I hear the booze a-calling
A look at wine in 'Frasier' and some memorable champagne method ciders.
Just a very short post today as I’m in the middle of moving house, a process that began in February when we put our house on the market and looks like it might be over nearly eight months later. Or by you time you read this, it might all have fallen through, such is the English system of house buying.
I started my wine blog Henry’s World of Booze in 2010 back before Instagram, tik tok, and all the horrors of modernity. I wanted an outlet for all the wine knowledge that was accumulating in my head and the only option was starting a blog. Nowadays I would probably have become an influencer and would be raking it in like all influencers are. One of the first things I wrote was a very short piece entitled ‘What kind of sherry did Frasier drink?’ Inadvertently, I had hit SEO gold back when most people would think those initials were a typo for SOE. This one post for a time made my blog one of the most-read wine blogs in the world, it’s quoted on Wikipedia and still easily the most-read thing I have ever written. I tried to follow it up with a look at what Bill Murray was drinking in Ghostbusters 2, Haut Brion (or should that have been Haunt Brion, arff, arff) in case you are interested, but it didn’t do anywhere near as well.
Since then I’ve always wanted to return to wine in Frasier because it’s such a fertile topic. A new series of the sitcom coming out this week was the perfect excuse, even if from the trailer it looks awful, so thank you for Acadamie du Vin’s new online wine publication Vinosity for commissioning it. Here’s a little flavour:
Frasier’s everyday drink – sherry – marks him out as a bit unusual. The actual brand isn’t made clear because they pour it from a decanter. Sometimes it’s light like a fino, or darker like an amontillado. In one episode it’s described as an ‘Andalusian amontillado’ but in another a strangely familiar blue bottle appears. Could the ultimate wine snob really be a fan of Harvey’s Bristol Cream?
While the sherry might be anonymous, the series is full of more specific references to splendid wines like Vieux Château Certan 1975 or Le Montrachet Marquis de Laguiche 1985. Some of the funniest moments involve misidentification of bottles at the brothers’ wine club. Niles: ‘I convinced some of my fellow psychiatrists to play a little prank on him. When he thought he was tasting the Château Pétrus, he was in fact sipping a Fourcas Dupré. You see, we’d switched the labels.’ In another Frasier says: ‘I had kind of a rough night at the wine club. During the blindfolded tasting, I gave four stars to a Mexican Zinfandel.’ The brothers’ competitive oenophilia reaches its apogee when they go head-to-head in a blind tasting to become ‘master of the cork’ – there’s even a song that the other members sing to the victor: ‘Hail cork master, the master of the cork, he knows which wine goes with fish or pork.’ Niles wins on a technicality. While the wine is important, so are the rules. As Frasier puts it, the club is ‘just about wine and clear constitutional procedures for enjoying it.’
I’ll be writing regularly for Vinosity alongside some big names in British wine: Victoria Moore from the Daily Telegraph, Natasha Hughes, a Master of Wine, and Amelia Singer from ITV’s The Wine Show. I also have a monthly column in The Critic magazine which is proving a joy to work for as they pretty much let me write what I want and when I file my copy the editor, and even sometimes the art director, let me know how much they enjoyed it. Not something that you get at every magazine. My latest column looks at an unforgettable tasting I attended of some mature champagne method ciders, not all of which had aged particularly gracefully:
Perhaps the most memorable bottle was one which I won’t name from 2011 which smelt like a shot of funky cider vinegar. One can imagine Jeeves giving it to Bertie Wooster as a pick-me-up after a hard night at Drones. It tasted even worse. While you’d think time would have softened the tannins, it was quite the opposite, one taster commented that it tasted like “a wooden ceiling falling on your head.
Happily there were also some truly excellent ciders which I mention in the article and I’ll post some more cider recommendations in the next week or so. Or even this Sunday, if I have time. In the meantime, good bye and good mental health!