CHEAPNESS OF CLARET.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 8585, 29 March 1906, Page 2

CHEAPNESS OF CLARET.

♦ WHOLESOME WINE STILL UNPOPULAR. Although the wines of the Bordeaux district are new cheap, pure and abundant there was never a time when light French wine was less in demand in England. The "Lancet," always the guardian of the dining-table, is publishing the* result of a practical inquiry into the reasons for this depression of the market. First among the causes which limit the sales of claret in England is the wrong-doing of the last generation of wine merchants, who gave the public for claret a doctored and unwholesome wine until the public would have no more of it. But the "Lancet" has now brought together samples of cheap claret from the counters of London wine merchants arid grocers, .and can certify all of them as genuine wines of good quality. This very clieapnees of claret has kept away many English buyem, who hold that a cheap article is probably too cheap to- be- good. Claret has an established enemy in the whisky believed by so many to be the most trustworthy form of stimulant, but that whisky and aerated water* should have become the common accompaniment of a meal at an hotel is due to the costliness of the ill-condi-tioned wine provided by most hotelkeepers, who will not content themselves with reasonable profit upon a bottle of sound claret. Tobacco often destroys that clean palate which claret demands, for claret cannot be sipped between whiffs of a cigar. The hors d'eeuvre, the savoury, and the liqueur all war against this delicate wine. . Reformers are agreed that the less alcohol a nation drinks' the better, and when, the beverage is as lightly alcoholio as claret the reasonable allowance of alcohol is unlikely to be exceeded. Even where equal measures .of alcohol are present, a glass of whisky and water is a harsher and more rapid stimulant than a glass af claret. The " Lancet "is able to report that, the public purchasing claret will get what they ask for. They' will get a dry, sugarless, and wholesome wine, which may be drunk safely by the gouty and rheumatic. ,