Venting Spleen - ignorance and terrible television induce intense fury
Two Green & Blue Clapham customers incur my extreme wrath (albeit unbeknownst to them) and then television compounds my misery by basically lying through its miserable teeth about the quality of a certain wine. I am now VERY angry.
Two Green & Blue Clapham customers incur my extreme wrath (albeit unbeknownst to them) and then television compounds my misery by basically lying through its miserable teeth about the quality of a certain wine. I am now VERY angry. Supermarket Customers and Bad TV – all in one night.
Jude will probably be very angry with me for posting this but if I cannot use this blog to vent spleen every once in a while, then I am not at all sure what this is for. My understanding of blogs is that they are a sort of diary and only a outright liar or a person mainlining Prozac would have solely happy or at least interesting experiences to relate.
I had dinner at Clapham with darling friend Mikey last night – Jude joined us later. It is such a very brand new place and we are still ironing out the kinks in so many ways, best to keep as close an eye as possible. Also, Mikey and I wanted to have a proper gossip about the school reunion I went to while in South Africa. We were fairly full upstairs and much later - it must have been around 10:30 – 11pm, a couple came in and ordered a glass of red wine each.
Later still, only us and them remained upstairs. I had noticed them reading our promotional cards on the tables etc but started to pay much closer attention when the lady picked up a copy of our wine list and started paging through it.
'This is really very expensive' she said dismissively 'I could buy these wines in Sainsbury's for half the price'. Although I think it rarely comes across – unless I am really very irked or people know me very well indeed – I actually loose my temper very quickly and extremely explosively. I have learnt to control it because it is rarely helpful to have a huge emotional explosion. This does not mean that I have stopped loosing my temper internally – it seems to happen all the time with running Green & Blue – but I think that most of the time, all people will pick up is, at most, mild irritation, while inside I am literally screaming blue murder. Last night, that one sentence was all it took – I got to the white hot, seething, trembling rage stage instantly. She could not leave it there. 'Look' she continued 'they also only have a Rioja Crianza. Everyone knows that Rioja Reserva is the best'. I had to force myself to take some deep, slow breaths.
They continued to make dismissive remarks, including making fun of our assertion about selling hand made bottles while I whispered to Mikey 'I am going to go over there'. 'No!' he hissed back, 'what will you say?'. That did stop me in my tracks. I know myself well enough to know that being that angry, I would almost certainly not come out with something brilliant and witty which would clear up any confusion that these two evidently had about exactly what it is we stand for here and what we are trying to do while winning them over and making them Green & Blue customers for life. I think I almost certainly would have said something like 'Excuse me, I couldn't help but over hear your conversation a minute ago. I am really far too tired and in need of a proper, long holiday to find it amusing. You are clearly completely ignorant of what real wine is about so it is probably best that you stick to your Sainsburys bottles. Please leave my bar now and don’t ever come back. Oh, and you might want to try reading the Ecologist or indeed anything which is trying to inform us all of what is happening to the world today. Your complete lack of awareness is completely shocking and one of the reasons why we probably are all destined to go to hell in a handbasket’ only less coherently and probably in an unnaturally high, strangulated voice which would have been amazingly unattractive. So I did not get up. I sat and started to feel quite light-headed with anger and upset. It was at the churning stage – never good. They got up and left, oblivious to the waves of fury emanating from our table. Jude arrived and Mikey related the story to him and he started to tell me off for even THINKING about going over. He reminded me that we are running a business and that alienating people who go and tell all their friends about the clinically insane owner of Green & Blue would not be a good PR move on the whole. I churned more inside and vehemently disagreed. It was very clear that those two and almost certainly any of their friends who are of a similar mind would not be our customers. This business is built completely on what we believe absolutely passionately in – wines that are made by hand and taste of their own, unadulterated grapes and the place they were grown. Doing things by hand ourselves – being local and caring about our team and our customers and our environment just as much as what we sell. That is pretty much what it is all about and as I sat there and Jude went on, I got even angrier. I was angry with myself this time, furious that I had just witnessed a display of pretty much everything we claim to be trying to change – profound ignorance about wines and a complete lack of awareness of what manufactured products are all about – and had done nothing.
