Next time you're buying a quarter bottle of wine in a pub, seek out these stars of Mary Dowey's mammoth tasting session
Bridget Jones has provoked a headlong rush for quarter bottles of wine - or so recent articles in the UK drinks trade press suggest. Sales have shot up in the past year or two - thanks, it is said, to thirtysomethings inspired by the girl in the fleecy pyjamas who cheered herself up with a glass or two of Chardonnay in front of the TV.
Is the same thing happening here? Not quite. "I think that's a shallow analysis," says Gregory Alken of Febvre & Company, a distributor of quarter bottles here and in the UK, where Febvre is in partnership with Geoff Read, founder of Ballygowan, in Grape Expectations, a company dedicated to quarter-bottle sales. "The issue is not age or status-related. It is simply one of choice. With quarter bottles, you can select a wine to suit a particular mood, then switch to a different one when that mood changes. It's an easier decision to open a quarter than to open a full bottle."
One thing is certain: there are far more quarters on offer now than when I first looked at small bottles seven years ago. They are well established in pubs and casual restaurants, providing a welcome alternative to full bottles left open for days with no preservation system. They are also scattered around the retail trade - as a blind eye is apparently turned to EU legislation decreeing that it is illegal to sell the 18.7cl size except in the pub and restaurant trade which was granted a derogation from this strange regulation. (The 25cl bottle size conforms to EU retailing requirements.)
Are they palatable or poisonous? During the recent holiday weekend I decided to find out by staging a massive tasting session in my kitchen. A selection of 85 wines from 11 companies was sampled - 44 whites and 41 reds. Don't feel envious for a second. This was the toughest task I've tackled in years.
The first shock was that there were so many shoddy wines. Even though hoary old things such as Black Tower and Blossom Hill - wines which have never impressed me - were deliberately bypassed in a fairly stringent selection process, heaps turned out to be pretty unpleasant. While a few were far too sweet, many more tasted wince-inducingly bitter.
Some wines, whites especially, were a year or two too old and lacked freshness - a problem exacerbated by the fact that quarter bottles mature a good deal more rapidly than full bottles. (Sauvignon Blanc from 2001 shouldn't still be knocking around; even 2002 is creaking. And, to make matters worse, a good many quarters are non-vintage, so you can't check.)
At the other extreme, some exceedingly harsh young red wines from 2004 are already on the market. So you need to peer at the vintage on the label, if there is one. I'd be on the lookout for 2003/4 whites and 2002/3 reds.
The other big surprise was that, although all the bottles were screwcapped - viewed as miracle closures which seal in freshness and rule out cork taint - almost 10 per cent of the total were faulty.Some were oxidised. Others had the unpleasant, cabbagey aromas and flavours indicative of reduction, a chemical reaction which can take place if wine has little or no contact with oxygen. And two actually smelt and tasted corked, bizarre though that may seem. I can't explain it, except to suggest that the wine was somehow contaminated by the culprit bacteria, TCA, in the winery before bottling. This exercise has made me sceptical about screwcaps.
A further concern is that some of the wines, although not faulty, simply didn't taste as good as they do from a full bottle. They seemed a little flatter, a little less vibrant. This might have to do with the more rapid development that occurs in a small bottle, or it might mean that the wine was exposed to more air than is ideal during the bottling operation.
Is it all bad news? Absolutely not. With so many quarters on offer, there are plenty of tasty wines to be had if you hunt around. And if Gregory Alken has his way, there will soon be even more. "I'd like to see Meursault and all the other benchmark wines in quarter bottles so that people have plenty of choice. For a long time, pubs were inclined to assume that all quarter bottles were the same price and the same quality, but that's changing. There is room for further expansion in the Irish market - but only if it is quality-driven. It will never work unless the customer can smile and say: 'That was nice.' "