Drinks for Classy People Part 3: The Lambrini

In previous posts on Drink it How You Like it we’ve had features on two drinks that perhaps struggle under the weight of the preconceptions people have about them; Carlsberg Special Brew and BabyCham.

Carlsberg Special Brew is known as tramp juice, and is generally considered to be drunk by the homeless and hopeless alcoholics you might find on your local park benches and at bus stops (at 8.30am). I think the price is a bit beyond the means of most homeless when you consider there are many cheaper super strength lagers available, but perhaps it’s a special treat when they’ve come into some unexpected money.

BabyCham on the other hand is a massive girly drink. Everyone remembers it from the adverts in the 80s, but no one seems to drink it – presumably because its faux champagne image is a little off-putting.

Continuing in that theme then (I’m not sure what the theme is… Drinks for Classy People? Let’s call it that)… this week we’ll be looking at Lambrini. Why? It’s on Special Buy at Aldi.

in the bottle

At the conception of this post, I didn’t really know what Lambrini was. I assumed it was a kind of fizzy wine, and I knew that it’s target market was er… girls who just want to have fun, aged say 18-30 – like the holiday club, but presumably a little classier, judging by the girls in this advert. Some of them have jobs, some are doing responsible, adult things (like DIY – actually, it looks like they’ve finished the job. Good work!), and they’ve all learned a specific dance, which coincidentally is called The Lambrini. None of them look like scallies, none of them are wearing tracksuits or over-sized hoop ear rings, none of them are sitting at a bus stop with a pram, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of them in episodes of Boozed Up Britain, Ibiza Uncovered or Party Paramedics. These girls might be paramedics – except the ones that are obviously surgeons… dancing… surgeons. And since all they want to do is have fun, presumably they’re not interested in things like commitment or babies.

label

30 might be pushing it a bit, actually. You’d expect them to have moved on to wine by then. On a side note, one of my line managers buys this for her teenage daughter because “it doesn’t really count as booze” – though it actually does. She was a bit surprised when I told her its ABV. I don’t know why she never thought to look at the bottle.

A bit of internet research shows that Lambrini is actually ‘lightly sparkling perry’ (7% ABV), so very much like BabyCham, but a little less sparkling. BabyCham comes in tiny bottles (200ml), while Lambrini comes in a large bottle (750ml), not unlike those giant bottles of San Miguel that I’m so fond of.

There were two varieties on offer in Aldi, and while I had been intending to buy one of each, the potential for humiliation and the fact that Brenda said she wouldn’t be drinking much of it convinced me just to get one of the original variety. Luckily the guy at the checkout in Burnage’s Aldi store just swiped it through the scanner like a bus driver looks at a bus pass – in that he didn’t look at all. Thousands of pounds worth of merchandise pass through his hands and go beep every single day, and not one item - nor one combination of item and customer - can appear to him as interesting in any way. So thanks for that.

Lam-bree-ni! Do do-do do-do, Lam-bree-ni…

Seven percent. That’s not that weak, is it? It’s half the strength of wine, but it’s stronger than your average beer, so I guess one of these is enough to get a common-or-garden variety teenage girl nicely pissed for the evening. That sounds dodgy. I’m not a sex offender!

I was, of course, stupidly excited about beginning the latest round of research for the blog, so I cracked it open an hour or so in advance of going out to see the Jesca Hoop gig at the Academy 3. Brenda wanted to drive, so I was drinking alone.

Lambrini is looking at you

Well, what can I tell you? It was fine. Not as sweet as I imagined it would be, but when Brenda came to drink hers on our return, she thought it was very sweet. She said she preferred the BabyCham – presumably because it feels a bit more like drinking champagne. It does taste a bit cheap, but certainly nowhere near as offensive as those 3 litre bottles of cheap cider – White Lightning, Carbon White and the like – which for my money are the masculine equivalents of this. Compared to those, Lambrini is positively classy. And it comes in a glass bottle. Not too classy though; on my way home last night I saw two middle aged ladies sitting at the bus stop next to one empty and one mostly empty bottle of Lambrini. They looked to be having a nice time.

I wouldn’t buy Lambrini again (even at £1.99), but there were certainly no ill side effects, and it didn’t taste all bad. I’d just prefer to stump up the extra two quid and buy four cans of Holsten Pills.

So there you have it; certainly not a glowing review, but not a bad one either. It’s all about personal preference really, and I can’t imagine too many people preferring to buy this over a nice Chardonnay (women) or just… beer (men), but you know; it’s cheap and cheerful, and that’s got to stand for something.