I do sometimes think that I display worrying obsessive compulsive tendancies. Something will happen and I will be completely incapable of letting it go until there has been some sort of resolution. I thought about it all the way home. Once home, I made some herbal tea and ate a South African rusk and thought about it some more. Jude switched on TV (it was horribly late – about 2am) and we started the fruitless search for something that was suitable for both of us. Jude tends to favour people very loudly blowing each other to bits or late night Poker. I don’t really understand either of those. We finally agreed on a program called Taste because they were discussing an attractive looking salad. After having gone through this, the presenter introduced their wine expert, Kitty Johnson, to talk about what wines you should take to a dinner party.
Kitty started off well, advising people not to take along well known brands (hurrah as everyone knows how much these cost, but instead to look for lesser known which will remain a bit of a mystery and which would cost considerably less. So far, so not bad. I started feeling better.
She then proceeded to highly recommend a sparkling wine, available in all good supermarkets, of course, called Sea Breeze or Sea View or something similarly maritime, based on champagne grape varieties and costing a mere £7. Jude wisely instantly changed the channel as, for the second time that evening, I almost suffered a fury induced stroke.
Kitty Johnson is a very attractive, very bright young woman who happens to be the daughter of one of the all time greatest wine writers – Hugh Johnson. He is a world class expert and author of one of my favourite books – The Story of Wine. I doubt very much that Kitty grew up drinking £7 bottles of new world sparkling and would also bet my very last cent on the fact that she does not touch the stuff with a very long barge pole when she is at home herself. I am not being a snob here. It is just an irrefutable fact that, the intricacies of making a good champagne or champagne style wine being what they are, there is no way on this earth that anything even half way decent can be produced at that price. It can only be done by growing grapes on a large scale, making all sorts of adjustments to the inferior fruit in the winery and basically cutting corners where ever possible. The end result is a bottle that is the fizzy, vinous equivalent of a Barcardi Breezer, tasting hideously confected, course and frankly disgusting, with a great whack of residual sugar thrown in to try to cover up the worst of the faults. Most depressing of all, that whack of sugar, mostly, works. People who really would not know real wine if it smacked them in the face or have never really learnt how to taste will have a sip and find it eminently drinkable.
What makes me so angry that I develop a pounding headache is that despite the utter mess we have got ourselves into on the planet, STILL no-one will stop perpetuating these myths. That you can buy t-shirts for £2, or that you can buy a chicken for about the same or a sparkling wine for a mere £7 – all with no discussion about the inherent quality of goods at that price or indeed the enormous cost to the environment in producing this shit. I truly completely and utterly despair.
Probably needless to say, I did not sleep very well and I woke up this morning still incredibly angry and upset and find now that I can’t seem to get on with the mountain of work that I have. I hope that writing this will calm me down somewhat, because I really do need to get on with it.
So, many deep breaths and I will finish with what, in a calm and collected manner (and in a voice that was absolutely not unnaturally high), I should have said to the two people in Green & Blue last night :-
I really am profoundly surprised that two evidently successful, educated people such as yourselves are apparently completely unaware of the differences between what we do and what you would find at Sainsburys. You are very, very much mistaken if you think that you could find anything we sell on their shelves, at any price. Supermarkets deal in wines produced on a very large scale – we are talking at least 10’s and generally hundreds of thousands of cases. Producing on that scale cannot begin to give the quality that is found in a good bottle of wine made by hand – and that means that almost everything is done on a small, human scale – generally, literally, by hand. We are doing our very best to be as inclusive as possible which is why we sell wines at retail which start at £5.50 (a damn good bottle for that price but obviously made on a slightly larger scale than much of what we do), but it is simply completely and utterly impossible to sell a bottle of something genuinely lovely (and not just manipulated to appear lovely on a superficial level) at any less than that or at 10 for the price of 2 or what ever ridiculous offers these places promote. If you genuinely cannot taste the difference than perhaps you need to attend our ‘how to taste like a professional’ session.
As for your comment about Rioja Crianza versus Reserva. As with many wines, the inherent quality comes down to the producer. Crianza and Reserva (now seen as very old fashioned categories by many in Rioja) are indicative of how long the wine has been aged in barrel or bottle. A Crianza from a very good producer is going to be a million times better than a Reserva from a mediocre producer so judging a wine purely on that basis is inaccurate and frankly, incredibly ignorant. A little bit of knowledge can indeed lead to profound stupidity.
