How to Rescue a Sad Wine or Two

by Earl Dexter

Either I am just super trendy or mighty ignorant, but this mode of adding slivers and nobs of flavoursome titbits to wine don’t phase me one bit. My uber wine-loving friend Lafras Huguenet developed – according to his wife – a disturbing heart palpitation coupled with involuntary anal leakage upon hearing that his grand-daughter was adding sliced jalapeno peppers to her glasses of Provençal rosé.

This pepper popping into rosé and Sauvignon Blanc is, by-the-by, currently a trend among the younger generation of wine drinkers. Not only does it apparently add flavour and zest to the contents of the glass, but also makes wine drinking look busy in a cool, intrusive sort of way. Fashionable, something the category needs.

Adding extra flavour to wine is, of course, nothing new, so I keep wondering why it is sniffed at by the likes of Lafras and his fellow snobbish vinous old farts. I remember encountering a modestly sized and fully ripe summer English strawberry floating in the glass of Lanson Champagne poured to me at Wimbledon a few years back.

In certain high-brow European restaurants, a single skinned grape is often added to a glass of acidic Sauvignon Blanc or Riesling in making a white wine cocktail. And while aggressively higher up on the scale of flavour immersion, Coca Cola blended with dry red wine makes a popular drink in many warm Portuguese-speaking parts of the world, such as Angola, Brazil and Mozambique.

Despite having no qualms about such supplementary wine practices, I do not indulge in these myself. Yet now and again I am compelled to deploy remedies to rescue dull and tasteless wines with the slight addition of external flavour. You can’t mend a broken heart, but a poor wine can be rescued.

Take Ruby Cabernet, for example, a red grape still popularly cultivated in South Africa and which is famous for making the kakkest wine to the greatest level of mediocre consistency. It tastes of mouldy rhubarb, liver extract and vinegared raspberry juice, yet some folk do like it, such as Mot and Dappies who often visit me during week-end trips to Cape Town.

These two lovingly delinquent mates always haul a bottle or two of Ruby Cabernet along, expecting me to open a bottle in their presence. A charming host, I do this but having poured my glass I excuse myself to visit the kitchen. Here, two to three drops of Angostura bitters are added to my glass of Ruby Cabernet, the firm, herbaceous notes of the bitters turning the wine from a cloying, bloody and mousy red liquid into something actually drinkable.

Sad Chardonnays, I’ve had few but not too few to mention, need external perking-up. One of these is the strangely popular Fat Bastard Chardonnay which is forever finding its way into my fridge, courtesy of the neighbour’s wife and her tartish friends who insist on leaving me a gift after I’ve sanded their carpets.

I don’t like pouring any wine down the drain, but to make an offensively over-oaked and under-finessed Chardonnay such as Fat Bastard palatable, half a teaspoon of fresh lemon-juice does the trick, wonderfully. The acid of the lemon cuts the woody clogged arteries and breaks down the dense sweetness leading the wine’s character. Actually, makes it taste quite all-right, a lesser Fat Bastard and more of the sane, finer wine it could have been from the start.

But be not ashamed, everyone needs a bit of help, now and again.