Cheapskate winos rejoice – chardonnay is back

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/12/cheapskate-winos-rejoice-chardonnay-is-back

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Word has it, via the Times, that chardonnay is back, and as someone who briefly bought into the snobbish ABC mantra ("anything but chardonnay") I have to say I'm pleased. It was while working in a north London pub that I became aware that my distaste for the stuff lay simply in prejudice, for my manager informed me that the chablis and the chardonnay grapes were one and the same, and that I was, therefore, making a total arse of myself. I got told, and then went back to it as one would an ex-lover: shamefaced, and completely hammered.

I last had a glass of chardonnay on Tuesday, in the bar below the Guardian offices. My friend, who has just started working there, was a tad concerned that she had alienated colleagues because when it came to being their round, she'd asked for her usual glass of sauv blanc. A glass of sauv blanc costs £11, which is why everyone drinks the riesling, and she'd been getting "looks". So much for champagne socialists.

I've always been a fan of cheap wine – a bit of a wine slag, if you prefer. One of Dylan Moran's finest jokes is about how there are, fundamentally, only two kinds of wine. The kind that makes you say "we'll get 10 more of those please", and the kind which makes you do a facial spasm. I also believe that there are two kinds of wine drinker: those who drink wine for the sheer and unadulterated purpose of getting pissed, and those people who drink to "enjoy wine" and are ponces about it.

France and Italy are two countries which fall into the latter category. I have lived in both, but I'm afraid to say that neither place rubbed off on me (I could insert a joke here about the same not being true of its male inhabitants, but it would be crass and unnecessary). These places are paradises for the cheap wine lover: a bottle of sparking wine will set you back 99 cents; you can buy rosé in cartons. In bars, they come in teensy, tiny little glasses, but it doesn't matter, because you can just have eight. Back in London, I discovered that most corner shops run a two-for-a-fiver deal on any Italian wine. Mark from Peep Show spoke of not wanting to break the £2.99 barrier (it's probably more like the £4.99 barrier now). But I say, go for it. Britain needs to stop fooling itself that it cares about anything other than alcohol content.

It all started when I was a teenager. On Fridays, our parents would drop us off in the car park behind Wetherspoons, and we'd down a bottle of Badger's Creek (Aldi's finest) before stashing another in a bush, for later. Sometimes we'd mix it up a bit and opt for some Lambrini-mainlining in the Bible Gardens, but the aim of the game was the same: get drunk, then sneak into the student's union via the smoking area for a spot of dry humping. Save for drinking mostly indoors now, very little has changed.

The media may be full of scare stories about loutish binge drinking, but we now know that middle-class drinking is just as much of an epidemic. In other words, it's not the kind of wine that you're swigging that needs to be watched, but the quantity, of course.

But we'll save the moralising for another time. After all, it's nearly Christmas.

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