There. I do actually feel much better now. Granted, the above would have almost certainly not have turned them into Green & Blue customers for life but this entry is about venting spleen and frankly, being even slightly conciliatory at this stage feels beyond my capabilities.
Jude will probably be very angry with me for posting this but if I cannot use this blog to vent spleen every once in a while, then I am not at all sure what this is for. My understanding of blogs is that they are a sort of diary and only a outright liar or a person mainlining Prozac would have solely happy or at least interesting experiences to relate.
I had dinner at Clapham with darling friend Mikey last night – Jude joined us later. It is such a very brand new place and we are still ironing out the kinks in so many ways, best to keep as close an eye as possible. Also, Mikey and I wanted to have a proper gossip about the school reunion I went to while in South Africa. We were fairly full upstairs and much later - it must have been around 10:30 – 11pm, a couple came in and ordered a glass of red wine each.
Later still, only us and them remained upstairs. I had noticed them reading our promotional cards on the tables etc but started to pay much closer attention when the lady picked up a copy of our wine list and started paging through it.
'This is really very expensive' she said dismissively 'I could buy these wines in Sainsbury's for half the price'. Although I think it rarely comes across – unless I am really very irked or people know me very well indeed – I actually loose my temper very quickly and extremely explosively. I have learnt to control it because it is rarely helpful to have a huge emotional explosion. This does not mean that I have stopped loosing my temper internally – it seems to happen all the time with running Green & Blue – but I think that most of the time, all people will pick up is, at most, mild irritation, while inside I am literally screaming blue murder. Last night, that one sentence was all it took – I got to the white hot, seething, trembling rage stage instantly. She could not leave it there. 'Look' she continued 'they also only have a Rioja Crianza. Everyone knows that Rioja Reserva is the best'. I had to force myself to take some deep, slow breaths.
They continued to make dismissive remarks, including making fun of our assertion about selling hand made bottles while I whispered to Mikey 'I am going to go over there'. 'No!' he hissed back, 'what will you say?'. That did stop me in my tracks. I know myself well enough to know that being that angry, I would almost certainly not come out with something brilliant and witty which would clear up any confusion that these two evidently had about exactly what it is we stand for here and what we are trying to do while winning them over and making them Green & Blue customers for life. I think I almost certainly would have said something like 'Excuse me, I couldn't help but over hear your conversation a minute ago. I am really far too tired and in need of a proper, long holiday to find it amusing. You are clearly completely ignorant of what real wine is about so it is probably best that you stick to your Sainsburys bottles. Please leave my bar now and don’t ever come back. Oh, and you might want to try reading the Ecologist or indeed anything which is trying to inform us all of what is happening to the world today. Your complete lack of awareness is completely shocking and one of the reasons why we probably are all destined to go to hell in a handbasket’ only less coherently and probably in an unnaturally high, strangulated voice which would have been amazingly unattractive. So I did not get up. I sat and started to feel quite light-headed with anger and upset. It was at the churning stage – never good. They got up and left, oblivious to the waves of fury emanating from our table. Jude arrived and Mikey related the story to him and he started to tell me off for even THINKING about going over. He reminded me that we are running a business and that alienating people who go and tell all their friends about the clinically insane owner of Green & Blue would not be a good PR move on the whole. I churned more inside and vehemently disagreed. It was very clear that those two and almost certainly any of their friends who are of a similar mind would not be our customers. This business is built completely on what we believe absolutely passionately in – wines that are made by hand and taste of their own, unadulterated grapes and the place they were grown. Doing things by hand ourselves – being local and caring about our team and our customers and our environment just as much as what we sell. That is pretty much what it is all about and as I sat there and Jude went on, I got even angrier. I was angry with myself this time, furious that I had just witnessed a display of pretty much everything we claim to be trying to change – profound ignorance about wines and a complete lack of awareness of what manufactured products are all about – and had done nothing.
I do sometimes think that I display worrying obsessive compulsive tendancies. Something will happen and I will be completely incapable of letting it go until there has been some sort of resolution. I thought about it all the way home. Once home, I made some herbal tea and ate a South African rusk and thought about it some more. Jude switched on TV (it was horribly late – about 2am) and we started the fruitless search for something that was suitable for both of us. Jude tends to favour people very loudly blowing each other to bits or late night Poker. I don’t really understand either of those. We finally agreed on a program called Taste because they were discussing an attractive looking salad. After having gone through this, the presenter introduced their wine expert, Kitty Johnson, to talk about what wines you should take to a dinner party.
