Peregrinations

Let us dispense with millimetres of wine

Anthony Peregrine

It maybe counts as a spate. I’m talking newwave wine bars, the ones where wine is served less by human hand, more by machine. Recently, I’ve come across them in Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Montpellier and Toulouse. They’re doubtless rife elsewhere. This is a serious business.

In such bars, you receive a card, like a credit card, and prime it with cash at the counter. You then go to the glassfronted wine dispenser in which there are perhaps two dozen wine bottles upended. You put your card in the card-slot, choose a wine and a wine measure, push the button and the wine flows. It’s useful, also, to remember to put a wineglass under the flow. In Toulouse, I didn’t. It is surprising how a measure of wine which looks tiny in a glass actually creates quite a mess on a shelf.

Initially, this (the winedispensing, not the mess) is intriguing. You may tackle a wine you couldn’t normally afford because the system allows you to buy it by the millimetre. You are also thrust into the pleasing company of other customers, in the main, polite young people working in startups in the fields of petsharing or similar. But the fascination wears off fast. A millimetre of wine, no matter how fine, does not spell “let it rip”.

Nor, I have realised, do I want good wine from a dispenser any more than I want beef wellington from a vending machine. I want it served by real people, the bottle then left on the table for all to drink, finish and reorder. Wine requires humans. We need to make a stand.

Talking of dining, these wine bars, indeed all wine bars, think it smart to serve tapas. This is wrong. Lord, how wrong it is. Tapas are neither dinner nor not-dinner. Not sufficiently substantial to replace a meal, too substantial to prepare for one. They exist in limbo, dousing but not satisfying the appetite. I love Spain more than life itself but, like churros, Julio Iglesias and the Inquisition, tapas represent a grave historical wrong turning.

So I left these metropolises, their thimblefuls of wine and titbits of toast, and travelled home cross country. I stopped in small towns, at small-town barrestaurants. You know the type: extensions of the street by other means, scrape of metal chair on tiled floor, six old fellows sipping their first of the day at 11am with a dozen teeth between them, two choices of wine (red or white) and, for lunch, the dish of the day, generally blanquette de veau or bavette-frites.

Life flowed through these places, tots through grandparents. I couldn’t have been happier. “Stick that in a machine and dispense it,” I said to no one in particular.