Sweep them off their feet - but do your homework first

I claim there ain’t

Another Saint

As great as Valentine. 

-          Ogden Nash

Here we are on that day of the year about which I have mixed feelings:  Valentine’s Day, when we are all supposed to toe the love line and demonstrate our devotion to our loved one. Now who am I to pooh-pooh the notion of a day given over to romance? But the idea that millions, nay billions, of us should all feel the lurve, to order, on 14^th February every year induces a certain sullen bolshiness in me.

Romance is dead – it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized and sold off piece by piece.

-          Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons

And have you seen the Valentine-themed merchandising?

At a local convenience store I spied such treasures as fake sparkly single red roses (sensible, can be re-used), red heart bunting to adorn your love nest (bit OTT and actually a bit scary) and, bafflingly, packs of twenty heart-shaped napkins. Twenty napkins? I didn’t realise Valentine’s Day was a group activity. Have I missed something? Are we supposed to throw Valentine’s parties nowadays, or are they designed for mopping up extravagant food and drink spillages without breaking the romantic spell by having to make a grab for the kitchen roll?

If you have made no particular preparations for your night of romance please do not pick up a card, flowers and a bottle of rosé from the garage on the way home. Nothing says “meh” like forecourt flowers and petrol stations are not renowned for their classy wine choices. Better to go home empty-handed than to bring home gifts that scream zero effort.

Better still is to spend a couple of minutes at your desk researching your options before setting off for home. The best shortcut to celebration is Champagne (I would say that wouldn’t I), though at this late stage you are not in a position to go chasing after a particular grower’s exclusive cuvée. However, there is equally no need to grab a bottle of anything that sports the name Champagne from a gondola end in the nearest supermarket.

May I respectfully point you towards a site called Bring a Bottle (www.bringabottle.co.uk), which provides useful information on where to pick up most of the Champagne grandes marques at the best price from major retailers. My eye was drawn to Bollinger Special Cuvée Rosé NV at £36.99 from Waitrose (hint, hint). One of the things I particularly like about the Bring a Bottle site is that it includes a handy graphic, illustrating price movements over previous weeks for your chosen Champagne – so you can tell whether the best price on offer really is a good deal, or whether you are just getting the going rate. “My” Bollinger Rosé has been pretty consistently available at an average of just under £39, so I’m happy that the Waitrose offer is worth taking up, albeit not a tremendous bargain either.

Other Champagne brands have far more volatile pricing – Veuve Clicquot NV, for example, which frequently varies from between £27 to £35 a bottle. If this is your Champagne of choice, you’d be well advised to wait until the price dips below £30 before buying. The Bring a Bottle site allows you set up an email alert which will advise you when a particular wine drops below its current lowest available price.

If you have more time available to winkle out your chosen bottle then a virtual trip to www.wine-searcher.com  allows you to search across a wider range of suppliers, including many independent merchants who also mostly now offer online ordering. This is often the best way to find the keenest price for any particular wine that you are after.

Pink fizz seems to be de rigueur for Valentine’s Day and it will no doubt not have escaped your notice that you have to shell out more for the rosé version of a house’s Champagne. Viz, Bollinger Special Cuvée is currently £32 at Asda, £32.49 at Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, compared to the lowest price for the rosé of £36.99. It would be a churlish valentine who would turn their nose and Champagne flute up at “merely” the Bollinger Special Cuvée, surely.

If you really want to show that you know your stuff, THE pink fizz of the Champagne cognoscenti is the delicate, understated and food-friendly Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé – though at around £50 a bottle currently it is not a bargain. Another favourite is Laurent-Perrier Brut Rosé (prices range from £44 to a frankly ridiculous £58), which has more overt red fruit and can be happily sipped on its own.