Kitty started off well, advising people not to take along well known brands (hurrah as everyone knows how much these cost, but instead to look for lesser known which will remain a bit of a mystery and which would cost considerably less. So far, so not bad. I started feeling better.
She then proceeded to highly recommend a sparkling wine, available in all good supermarkets, of course, called Sea Breeze or Sea View or something similarly maritime, based on champagne grape varieties and costing a mere £7. Jude wisely instantly changed the channel as, for the second time that evening, I almost suffered a fury induced stroke.
Kitty Johnson is a very attractive, very bright young woman who happens to be the daughter of one of the all time greatest wine writers – Hugh Johnson. He is a world class expert and author of one of my favourite books – The Story of Wine. I doubt very much that Kitty grew up drinking £7 bottles of new world sparkling and would also bet my very last cent on the fact that she does not touch the stuff with a very long barge pole when she is at home herself. I am not being a snob here. It is just an irrefutable fact that, the intricacies of making a good champagne or champagne style wine being what they are, there is no way on this earth that anything even half way decent can be produced at that price. It can only be done by growing grapes on a large scale, making all sorts of adjustments to the inferior fruit in the winery and basically cutting corners where ever possible. The end result is a bottle that is the fizzy, vinous equivalent of a Barcardi Breezer, tasting hideously confected, course and frankly disgusting, with a great whack of residual sugar thrown in to try to cover up the worst of the faults. Most depressing of all, that whack of sugar, mostly, works. People who really would not know real wine if it smacked them in the face or have never really learnt how to taste will have a sip and find it eminently drinkable.
What makes me so angry that I develop a pounding headache is that despite the utter mess we have got ourselves into on the planet, STILL no-one will stop perpetuating these myths. That you can buy t-shirts for £2, or that you can buy a chicken for about the same or a sparkling wine for a mere £7 – all with no discussion about the inherent quality of goods at that price or indeed the enormous cost to the environment in producing this shit. I truly completely and utterly despair.
Probably needless to say, I did not sleep very well and I woke up this morning still incredibly angry and upset and find now that I can’t seem to get on with the mountain of work that I have. I hope that writing this will calm me down somewhat, because I really do need to get on with it.
So, many deep breaths and I will finish with what, in a calm and collected manner (and in a voice that was absolutely not unnaturally high), I should have said to the two people in Green & Blue last night :-
I really am profoundly surprised that two evidently successful, educated people such as yourselves are apparently completely unaware of the differences between what we do and what you would find at Sainsburys. You are very, very much mistaken if you think that you could find anything we sell on their shelves, at any price. Supermarkets deal in wines produced on a very large scale – we are talking at least 10’s and generally hundreds of thousands of cases. Producing on that scale cannot begin to give the quality that is found in a good bottle of wine made by hand – and that means that almost everything is done on a small, human scale – generally, literally, by hand. We are doing our very best to be as inclusive as possible which is why we sell wines at retail which start at £5.50 (a damn good bottle for that price but obviously made on a slightly larger scale than much of what we do), but it is simply completely and utterly impossible to sell a bottle of something genuinely lovely (and not just manipulated to appear lovely on a superficial level) at any less than that or at 10 for the price of 2 or what ever ridiculous offers these places promote. If you genuinely cannot taste the difference than perhaps you need to attend our ‘how to taste like a professional’ session.
As for your comment about Rioja Crianza versus Reserva. As with many wines, the inherent quality comes down to the producer. Crianza and Reserva (now seen as very old fashioned categories by many in Rioja) are indicative of how long the wine has been aged in barrel or bottle. A Crianza from a very good producer is going to be a million times better than a Reserva from a mediocre producer so judging a wine purely on that basis is inaccurate and frankly, incredibly ignorant. A little bit of knowledge can indeed lead to profound stupidity.
There. I do actually feel much better now. Granted, the above would have almost certainly not have turned them into Green & Blue customers for life but this entry is about venting spleen and frankly, being even slightly conciliatory at this stage feels beyond my capabilities.
