Before I got a job at Oddbins, my wine buying life had consisted in purchasing bottles of Penfolds from Threshers in the attempt to make me look a tad sophisticated in front of women. My stupid, late teenage, self thought that buying wine from a wine shop rather than a supermarket would make me look as though I knew what I was doing and therefore might have a better chance with the unsuspecting young lady. And before you even ask, no it didn’t work. All it made me look like was a total idiot, as the shopkeeper asked me for ID, and when I presented it to him he scrutinized it with such suspicion that he made it blatantly clear to me, and the lady, that he thought I looked twelve years old. Not what you want when you are trying to chat up a girl.
So in the early summer of 2001, I joined the wine trade. Like everyone who has ever started their career in the big ‘O’, you don’t have a plan when you join Oddbins, you just need a job and they are prepared to employ you. The pay was rubbish, the hours were long, and the area manager was a semi-distant bane of any manager’s existence, but you loved your job. You loved the fact that you got paid to draw silly pictures on the windows of ‘Mr O’, and that you got to drink for a living. Sure, there was the inevitable stock count that spoiled every other month, but it was a good life working for Oddbins in the first few years of the 21st century. And then the French mucked everything up, when Oddies owner, Seagrams, sold the company to Castel Freres. There was an attempt made to ‘streamline’ the company and make every shop the same, and if you actually cared about your shop, as I did, you knew that this would not always work in every shop. So, reluctantly, I quit my job and thought I would be out of the wine trade for good. Little did I know that independence was just around the corner.
Amethystos Fume (#1) The only reason that this is here is as it was the first wine that I wrote about in my first tasting book. I wrote “Very pleasant on the nose, but very harsh taste. Did not like but Duncan and Jenny (my assistant manager and manager at Oddbins) did”. It is a Greek, oaked, Sauvignon Blanc that lies on its lees for about four months, and I actually cannot remember a thing about this other than it never sold!
Another Greek wine sticks in my mind from my Odd days was their sweet wine, Nyx Mavrodaphne (#2) a fantastic sweet wine that only cost £6 (in 2001) yet was unbelievably glugable, with flavours of treacle, toffee and chocolate. The grape that shares this wines name is vinified in large barrels, and then fortified before being transported to cellars to continue its maturations and then entered into a solera system. This was my first foray into the world of sweet wine, and it is something that, to this day, adore. Sadly, another foray into sweet wine is the third wine on this list.
In your early days of wine tasting, you like things that you go back to in years to come and cringe about. One such wine for me was the Beringer Blush Zinfandel ( #3). Nowadays, I (and my colleagues who tasted with me) would say that Blush/White/Pink Zinfandels are the wines of the devil, and would deny ever liking such a thing. Sadly for me, I have the written proof that I, when I had a novice palate, did like this pink hell, and I know that they did too. They just don’t have the proof that I do, because they didn’t write notes. I wrote “Strawberry cream chocolate filling, with roses on the nose. Sweet strawberry, a touch of marmalade, and a long, Peach Schnappey/passion fruit finish. Lovely” Someone please shoot me now….
Cynicism is a terrible thing, but it appeared early on in my note writing days, and emerged all too clearly in the Peter Lehmann Barossa wines! I wrote, for the 1998 Peter Lehmann Barossa Cabernet (#4), “Fruity, blackcurrants and a load of bramble leaf. Very tasty”, but for the Peter Lehmann Barossa Shiraz (#5) it was“Crap” and the Pisani (sic) Pinot Grigio (#6) was “BANANAS and bugger all else”. Is it bad that I still dismiss wines in a similar fashion? I don’t think so, afterall, most people will read the first paragraph of a book (or blog) and then stop if it doesn’t grab their attention, so doing the same to a wine is equally as bad or equally as correct. Plus, if Parker can know within a second and a half if he is going to rate the wine highly or not, why shouldn’t a 23 year old me do exactly that?!
