Cask wine/vin ordinaire

I was shocked to read this morning in the Australian Financial Review, that nowadays over a third of the wine sold in French supermarkets is in casks. Why should I be shocked? The French have been drinking vin ordinaire from Algeria and the Languedoc for a very long time after all. And really what's so bad about cask wine anyway? What you can buy in Australia in a cask is actually pretty drinkable. Well some of it. And it will keep longer once opened than wine in a bottle.

What was really interesting about the article though was to discover that wine is now imported into England from Australia (and elsewhere too), in huge container size plastic bladders - enough to fill 33,000 bottles! That is mind-blowing to me. I mean how strong must that plastic bladder be? In a huge warehouse near Bristol the wine is then decanted into bottles, packaged and sold in those supermarkets throughout Europe. If the wine was transported already bottled, one container could only hold 14,000 bottles - so you have more than double the amount of wine in the bladder.

And another interesting thing - an aside really - is that they change the labels according to various events such as the Ashes, which Hardys sponsors. Apparently a special label was produced after some significant cricket happening in the fourth test (I don't understand cricket), and all 75,000 cases sold within a month. Labels are obviously important - and again I think the Australians can take a lot of credit for the quality of wine labels these days. Even the French, who are very conservative when it comes to wine, are beginning to be a bit more creative.

The article in the AFR is about Accolade Wines and their wine park in Bristol. Accolade is the biggest wine company in Australia and the UK by volume sold. I would direct you to the article but alas you have to be a subscriber to AFR to read it. It was really quite interesting. Like the screw caps that now dominate the wine bottle closures in Australia, the claim is that the wine is better preserved and arrives in better condition. We are not, of course, well I assume we are not, talking about the top of the range wines. But then again maybe they are included too.

I remember wine casks coming into production. Prior to that there were flagons or you could buy wine in bulk and bottle your own. Wine bottling parties were common and fun. We had a few. We even had a little hand-operated machine for forcing the corks into the bottles. You would go out to Vermont and buy a barrel of wine and then put it into bottles. The cask was originally invented way back in 1935 at Angove's in South Australia. With the first version you had to cut off the corner of the bladder and reseal it with a peg. Not very efficient. In 1967 Penfolds improved this and patented the plastic tap that you now get. So I am a bit confused because I really don't remember there being cask wine until the 70s. And in spite of some better quality wines being available in casks it is still really the domain of vin ordinaire - for parties, cooking and heavy drinkers.

For the downside of it all is that it is cheap and in large quantities and therefore very good for alcoholics. And I have no answer to that. This is true.

Most of us do not drink quality wine anyway. Well the real quality. A bottle of Burgundy costs in the hundreds of dollars, so, unless you are a millionaire in love with wine, you are not going to drink that every day. Besides if you do, what do you do on special occasions? You've got to have something to splurge on.

Besides Australian, and lets not forget New Zealand, wine of moderate price is of more than moderate quality. And living on the edge of one of our prime winemaking regions we feel blessed. But we do try to restrict our consumption to the weekend.