By this time your head is spinning. Not a wine expert in sight, just a lady who happily tells you that there is a two for one offer on loo rolls.

Exit.

Back home and onto the Internet. You first search for discounted wine in supermarkets, and have some success. Your search is 100% price driven and you have no idea what has forced this price down say from £7.99 to £4.99. Could it be the fact the wine is actually rubbish, or it is just past its best? Is it a blend of average wine tarted up with additives to create a dull predictable homogeneous year on year big brand taste?

You cave in out of frustration and order one bottle to try with friends. Half of them say it is ok, some screw up their faces in disgust, and others just want to drink any free solution containing some alcohol. You then discover that the supermarket can only provide half of the required amount of the stuff.

Back online.

Relying on Internet reviews of bottles of wine is a bit of a lottery. The rise of 'shilling' is partly to blame. Don't panic, the 'economic downturn' (we are apparently past the crunchy bit now) is not resurrecting old money, despite the fact we cannot even make our new money properly (the current faulty 20p coins with no dates). To shill is to pretend to be a genuine customer, but really be in the back pocket of the seller. It is hard to trust wine reviews, unless you can be sure of the authenticity due to a little research around the reviewer. There is no eBay style review of reviewers. No centralised aggregate trustworthiness system. Obviously there are lots of great shill free sites (try saying that after a few glasses..) and the rich tapestry of some of the established wine blogs are a very good bet (although I am bound to say that). Maybe someone should invent a shill free certified stamp or something, as much good as that will do.

So where to next....I suppose it is time to bother some of your friends again and ask for their ideas, assuming that they are not covertly working for some shady wine pyramid selling scheme.

You get some good recommendations like 'we had this wine at our wedding and it was perfect'. The problem is that they may well have been married a couple of years ago, and that wine is long gone, well certainly the vintage, maybe not the brand. They may well have driven to an obscure vineyard in the depths of France and spent £3.00 per bottle, ending up with a superb wine, a one off. You also want to be original, an Indiana Jones in the world of wine, flexing your deep Sunday supplement wine knowledge with your guests, feeling innovative and cavalier.

Off to a wine shop.

Immediately you are seduced by the smell of the wooden wine racks and the intimate feel of the place. All the prices are hand written and there is a little bio on each bottle, a touching and helpful life story. The shop keeper has a great knowledge of wine and guides you to a batch of he has been trying to shift for a long time...stop...now I am now being way too cynical. The wine shop is a great bet. You can develop a trusting relationship with the owner/manager and hopefully find a good bottle. You then go online and try to find it cheaper, which of course you do.

Poor independent wine shop.

Unfortunately you find a double bluff type shill review saying the wine is terrible. More confusion sets in.

In reality, after reading guides online to choosing cheap wine, the information seems to instantly evaporate on application. You need to put a considerable amount of work in if you are to go it alone.

Some pointers like these work for some and not others -

Try to buy wine produced from a more defined area and maybe not so popular general region (research required)

Check how old the wine is (lots of cheaper wine is designed to be drunk young)

Look for unusual grape varietals and blends (for example some of the Italian varietals are excellent and good value)

Try to spot the quality cheaper New World bargains (some say it is better wine for your money than Old World wine in the budget bracket)

Make sure the bottle and label are impressive, attractive and/or intelligently understated , as visual perceptions can dramatically influence taste.

Ask for a bulk discount and see where you end up (no-brainer)

Try the wine over a couple of evenings, with and without food (preferably similar food to the event).

Do a blind tasting of several possibilities with friends

and so on.....

What did I end up doing? I went for an unusual New World blend of grapes on the advice of a wine merchant I trusted that brought the price down, along with a bulk discount. I did a blind tasting with friends and it came out on top.

note - If you are worried about Champagne then read this post I wrote recently. In a nutshell cheap can be excellent. Even try Prosecco (an Italian dry sparkling wine) as an alternative.

Rudolf's Bio

I am still, like many, struggling with the word 'organic'. Branded to mainstream attention by major food retailers as a healthy, ethical, bourgeois choice, it seems to mean a spectacular confusion of manured tomatoes, happy chickens and celebrity chefs.

If you are finding that concept difficult to get your head around try 'biodynamics', invented by Rudolf Steiner, the phrase coined by his humble followers. It predates most of the organic movement and is wacky stuff.

What came first the organic chicken or the biodynamic egg?

So how is a bottle of wine going to educate me about this particular type of parentage? In short it is probably not. Studying an inanimate bottle is a hybrid game of charades and hide and seek. Lets see..organic is three syllables, biodynamic is five, already it is going to be a struggle. The English language is melting into 'text speak', so the long words and ever shorter attention spans are a really bad combination when it comes to getting a message across.

Where was I...oh yes what is this biothingamajig?

There was a news story very recently about how the moon cycles affect the taste of wine, and that pretty much sums up biodynamics. But do not laugh too much because major brands like Tesco and Marks and Spencer are said to be taking this biodynamic loony (sorry lunar) calendar seriously and only let their wine critics taste on the 'good' days. The calendar was produced by a German great grandmother called Maria Thun (or was it Thumb, related to Tom..you couldn't make this stuff up, could you?)

In all seriousness biodynamics has major benefits to the local environment as everything is pesticide free. Wines may well have interesting characteristics due to the rather eccentric 'organic' (here we go again, the 'o' word has slipped in when I do not really understand it) soil preparations like..

preparation 505 - 'Oak bark fermented in the skull of a domestic animal'

or

preparation 506 - 'Dandelion flowers fermented in cow mesentery'.

I suppose, through the eyes of a biodynamic wine producer, the vines seem like acupuncture needles in the back of a rather large elephant which has been regularly massaged with essential oils. Sceptics may say this creates either a placebo effect or genuinely better wine simply due to the extra care taken, rather than the hocus pocus.

Tenders of these challenging viticulutural eco-pockets are truly passionate about the land so I really do not care how weird and wonderful this all is, anything that environmentally friendly is good in my spell book.

Low On Juice

My phone is on it last legs. It only vibrates now, too lethargic and cynical to ring. It has seen the rise of the iPhone and has just given up I think, slowly developing an inferiority complex.

This means I am going to have to probably bite a chunk out of the Apple, and spend all my hard earned cash on an iPhone contract. Then I can be on the Internet wherever I am, sending tweets with one of the iPhone's rich application set.....that is until the battery gives out. I am told the Swiss Army Knife of phones is demanding on juice....

Like running a tank in the desert on tracks made of ice.

My current phone will be smugly awaiting for me to discover this, and knows I will probably be back. In truth, I just like the look and feel of the iPhone. The rest is irrelevant (sort of).

There are some wine apps for the iPhone which interest me. These are designed to help you source and choose wines.....sounds good doesn't it? I will let you know when I finally take the plunge.

Snooth have just released on of these apps which I aim to road test.

There are mixed reviews of some wine apps out there, and ultimately I get the impression that one app will not really be a good replacement for asking a member of staff in a good wine shop, but a complementary tool all the same.

Do not vacuum out your brains just yet and plug the iPhone into the void.

The choice of wine is ever more bewildering, probably not enough time on the iPhone's fragile life cycle to cope with the possibilities. I am sure that by the time I had typed in 'Gewurztraminer' to the slightly awkward touch screen keyboard (clearly engineered for The Borrowers' tiny hands) it would be too late and way too frustrating. Combine that with the inevitable half full mobile broadband Britain and you have a nightmare.

My method is more to avoid wines I have bought, drunk and hated. The 'horse has already bolted' approach. You can only really know what you like by trying the stuff. After all....

'One man's meat is another man's poison'