'Shall we get a bottle of VPR?'
Why are we *quite* so silly about rosé? Plus knitting and goats. Oh, and a terrible film AND a marmalade update...
I have a friend who refers to it as ‘VPR’. As in ‘Shall we get a bottle of VPR?’ It stands for Very Pale Rosé and she will say it as she sits down in a pub or bar from roughly this time of year until around the end of September when we transfer back into Red Wine Season.
The Season, the old-fashioned term for the summer months of things like Ascot and polo and panama hats, *technically* kicks off with the Chelsea Flower Show in a few weeks. But Rosé Season is here already. How do we know? Because, as reported in The Times yesterday, (some) French winemakers have started their annual grumble that we’re drinking the wrong rosé, that those of us who like the paler stuff are plebs who don’t know what we’re talking about and that - actually - we should be drinking rosé that’s more the colour of Ribena.
There’s harrumphing about this every year from certain quarters, the people who make the darker stuff, because pale rosé, or VPR, has become so wildly popular in the last, ooooh, decade or so? This year, the particular grumble is that pale rosé is ‘swimming pool rosé’ and for ‘unsophisticated’ palates. Oooh-oooh, saucer of milk for Table Deux, s’il-vous-plaît.
I cannot bear people being snotty about what others choose to read or watch or eat and therefore also drink. If you like pale rosé, drink it. Why should you be made to feel as if you’re drinking the ‘wrong’ thing? Hell, have a frosé if you like (a frozen rosé, like a rosé slushy). And I don’t see why ‘swimming pool rosé’ should be such a bad thing? I like swimming pools AND I like rosé. Together OR separately.
Admittedly, the names of certain rosés don’t help much. Whispering Angel, I always think, sounds like a stripper. Some years ago (in the pre-Brexit days when you could still do booze cruises), a friend of a friend capered from Parsons Green to Provence in a white van and brought back 1,000 magnums of pale rosé. He designed 1,000 sticky labels, stuck them on the bottles and flogged the lot to mates: Guns n’ Rosé, it was called. Every self-respecting Sloane served it with burnt sausages from the local farm shop that summer.
A couple of years ago, bottles of something else called Notorious Pink were circulating at Hurlingham and - intrigued by this - I traced their import back to a British wine dealer called Piers, who apparently more usually focusses on Petrus and is known as Piers-sells-wine-not-beers. I had assumed that the name of this rosé was some sort of play on the American rapper Biggie Smalls, aka The Notorious BIG, but Piers replied to my email, sounding slightly confused, saying that it was a French Grenache and, as far as he understood, ‘it wasn’t named after any singer’.
HUGE question: what will be this summer’s most fashionable rosé? Chateau Léoube is pretty popular, because it comes from Daylesford. Or there’s AIX, which I never know how to pronounce (is it ‘ex’? Is it ‘aches’?). I’ve lost track of what’s going on with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s legal case but the rosé from the vineyard they used to jointly own, Chateau Miraval, is another posh one that people like to bandy around. I’m a fan of the one with chickens on it, La Vielle Ferme, simply because I once read a wine writer declare it was the best value rosé on the market. Waitrose are flogging it for £8.50 a bottle atm.
As it happens, Telegraph wine writer Victoria Moore is compiling her big guide to this year’s rosé for the paper this very weekend, but this means she won’t tell me what the best bottle for under a tenner is now. You’ll have to wait for Saturday. She does suggest, though, that the booming popularity of VPR has driven the quality down. ‘It is probably true that there's been a prosecco-ification of Provence rosé - you know, when something gets so popular that everyone has to make more and more of it, the price of good grapes goes up and the quality of the cheaper wine goes down.’ Look carefully at the labels of the under £10 bottles on the shelves, advises Victoria, because ‘you’ll see that a lot of what you think might be Provence is actually from the Languedoc or it's Vin de France or it's IGP Mediterranée because everyone's desperately sourcing from elsewhere.’
Alternatively, you could do what plenty of us do in bars/pubs/restaurants, which is look at the wine list, then wince apologetically at the waiter and, slightly embarrassed, ask ‘What’s the palest rosé you do?’ Unless you’re my anonymous friend, that is, and you talk loudly about ordering a bottle of VPR.
Picture of the week
This is Margaret, Margaret Seaman, I read about her in the papers over the weekend and thought the story so lovely I wanted to include it here. Margaret’s a 94-year-old great-great-grandmother from Norfolk, who started knitting in 2013 after her husband Fred died as a way to try and distract herself from her grief. She’s since become known as the ‘Queen of Knitting’ because she’s knitted various giant landmarks, including HUGE knitted versions of Buckingham Palace and Sandringham, complete with little knitted Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip figures. She’s also knitted Great Yarmouth pier in its 70s heyday (completely with knitted sandcastles and little knitted people sunbathing on the beach), and a knitted hospital, met both the late Queen and the current one, and has raised over £140,000 for charity via these knitted buildings.
