I can picture in my mind what I admit is a somewhat romantic scene. It is of a French, Italian, or Spanish family sitting down to a meal complete with carafe of unassuming (cheap) local wine. The children in my imaginary picture learn by example that food and wine are inseparable, the perfect partners, and grow up to be well balanced adults that of course drink responsibly. The counterpoint to this image is one of a kid in America, although nowadays it could be just about anywhere in the world, sat solitarily in front of a TV chomping on a hamburger and swilling it down with a gallon of coke. The inevitable scenario for this imaginary child is a progression to Alco pops and a young adult life where Saturday nights are spent being sick in the local town centre. Both of my imaginary pictures are based of course on stereotypes, the former less common than I would hope and the latter far less common than I imagine. In reality wine has largely become merely another alcoholic beverage competing with a plethora of alternatives.
Most British people of my generation were not brought up in what can be referred to as a wine culture, something akin to my romantic image of a Mediterranean family at dinner. Growing up wine or alcohol of any kind for that matter was not common in our house. I have a vague memory that at Christmas time one of my parents took out of the cupboard an old, (meaning opened the previous Christmas as opposed to treasured vintage), bottle of sweet-sherry, Harveys Bristol Cream was the favourite. Alternatively a lucky visiting relative maybe offered a port-and-lemon, or pushing it a Stones Ginger Wine, which turned out not to be wine at all by today’s accepted definition, but instead made from a fermented blend of ground ginger and raisins. Wine appeared relatively late on in my teenage life and ironically given my enthusiasm for fermented grape juice I realise now was probably a result of cleaver marketing.
Mateus Rosé was probably the first wine I ever drank. For those of you not familiar with the name, Mateus Rosé was, and still is a sweet, and what the French call pétillant and the Italians call frizzante, but what we called slightly-fizzy, pink wine - a sort of (semi)grown-up equivalent of an anaemic, but crucially alcoholic Ribeana. Originally Mateus Rosé was made in the Minho region in Northern Portugal and modelled on the traditional Vinho Verde wines, (pronounced veen-o-verday), both facts I certainly did not know at the time, and in any case for me far more hip was the funky-shaped bottle. The bottle shape then as it is now was globular, or onion, or what the Germans call Bochsbeutel, and at the time it seemed that a whole cottage industry developed based on turning the empty bottles into table lamps.
The carefully constructed image for the wine was complete with a renaissance-style painting on the label depicting the Mateus Palace, although ironically the wine was never actually from the famous estate. It was all a created myth that this impressionable teenager fell for hook line and sinker. For me Mateus Rosé was the height of sophistication further enhanced when in 1973 Elton John released his Goodbye Yellow Brick Road double LP containing the lyrics of the title of this blog (the song Social Disease, last-but-one track, side four).
Mateus Rosé is in fact one of Europe’s first branded wines with production starting at the end of the Second World War. It was created deliberately to appeal to the developing North American and northern European markets and boy was it successful. By the late 1980’s fifteen years after I was introduced to this iconic wine, sales of Mateus Rosé and a sister white reached 3.25 million cases a year and accounted for more than 40 per cent of Portugal’s total annual table wine exports. By the mid-1990’s Mateus Rosé had lost its lustre as the increasingly sophisticated wine drinkers of North America and northern Europe moved on seduced by the fruit-bomb wines of Australia and the New World in general. For the last decade or so the Mateus Rosé brand has been owned by Sogrape, Portugal’s largest wine producer. Sogrape have relaunched the brand and expanded the range to include a Mateus Rosé Aragones (very sweet at 30 grams of sugar per litre), Shiraz, Temranillo, and a Rosé Sparkling. Interestingly the original Mateus Rosé is largely unchanged the only major differences being that the label is smaller than the original and that it is now mainly produced in the Bairrada region (south of the Minho region) of Portugal.
Kenyans can also enjoy the delights of Mateus Rosé as the main supermarket chains here supply at least two of the variations, the original rosé and the new(ish) Rosé Sparkling. In wine speak they are both technically semi-sweet and relatively low in alcohol; 15 grams per litre, 11 per cent alcohol, and 12 grams per litre and 12 per cent alcohol respectively. The difference from my youth is that in Kenya there are dozens of direct competitors for Mateus that line up on the supermarket shelves. I far as know Kenyan’s like Mateus Rosé and my local supermarket tell me it sells well. I am keeping my eyes pealed to spot the first Kenyan Mateus Rosé table lamp complete with Masai bead work.
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