Normally when one looks at a bottle of wine, the label will say “75cl, 1er Cru, 2003, Mis en bouteille au château”, or, in the Fact Household “3 liter Tetrapak, finest Bulgarian Tablewine”. Not so the bottle I’ve just been given as a thank you present:
Now, I’m sure that all wine comes into contact with polyvinylpolypyrrolidone at some stage, but I really didn’t want to know. Yes, yes, it’s completely harmless to humans (Wikipedia says so) and the lethal dose required to kill a rabbit involves dropping a 50kg sack of the stuff onto the poor beast, but it just sounds nasty. Herein lies the problem: who can I give it to as a present who’s such a pisshead that they won’t care?
I’m sure it’s a question that my friend struggled with as well.
ah well, these things happen. Though it states that said substance is irritating for the eyes. But so is that bottle of Liebfrauenmilch I found after a party in my place. Pfuiteufel! Now who brought that along? Made discreet enquiries but to no avail. Have been hiding it ever since and am still wondering where I can discretely dump this. We used to have this bottle of cheap Limoncello where I studied and it was quite a social animal - went from one house party to the other, lingering there for a bit then going on without a significant decrease in level. Wonder if it’s still circling around? Guess it’s time to release the Liebfrauenmilch…
Liebfraumilch doesn’t exist in Germany, does it? It’s for export only. I’m a great fan of lightly chilled Trollinger/Lemberger, but that’s the BW part of me coming out and I’ve never seen it here.
Oh and as for Limoncello, a neighbour of mine with an Italy fixation would always bring me a bottle as a thank you for watering her plants when she went on holiday there. The best use I found for it is as a paint remover for hands - gets rid of dried on emulsion, with a (kinda sorta) zesty smell.
And the use of copper sulphate isn’t at all perturbing either?
Nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide? This Somerfield Shampain then?
The best bit is where Filtration apparently reads as an ingredient.
They forgot to say what colourants are used in the bottle glass (or is it plastic?).
Copper Sulphate? Essential for healthy teeth and bones….. Isn’t it? And it is Co-op / United NorWest own-brand Australian Semillon (2006) in a real glass bottle (although the label doesn’t actually state that it’s glass, so one never knows for sure). It does have added vitamin C though!
a bit old:
Selbst in England, dem Hauptabnehmer, ist Liebfrauenmilch “nur noch bei einer älteren Bevölkerungsschicht gefragt, die relativ selten Wein trinkt”.
© DIE ZEIT, 31/2003
anyway, you can’t even cook with that stuff!
Polyvinylpolypyrrolidone? The romance has gone right out of the wine making industry. Oh for the days of Isinglass and Ox blood. Erm . . .
QoS: Yes, but Isinglass sounds like something from a Tolkien novel And Ox blood is tasty (especially when fresh and warm - oh okay, I’m not telling the entire truth - pig’s blood tastes good (see black pudding) but I might be exposing my country bumpkin ways here…. whereas PVP is something that I only know from mixing solutions for Southern blotting.
RhineBlaze: There was a time, long ago that the Fact family, including the young Mr. Fact at the tender age of 10 or 11 would be given a glass of liebfraumilch by an elderly aunt with Christmas dinner - which perhaps explains why I didn’t drink alcohol again until I was at least 20.
Ooooo, a nice poached egg and black pudding salad, served with mixed leaves and warm crusty bread, and accompanied by Return of The King on DVD. Surely, the experience could only be enhanced and enlivened by a glass of Blue Nun. No? Or perhaps the madly amusingly named Hirondelle. And it’s not even a Vin Fou!
QoS: “Have you ever visited a Fact hostelry before?” I presume not, as you’d then know that our staff would recommend a can of lukewarm Stella Artois (which is much better than its wife-beater image deserves - especially at breakfast time) to accompany the poached egg / black pudding salad (garlic croutons optional). And we don’t really do crusty bread - we get our bread deliveries on a Saturday morning, but by Thursday or Friday it’s a little, hmm, al dente, is not the right phrase, but approaching crusty…..
Mr Fact, poor you - I remember my surprise when I first encountered in 1987 (taken by a well meaning host family) the wine shelfes of a very large British super market, though it was one of the largest supermarkets I had seen at that point, the prices and choice of wines was quite surprising. Even in my early teens I knew that a fair amount of the products on sale fell into a category my mother classifies as “das kann man keinem Esel hinters Ohr kippen”.
RhineBlaze: “das kann man keinem Esel hinters Ohr kippen” Yes I can understand it literally, but is it specifically Kölnisch? I’ve never heard it before, although when asking about German wine in my local supermarket have been told “We do have some cheap Hock, I think…….”
Mr. Fact: the correct term would be kölsch (and please do not get me started on our ‘water’) - but as far as I am aware this graphic expression is my mother’s own creation. regarding the reputation of German wine in this country - we have a long history of exporting our …hmmm, ehm… special wines to this island.
Aha! So you try to trick the foreigner into learning dubious German vocab. Apparently, 60 years ago one of the main reasons German spies in the UK were caught was because they used far too many phrases from Jeeves & Wooster (this might be entirely apocryphal).
Did I say: Mr. Fact,- l this is a jolly good German proverb? no! Only once told a colleague that Ingwerkeks is a much better swear word - BUT that was in selfdefense - he was already repeating the rather graphic one I used before and - uh.. couldn'’t let that happen.
Bentonite!? That’s the stuff they make cat litter out of.
Anyway, I worked in the booze department of an English supermarket in a small provincial town for two years (during the larger part of which I was, ironically, legally unable to purchase the products I was stacking) and in its defence I’d say it did have a decent selection of wine. However I do also remember that Liebfraumilch was the one item I never needed to write down on the list of bottles to fetch from the warehouse (each trip I just took a new carton from the Liebfraumilch carton stack). There was also another wine-based product (can’t remember what it was called, came in white, pink and red variations and was probably “Italian”) which was sparkling in nature and very popular with certain segments of the market and which also had its own stack in the warehouse. This was 1989 - 1991.
As an American (or is it really as a libertarian?), I prefer labels and consumer freedom to government regulation and lack of labeling. Not that the labels are always accurate.
Last summer at the freezer case, I read the ingredients on a box of “mulit-vitamin” popsicles. Peas and fish oil were listed as possible ingredients. I still bought them.
Mr Fact - do you drink _halbtrockenen_ lightly chilled TL?