What Margaret’s knitted creations need now, though, is a permanent home. I spoke to Jayne Evans yesterday (if Margaret’s the Queen of Knitting, then Janye is her lady-in-waiting, she explained), who recently organised an exhibition of Margaret’s knitted buildings in Norwich. They need a proper home, Jayne explained, so that more people can enjoy them. ‘Honestly, they reduce people to tears,’ she told me, ‘and the more people who see them, the more [charitable] money in the pot.’ You can read more about Marvellous Margaret HERE, visit her JustGiving page HERE and contact Jayne (via me or that website) if you know of a space where the knits can go on display. I think they’re incredibly charming and very British and shouldn’t simply be gathering dust somewhere.
Recommendation of the week
Can I preface this by saying nothing I put in here is an ad? (I WISH QUITE FRANKLY. WHY HAS NO PR RESPONDED TO MY REQUEST FOR FREE NECK PILLOWS?) Just in case you think this week’s rec is a freebie because it most certainly isn’t.
What I’m talking about today Chuckling Goat kefir. You know kefir - it’s that yoghurty drink that’s increasingly on supermarket shelves (Yeo Valley do one now, dontcha know?) because we’re all supposed to be eating/drinking more fermented stuff. Some years ago, while still at Tatler, I interviewed a very splendid lady at her enormous posh house in the West Country and she insisted on sending me back on the train from Tiverton Parkway with a jar of kefir grains from her own supply, the Bonne Maman lid studded with holes so the kefir grains could ‘breathe’ (she was quite eccentric, this lady, but the best people often are).
I subsequently spent several months cultivating the grains in my fridge, making my own kefir. But if you can’t be bothered with the faff of fermenting your own kefir, or worry (as I did) that you might accidentally ferment some kind of bacterial/biological disaster/the next pandemic, Chuckling Goat is the answer. It is the KING of kefir - the ultimate, best, most pungent kefir I’ve come across and if you order it now, this morning, it’ll arrive tomorrow. Admittedly it costs £50 for four bottles, and it tastes EXTREMELY goaty, but I make those four bottles last a least a month and you get used to the taste. I actually quite like it now, first thing in the morning.
I don’t think we need to go into *great detail* about the effects it’s had on me but I’ve now been taking it for three months, and I feel much…perkier. A bit like the lady in the Senokot advert, skipping about merrily without any tummy troubles. You just need to be extremely careful when you open each bottle because they are FIZZY. I opened one a couple of weeks ago when still quite sleepy, and kefir went everywhere, all over the walls, which unfortunately made my kitchen look like it had recently been used for a porn film. But apart from that, can’t recommend highly enough.
(Just realised that last week I banged on about Rennie and Gaviscon, and this week it’s kefir and Senokot. Shall we try and have a gut-free week, next week?)
Nonsense of the week
Civil War. This is the new Alex Garland film (The Beach, Ex Machina, 28 Days Later) and I had high hopes. A film about present-day America descending into civil war? In the year there’s a presidential election happening? At a moment when a former (and possibly future!) president is on trial? Ooooh, topical, yes please! Also, it stars Kirsten Dunst, who I’ve always loved, playing a conflict photographer. Multiple ticks from me, even though journalists onscreen are often INCREDIBLY annoying (never seem to do much work; spend quite a lot of time taking lunch breaks; often having an improbable affair with one or more colleagues*).
And yet, having seen the film on Sunday night, it manages to say basically nothing interesting about a) America disintegrating into civil war b) war reporting. There are a few dystopian scenes which are vaguely entertaining - a highway strewn with abandoned cars; a barren JC Penney carpark dominated by a crashed helicopter - and when you see these you think, ‘God, imagine, could we/America be close to that?’ Also, Kirsten Dunst’s husband, the brilliant Jesse Plemons, makes an excellent Apocalypse Now-esque psychopath in the most grisly scene of the whole movie. But otherwise it’s pretty silly, almost boring, and the ending particularly so. ALSO, the young rookie journalist rocks up at the epicentre of the conflict, missiles and guns going off all around, with her Dad’s old camera and wearing a pair of Veja trainers. Come on.
*Plenty of people would say this is EXACTLY what journalism is like, to which I would say can’t possibly comment.
PS. There is a touch of the parish church newsletter about today’s Substack because on top of knitting and a discussion about digestion, I have exciting marmalade news. I was sent a press release about the World Marmalade Award winners yesterday and I know you’ll all be desperate to know the results (I wrote about the World Marmalade Awards a few weeks ago. Read it HERE if you missed it.) CONTROVERSIALLY, for the first time ever there were two winners and they were BOTH made by the same man. Worcestershire’s Stephen Snead made a seville and lime marmalade with red chilli and a lime and Crème de Cacao marmalade, so they’ll soon be available on the shelves of Fortnum’s. Other entries apparently included a marmalade with seaweed in it and, in the Merry (ie boozy) Marmalade category, a marmalade that came with a mezcal worm. You know, like those worms you get in tequila bottles sometimes? I will probably stick with my mother’s marmalade, but each to their own.
Lovely chatty piece as I read in Avalon north of Sydney!
As an aside, with British winemaking going gangbusters, and climate change likely to make Southern Europe inhospitable to grapes, there will likely be diminishing need to import rose.
And a passable kefir can be made by keeping part of your original and tipping it up with milk. Leave to stand at room temperature, a day or so I think, and then refrigerate!
Where does Mateus Rose fit in? It is entirely apocryphal that the inventor said on his death bed "I still don't know why we need grapes"