English summer has finally arrived and the hot weather means every Brit has moved family and sofa into his back garden for the duration. When I visited my local Tesco a week ago it was clear the “Barbeque season” had started. Charcoal bags were polluting the shelves and those ingenious ready to light mini-barbeque sets were also available to tempt flip-flopping shoppers. Garden tables, garden chairs, parasols, garden grills, salad bowls, salad tongs, plastic plates, plastic glasses, plastic forks, little picnic sets, big picnic sets. Are you getting the picture? I also saw this little kid, already prepared for the first ‘al fresco’ party of the year. He was fully covered in white, plastered with 2 inches of sun cream; the poor fellow.
The meat aisle and the drink section were both reflecting the same story. The burgers boxes had increased the “BBQ” letters ten-fold and were now bright yellow and showcased alongside all sorts of barbeque friendly food: chicken drumsticks, lamb kebabs and God knows how many different kinds of sausages. In the beer aisles, the chubby found themselves in Disneyland. Beer bargains so good, so cheap, and so irresistible that I overheard a double size man telling his wife: ‘Darling, we should stock up for next year’.
But it was not until I reached the wine section that I started to put together an idea from this barbeque frenzy. We Argentineans are the world acclaimed experts in barbeques; the ones that have extended the frontier of grilled meat to every edible corner of our revered cows. We are the only ones that, if we could, would deport “vegetarians” to another country, India perhaps. Our blood may not be blue, yet it is so packed with proteins that we receive Royal treatment in any Blood Donation Center in the world.
In terms of meat and wine pairing the English should look at what the beef experts have been doing for generations. In all fairness, Argentinean wine has been present on tables with meat dishes since the times the gauchos learned how to light a fire. I am not being blindly biased here, The Independent Magazine recently published a very interesting article by food critic John Walsh (unknown to me but apparently an expert in his field). Having grown up in an Irish carnivorous household, as he literally put it, he embarked on a very romantic quest: to find the best beef steak in Britain. His love for meat cooked naked, as God intended, made even me feel envious. Anyway to cut a long story short, he found his beef, the required maturation period to allow it to express its tenderness, the best way to cook it and guess what? His only wine recommendation in his long article was a Malbec that he had in the best Argentinean Restaurant in London, ‘Santa Maria del Buen Ayre’ in Hackney.
Another example came under my nose this Sunday when Tim Atkins (self-declared Francophile) selected the Top 36 wines for summer in his regular column in the Observer. Two Argentineans reds were featured and his comment on the most affordable one read:
‘The ideal red for a barbie, or asado if you want to sound like a native, this quaffable, smoky, plumy blend of Bonarda and Malbec is a tribute to the weakness of the local currency as well as good wine buying’.
The wine sells in Morrison’s at £2.99, an absolute bargain for any humble ‘barbeque lover’ in Britain.
So what are we waiting for? Lets seize the opportunity. Climate Change has brought to Britain a heat wave that apparently is here to stay. The summers will gradually become hotter and hotter and the English will find themselves having a hell of time between the smell of grilled meat, salads, beers and wine. The recently opened office of Wines of Argentina in London could take advantage of this free and increasing acknowledgment by the press that our wines are good for barbeques and summer drinking. The office should start pronto bombarding the mind of the English wine drinker with the idea: Meat means Malbec!