Oddbins Own Labels (#7) were the bane of my existence when working for the company. Some were good, and some were horrific. For every Quiltro Sauvignon Blanc (Chile), there was a South African Pinotage with a mutated ostrich on the label called Obikwa. The Mosaique range, from the lazily named “Regional France” section were not bad at all (particularly the Chardonnay), but the Glenloth red and white from Australia were rotten – despite selling by the bucket load as house wines to restaurants. The one thing that most of these wines had was a garish label, designed by someone at head office who had a passion for cartoon animals. Maybe they were brought up watching ‘Rolf’s Cartoon Time’ and felt that if they drew enough of these damn animals, they would come to life like they did on the television show. The one thing all these wines were was cheap, and excessively promoted! Without exception, at the start of every ‘promotional period’*, we would see which one of these products had a rainforest worth of card printed up to ‘highlight’** it, and we would all groan at the fact that it was never the wine from the range that was any good.
*(the Oddbins term for ‘month’)
**(the Oddbins term for ‘we are sending you far too much stock and you have to shift it all despite there being no saving for the customer’)
Despite having striven to establish themselves as stocking small producer wines, Oddbins did have some larger produers. Deakin Estate (#8) with their big multicoloured labels (particularly the bright orange Chardonnay) were always the go-to Australian choice, not because they were particularly good, but because they were less bad than some of the alternatives (Rosemount). There was also the likes of Concha y Toro, but we never sold these wines, as the next wine on my list were far better and also cheaper.
The Carta Vieja (#9) range from Chile was the first contact I had with someone who actually worked for a wine company, and the wines were not all that bad! The European export manager for Carta Vieja lived in St Andrews and was always popping in to get some feedback, or show us proofs for label redesigns, or ask our opinions on these wines. We only ever stocked their basic single varietal wines, which were good, but we knew, and tasted, a wealth of other wines from their higher ranges and thought they too were not bad. Oddbins still sells these wines, and it is a miracle that these wines are only 50p more then when I was selling them in 2003, although I suspect quality has gone down a bit!
There were some great wines during my Oddbins years, and whittling them down is tricky. The 1998 Chateau Maris Minervois (#10), of which the rather pompous me of a few years back wrote “a medium bodied, exceedingly tannic, but fruit driven palate – a very serious wine” was such a good wine, made my Anthony Eden’s descendent, Bertie, and was my first introduction to biodynamics. I have fond memories of multiple vintages of the red Bordeaux, Chateau d’Arcins (#11) that was one of the good wines that Castel Freres brought in when they bought Oddbins and introduced their horrific Virginie range. Pierre Gimmonet Champagne (#12) was a fantastic producer, with a ridiculously tasty vintage champagne for about £25 and a non vintage for a tenner less. So many bottles of that were consumed over a couple of years…
The Bonny Doon Ceci n’est pas un Carignan (#13) was“Dark, porty with liquorice aromas and a chunky bitter chocolate flavour with heavy fruit and gutsy tannins” and I thought it was outstanding, though not outstanding enough to write down the vintage! Another Randall Grahm offering was the Ptomaine des Blagueurs (#14), a wine that he made in France, that was super and gave you a Bonny Doon-esque wine for less than a tenner.
But the wine that stays in my mind the longest, was Kiwi Cuvee Sauvignon Blanc (#15). Aside from the fact that it was a great French Sauvignon Blanc for less than a fiver, Kiwi Cuvee caused the New Zealand winemakers to throw a major strop because they thought that the word ‘Kiwi’ would confuse customers into thinking that this wine was from New Zealand – despite the fact that it was firmly placed in the French section of our shelves. The wine was made by a Kiwi, Rhyan Wardmann, was very new world in taste, and appearance, and offered a damn good Sauvignon for half the price of a New Zealand wine. It was replaced by the slightly inferior Smoking Parrot Sauvignon Blanc, which was in itself controversial as I was asked if it promoted setting birds on fire. As was usual with the marketing department of Oddbins, we were never explained the reason this was called Smoking Parrot, but apparently (according to www.winelabels.org) it was because another name for a parrot is ‘Polly’ (see Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch for evidence of this) and Fume is French for ‘smoke’. Therefore this wine was intended as a substitute for Pouilly Fume…. More cryptic than an episode of 3-2-1 with Dusty Bin.
In the years since I left Oddbins, there is an increasing number of people who I meet in the trade that cut their teeth with the big O, and everyone who worked there pre-Castel have a soft spot for the company. I have many fond memories of the customers, the colleagues and, of course, the wines – be them good or bad, and I am exceptionally proud to have been an employee of, what was then, the best multiple outlet high street retailer. Hopefully its new owners can rekindle that magic.