---------------------------------------------------

Now! This weekend is the weekend of the Chorlton Beer Festival, and I was fully intending to go until I realised it was going to rain all weekend. There isn’t much joy to be had drinking ale with your feet in a puddle, and your hood up, listening to the constant pat, pat of raindrops. We’ll see how many people really like real ale there, won’t we? Except we won’t because presumably no one will be there to see how many people aren’t there. Stupid British summertime.

Well, have fun this weekend. I’ll see you next week with some more… something or other.

Booze Tourism Part 4 - Belgium

By way of introduction, I’d just like to say that I started writing this post some time ago. I’d been planning to put it out for a while, but then I heard about the upcoming Ramsbottom Chocolate Festival, which promised chocolate beer cocktails and chocolate beer among other things, so I figured I’d best hold back, and see if I learned something that went against my original conclusions. What follows then is my original Booze Tourism feature on Belgium. Next week I’ll post my conclusions from the Chocolate Festival, and we’ll see if I’ve learned anything or changed my mind. So please come back then. Here we go.

Beer and chocolate don’t go together. If you try eating chocolate and accompany it with a glass of beer, you’re just ruining both; they cancel each other out completely - except… if you’re talking about Belgian chocolate and Belgian beer.

Belgium is famous for its chocolate and beer, and it’s almost as if they were specifically designed to complement each other. Maybe they were; here in the UK we have beer and crisps, in France they have wine and cheese, in Australia they have – I don’t know – shrimp and barbies (whatever they are). I expect these formed partnerships by accident, but the specific natures of Belgian beer and chocolate just seems a little too neat to have been anything but deliberate.

Long before I officially became a Booze Tourist, Brenda and I had a weekend in Belgium – Bruges and Brussels. We had a wonderful time. They love their beer over there – love it. They love it like the French love wine, and that’s really refreshing. I get a bit sick of feeling like I’m expected to drink wine every time I go out for dinner, so Belgium was a welcome change for me.

Belgians drink beer with their meals, in fact, most restaurants over there don’t have a wine list, they have a beer menu. Page after page of mouth-watering, tasty and strong beer. And you feel like you’re getting the respect you deserve for drinking it, instead of being made to feel like you’re a cretinous oaf or a football hooligan.

Even the pubs have menus, with 300 beers available. In one pub, Brenda and I ordered one beer from each page of its leather bound beer-tome, and we were nicely sloshed by the time we left to get dinner – Brenda especially – and we’d only made it halfway through. I’ve been to beer festivals where they haven’t approached that kind of variety. In fact, not long after we returned from our weekend away, we went to the Chorlton Beer Festival, where they were boasting of having thirty – thirty – different ales. I sneered condescendingly. That’s not even trying is it? The festival runs from Friday night until Sunday, and they’ve always run out of beer by Saturday evening. Get enough in!

I had never had any compulsion to visit Belgium, but Brenda came home one day saying that there were cheap fares on the Eurostar. They weren’t that cheap, but when we tried Skyscanner.net we found we could get flights for free – plus taxes, and that came to about £30 each (or £30 altogether. I can’t really remember now). Mind you, the flights were actually to Charlerois, which isn’t strictly Brussels, but that’s Ryanair for you.

When I mentioned to my friend Paul that we were going to Belgium, he sounded really excited, and said, “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“Really?!? Why? What’s in Belgium?”

Beer. Great beer. You can forget your Stella Artois, they have loads of different types of beer. Most of them are so strong that they don’t necessarily come in pints, it can be a half or even less, and there’s nothing unmasculine about it – unless you’re drinking one of the fruit beers. And I don’t mean that as a homophobic slur – some beers are made with fruit! Drinking fruit beer is a bit girly, but you’re old enough to make your own decisions, Nancy.

If you live in Europe, and you are looking for a city break, I’d recommend it – especially Bruges, which is very peaceful, but a great place to wander around and drink. It probably works best for couples though.

You will want to try the chocolate too. We found a place where they give you a mug of hot milk, and a saucer of melted chocolate to mix into it with chocolates on the side – very fancy hot chocolate. There were portraits of dogs dressed in suits on the walls too, so that was pretty special.

You can drink as much of the beer as you want, and it won’t destroy the sweetness of the chocolate, and you can eat as much chocolate as you want, and it won’t dull the taste of the beer. Well done to the Belgians.

Apologies for the lack of booze porn this week, but I’m afraid I don’t have anything relating to this adventure. Rest assured though, I’ll be back next week with the sequel to this post, and there should be one or two pictures to accompany that one. So do come back soon, and have a great Easter break.