Do chocolates and Champagne mix? In any objective way, of course not. Champagne lacks the body and sweetness (even the sweeter, demi-sec styles) to stand up to the mouth coating sweetness and richness of chocolate. Putting them together is flattering neither to the Champagne nor the chocolates. If you want a wine to match with a box of chocs, then a rich old Oloroso sherry would be a far better choice. But there is undoubtedly something decadent and endearingly batty about showering your loved one in luxury items, whether they should ever be consumed together or not.

And a final piece of advice if you’re thinking of buying something for your female Valentine to wear, remember that, in the words of Dorothy Parker, “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

What fresh hell is this?

The party’s over, the fizz is flat, the turkey has finally been seen off and the decorations are looking more shabby than chic. Here we are again in January, the cruellest month, its icy hand beckoning us into the dark nights and grey days of deepest winter. Even if you’ve hardly touched a drop over the festive season, January can feel like one long hangover – from too much food, too much drink, too much money spent.

Dorothy Parker was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of hard-drinking, wise-cracking writers and wits who met for lunch and cocktails at The Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan in the 1920s. Her riotous lifestyle meant that her experience of hangovers was deep and long-lasting and she dubbed the after-effects of drink as “the rams” and, with typically concise wit declared that “A hangover is the wrath of grapes.”

Even as we undergo the exquisite torture of entirely self-inflicted suffering that is the hangover, we can at least console ourselves with the descriptions of the hungover state from some of our foremost literary talents.

PG Wodehouse’s character Bertie Wooster was no stranger to over-indulgence and was lucky that his faithful Jeeves was on hand with his legendary “corpse reviver” (recipe uncertain, but see the Savoy’s version below) if he were “suffering from magnums”. Wodehouse also recognised that there is more than one type of hangover and classified them thus: The Broken Compass, The Sewing Machine, The Comet, The Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie. He did not go on to specify the symptoms of each; that is left to our own imagination (and experience).

Kingsley Amis wrote perhaps the most deliciously definitive description of the morning after the night before in his novel, Lucky Jim.

“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

Is there a cure for such a condition? I recently had cause to consult my copy of Booth’s Handbook of Cocktails & Mixed Drinks, published in 1966 and written by John Doxat, who sounds like he would have made an entertaining drinking companion. Unsurprisingly, he writes with some authority on the after-effects of a night in the company of those he calls the compulsively convivial: “It is only the very wise who have never suffered, even mildly, from that matitutinal malaise or alcoholic remorse to which the ugly and descriptive word Hangover applies.”

He goes on to offer a number of drinks said to have some efficacy in remedying the condition, including the classic Prairie Oyster:

1oz Cognac

1 teaspoon wine vinegar

1 teaspoon Worcester Sauce

Dash of Red Pepper (presumably hot sauce such as Tabasco)

Pour over the yolk of an egg and drink without breaking the yolk.

Never mind not breaking the yolk, I should have thought drinking without gagging would be the most tricky part.

He also gives the recipe for the Savoy Hotel’s version of the Corpse Reviver:

1/3 brandy

1/3 Fernet Branca

1/3 White Crème de Menthe

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail-glass.

This is clearly from the “kill or cure” school of thought. Whether the corpse in question was grateful for being revived by this method, history does not record.

Along similar lines is the Heart Starter:

Good measure dry gin in a tumbler of iced water.

Add heaped teaspoon Andrews Liver Salts.

Toss down quickly; and wait.

Sounds ominous.

Perhaps the kindest morning after the night before treatment is a good old-fashioned Bloody Mary. Many of us have our own favourite recipes, but here is John Doxat’s:

1oz vodka

Iced tomato juice

Dash of celery salt

Dash of Red Pepper (see above)

Teaspoon of Worcester Sauce

Stir together in tall glass, with a little cracked ice.

It at least has the benefit of providing one of your five a day, if nothing else.

Whether any of these drinks works better than a lie-in with some Ibuprofen is very much in the eye of the beholder. As Robert Benchley, contemporary of Dorothy Parker and a fellow-member of the Algonquin Round Table, put it: “The only cure for a real hangover is death.” Gulp.