Don't punish wine lovers with plastic bottles!

by Giles Coren  |  15 October 2010  |   4 comments

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Serving alcohol in plastic glasses and bottles is a terribly disproportionate response that is only going to punish serious food and wine lovers.

It goes without saying that at Lovefood we don’t just love food, we love drink as well. What’s the point of a fat, juicy, well-marbled, 35-day aged, rump steak, seared hard for 100 seconds a side, left to stand for five minutes and then sprinkled with roughly bashed pink Murray River salt, if you haven’t got a glass of perfectly okay claret-type wine to go with it?

Indeed, there are those of us here who, forced at gunpoint to choose between the two, would probably take the glass of wine over the steak – but that would mostly be from the stress of having a gun pointed at us.

We’d want the bottle to have been opened a while ago, but not too long, and to have been decanted to give it a fighting chance, and served nice and cool. “The notion of serving a red wine chambré,” we would explain, “refers to the temperature of a bedroom in an 18th century chateau in the Loire, which would probably have been about 15 degrees, not the temperature of a modern, carpeted, centrally-heated, suburban boudoir. If I want my wine mulled, I’ll jolly well let you know!”

We are sophisticated, you see. We know a little bit about wine, but not enough to be boring about it. We are not James Bond, tossing on about vintages like some oenophile train-spotter, presumably boring his women into bed after first drugging them with grog.

We think booze is great taken in moderation, and sometimes we even like to get drunk. So imagine how shocked we were to see in the news a plan to serve alcohol much more often in plastic glasses and bottles “to reduce the injury toll from violent attacks”.

Dr Alasdair Forsyth, from the Glasgow Centre for the Study of Violence, told a conference that the use of glass as a weapon could be eliminated altogether if retailers moved to plastic containers alongside bars and clubs.

Some estimates apparently put the cost of glass-related violence to the NHS, police and courts at more than £100m a year. The precise number of violent attacks involving glass each year is unknown, although the crime surveys suggest it may run into six figures.

Over the years, the pub industry has introduced toughened glass, but now researchers say further measures are needed. Dr Forsyth, due to address the World Safety Conference in London, said: "Milk is commonly sold in cartons, soft drinks in plastic and hot drinks in ceramics.

"The one category of drink still commonly sold or served in glass vessels is alcohol, paradoxically the only beverage type associated with an increased risk of accidents and serious violence.” And he wound up by declaring that, “It is much easier to eliminate glass used as a weapon than knives.”

Are they really going to take away our lovely wine and beer glasses – so gorgeous to fondle and finger, so beautifully neutral in flavour and texture, so nurturing of their contents – for some squishy, unsympathetic, ugly, chemically-scented plastic thing (which, frankly, I wouldn’t use to serve piss to a witch) because a few thousand preliterate skinheads in provincial town-centres don’t think they’ve had a night out till they’ve opened up a stranger’s face with a broken pint glass?

It’s a nonsense. It’s like banning people from owning cats because, technically, if you really needed a weapon, you could kill it, skin it, extract its thigh bone and sharpen it to a point, and then stab someone in the eye with it.

This is a terribly disproportionate response that is only going to punish serious food and wine lovers for the sins of a lot of hooligans who should have been hanged years ago anyway just for having shaved heads and white trainers.

If these safety do-gooders want to go to war with us then, by God, we’re ready for it. Just after I’ve opened this cheeky young Burgundy and given it a moment or two to breathe…

Also worth your attention:
Glasgow Centre for the Study of Violence