I SMILED in the supermarket the other day as I listened to a couple of youngish people discussing what wine they were taking to a party. They hovered between Australian, Chilean or Argentinian; Chardonnay or Chenin Blanc and didn't settle for the cheapest either. This isn't unusual. What a difference from yesteryear. Just when we became a nation of wine drinkers is a bit unclear. I suppose during and after the war wine wasn't being imported in any great amounts, so it wasn't until the 1950s were halfway through that it became readily available. Wealthy people would have wine cellars but most people only got wine when they went out to dinner and sometimes not even then. You would often be invited to people's houses and the only alcoholic refreshment would be a pre- dinner glass of sherry which came in only one flavour. Sickly sweet. If there was a bottle of wine, the host would carry it carefully and proudly to the table as if it were a newborn babe. Sometimes, if the couple had aspirations towards being middle class, the wine would be decanted, which was pointless if it wasn't vintage, and let's face it, you could decant a bottle of Mateus Rose until the cows came home and it wouldn't have made any difference to the taste. If it wasn't decanted the host usually made a fuss about opening it to let it breath. Again, this would be pointless because how much could a bottle of wine breath through its little opening at the top? Once all this was over and he would measure it carefully into each glass up to an invisible level which should have read 'that's your lot'. Which it usually was. In those days it wasn't really done to take a bottle of wine with you when you went to dinner with someone. It probably began when people realised that they could double the number of bottles available if they took their own. Sometimes they found, to their consternation, that the host accepted the bottle but made no attempt to open it, stowing it away in a cupboard and mentally marking it down for the next dinner party. If you were younger and went to 'a party', which could be anything from someone's 21st to a regular Saturday night event in someone's house, usually someone with very liberal parents or a bedsit of their own, you were expected to take your own drink. Young men with a bit of cash veered towards a 'Party Seven' or bottles of cider. For women the choice might be a couple of bottles of Pony or Cherry B, the former posing as sherry the latter as port, Babycham or Moussec. If you were a little strapped for cash then the choice was a bottle of something called 'British wine', an appellation which would certainly be frowned upon by our trading standards office today as it certainly wasn't British grown and had probably arrived in a container lorry marked 'vino tinto plonko' at the dockside a few days before. British wine, however, was one step up from buying wine 'loose' by taking your own bottle to an off-licence and getting it filled from a tap at the back of the shop with something red and liquid. Both were fairly disgusting and usually guaranteed to take the enamel off your teeth. After one or two glasses you didn't care. The idea upon entry to the party was to quickly make your way to the table where the drinks were laid out, and deposit said bottle of British wine with sleight of hand, and then look around for something better to drink. The trouble was, everyone else was doing it too. What you really needed was an innocent abroad, who had bought something halfway decent and hadn't yet learned the golden rule – never let go of a bottle of something halfway decent when anyone clutching a bottle of British vino tinto plonko is hanging around in the vicinity. The other golden rule was never arrive late, otherwise you would find nothing but the plonko or, in later years, giant brown bottles of Liebfraumilch which even seasoned drinkers drew the line at. The latter were usually only ever used in punches but, personally, my own golden rule is never to go anywhere near a bowl of punch. If I want fruit salad I'm perfectly capable of cutting up a few bananas and apples, I don't want it floating around in something that looks like stagnant pond water and tastes like the dregs of the end of the evening's drinking. Most punches are, actually, made up of all those bottles of stuff people bring back from holiday which seemed so cute in the hot midday sun but not so interesting when back home in rainy Cornwall. Punches are also often lethally full of spirits, so that Great Aunt Maud can be reduced to a babbling wreck after sipping what she thinks is a nice fruit cocktail and hangovers from drinking a mix of Tia Maria, banana liquour, Spanish brandy and Liebfrauwhatsit can last for days. As far as I'm concerned the only fruit which should be legally allowed near alcohol is the olive in a dry martini. But back to wine. For most of my generation, our first taste of eating out was in bistros, which were both cheap and romantic. Nearly all of them had check table cloths, menus written on blackboards, student waiters with a bit of an attitude, and Chianti bottles with candles stuck in them on each table. The Italian wine industry at the time must have laughed all the way to the banco when they realised that the stupid English would actually buy any quality of wine if it came in a bottle with a straw skirt so that they could stick a red candle in the empty bottle and let the wax drip down. We all had a collection at home, which ended up as embarrassing as the Spanish holiday raffia donkey. If you didn't drink the bistro Chianti, and some didn't actually sell it, only obtained the bottles somewhere, you got French plonk which initially was fairly good. In other places you tended to only order the wine you could pronounce to avoid being sneered at by waiters, so Cabernet Sauvignon was out. Holidays abroad really introduced us all to wine. Some took to sangria, I personally thought it was only a Mediterranean version of British Wine. Some people actually pretended they liked Retsina, even though it does taste a bit like diluted disinfectant. Now we British are probably the biggest imbibers of wines from all over the world. Walk into a French supermarket and you will be unlikely to find anything but French wine. Nor anything else from foreign shores for that matter, but we better not go into that as there's a French market in Liskeard today and over the weekend and I don't want a sharpened baguette through the window of my office. The people I feel for are those wine producers in the UK who have to market their products (and very good they are I hasten to say) to folks like me who have a lingering memory of British wine and the trouble we used to go to to avoid drinking it...
