Budget Brands: Bellino Extra Dry

Good evening everybody. Thanks for joining me for another Friday evening blog post about alcohol. This week I’m reminiscing about the time I bought the cheapest “vermouth” in the shop…

Every other Saturday morning the missus and I collect together a few cook books, and plan our meals for the next two weeks. Not only does it help eliminate waste, but it also cuts down on the amount of time spent doing this job one day at a time, straight after work. It’s still not a job either of us enjoys doing (life’s full of those – cleaning, anyone?), but it certainly is better to get it out of the way in one go every fortnight.

The last one was actually slightly more interesting than usual, as I found a recipe that called for the use of dry vermouth. I’d been waiting for an opportunity to try a new bottle for some time, and it had finally presented itself in the form of groceries. Nevertheless, funds have been tight this month, so I figured it would be a good time to add another instalment of the Budget Brands series, and headed to Tesco with the intention of buying their own brand, which I believe is usually priced around £5. Finally I would be able to start on that martini research – once I remembered to get some olives.

On arriving at the small vermouth shelf in Tesco (why so much wine, so little vermouth?), I found I didn’t need to go for the own brand, as there was actually another brand, and it was even cheaper; Bellino Extra Dry (£3, 13% ABV).

‘Bellino’ doesn’t sound like an authentic Italian brand to me. I mean, it could be, but it just sounds like someone in the UK has made up a word that sounds like bellini to make their brand seem more authentic. A look at the bottle reveals that there is nothing Italian about this at all.

A closer look, which in hindsight perhaps I should have done before, reveals that this isn’t actually vermouth – it’s made from grape juice, whereas vermouth should be made from wine, so it looks like that £3 is going to turn out to be something of a false economy. I can’t investigate all the various types of martinis without actual vermouth, can I? I mean, I could, but my research would be refuted, and not worth the electricity used to type it, nor the kilobytes of memory used to store it. This is probably the wine equivalent of White Lightning.

Well, it’s still an alcoholic drink, and I was still interested in trying it. I did a little bit of research on the internet first, and found some reviews that frankly weren’t too encouraging – “smells like wet dog” being the most memorable. They ought to put that on the label. In fact, they should call it, “Cane Bagnato”.

Last Friday the time came to try it for myself, and I can now confirm it was indeed a false economy. I didn’t notice any detrimental effects on Nigella’s chicken dinner, but there’s not much reason for drinking this. I wouldn’t say it smells like wet dog exactly, but there isn’t anything particular pleasant about its aroma and, correspondingly the flavour is nothing to write a blog post about either. It’s like drinking a glass of cooking wine that’s been left out all night. And day.

If you’re ever considering buying this; think again. I don’t know if I’m going to end up drinking any more of it, so we’d best have some more vermouth themed recipes in our next meal plan.

I do like investigating budget brands, though the more discerning my tastes get, the less inclined I am to do so (will I ever buy that “Scotch Whisky” or “Vodka” from Aldi? – yeah, I suppose so when I’ve finally got some disposable income), but nevertheless, of all the ones I recall up to this point, for the sake of hyperbole, let’s say Bellino is the worst budget brand yet.

There you go. Just a short one this week. We’ve been having some lovely weather here, and it’s time now to go out and enjoy some more of it. Unusually for a Friday, I won’t be drinking until much later. I have to drive into town to rehearse for a gig on Sunday, so I’m already looking forward to getting back and cracking open something special. Whatever you’re up to, enjoy the weather and enjoy yer drinking. I’ll see you next time.

Budget Brands: Grappa from Tesco

The cost of the four holidays I had last year is catching up with me, and I have some big expenses coming up – home insurance and the like – so the austerity measures are hitting pretty hard around here. Not the government’s austerity measures; my own. There’ll be no spending with reckless abandon for a while – except for the stag do, the second stag do and the honeymoon, where I’m looking forward to hitting the Duty Free - but facilitating those is a large part of what these measures are aimed at, so things aren’t all bad.

Still, a man needs some short term things to look forward to, so I went to work last week with £20 in my wallet, and I told myself, if I had enough left at the end of the week out of that £20, I would allow myself to buy that cheap bottle of grappa that they have at Tesco. So I needed to have £13 left. If you budget for 5 a side at £6.20, that would leave 80p. So there was to be no chocolate and crisps whenever I got hungry, no bacon and sausage barm first thing on Friday morning, and definitely no takeaway pizza for lunch. It was going to be hard, but these travails make us stronger.

Enough about my financial strait jacket, what about the grappa? Well, yes, of course I made sure that I had £13 left at the end of the week. The carrot and stick approach worked very well. How good though, could a bottle of grappa at £13 possibly be? Obviously I wasn’t expecting it to live up to the standard set by the Domenis Storica that I bought in Venice last year, but retailing at £45-50 in the UK, that one is a little beyond my every day means if I want a nice glass of an evening. If Tesco’s product is even half as good it would be a bargain and a potential new favourite.

The budget brand in this case is Grappa Julia Superiore. It’s the only grappa available in Tesco, and I haven’t seen any other grappas in other supermarkets, so I assumed it would be the equivalent of Bells whisky. Nevertheless, my burgeoning interest in grappa is such that I had to try it.

It has an ABV of 38%, so it is budget standard in that area (the Domenis Storica was an impressive 50%), but in the bottle it looks the part - it’s an interesting shape, and it appears to be made in Italy (as opposed to the Italian part of Switzerland or San Marino, which are the only other places that grappa can come from). Nowhere does it say, “bottled for Tesco”, or anything discouraging like that, though there are descriptions on the back in French, English and German – to me that’s not a great sign, but cool yer boots…

It’s also a full size 70cl, whereas the Storica was a conservative 50cl. A bit of geeky maths tells us you’re paying 18.6p per centilitre for the Julia and a massive 90p per centilitre for the Storica. A bit more geeky maths tells us that the equivalent quantity of Storica would cost £63 - drop for drop, that’s 5 times more than the Julia.

The cap is screw top, so there’s no satisfying squeak-pop on opening, but it has the right smell, and it tastes right. It doesn’t have the lovely sweetness of the Storica, but its (slight) bitterness isn’t overpowering or lasting. It makes a very good first drink of the evening, and I have to say, for £13 I’m satisfied. If I’ll ever buy this brand again, only time will tell – I’m not sure what my grappa needs are yet, but if you do get a craving and your funds are limited, or you’re bored of brandy like the checkout assistant at Tesco said he was when I bought this, it would be worth your while to give this a try.

I was explaining to the assistant that grappa is like brandy, but made differently, and come to think of it, if we widen our net of comparison to compare this grappa to brands of brandy, say the Courvoisier VSOP that retails around £30, I think I much prefer the grappa – it’s half the price, and out of all the sipping bottles I have at the moment, it’s proving to be the every day go-to. No, it’s not as special as the Caol Ila cask strength whisky, but it’s precisely because that’s special that I don’t go to it every day.

The Storica was special also, and all the more precious because of its limited quantity, so while Julia doesn’t quite reach the heights that that one scaled, it’s affordable to the wallet and acceptable to the palate. What more can you ask for?