Those artfully rustic crooked J.P. Chenet Merlot bottles.Nothing wrong with the wine contained therein (in fact I'm sipping a glass of it now) despite what they say in Sideways. But.....the first time you see one, on its own, you think, well, that's charmingly rustically imperfect, as if produced in some rustic shed out the back of some rustic French chalet by some rustic horny-handed toothless garlicky Frenchman with grape stems lodged between his toes. The slightly off-vertical bottle-neck, the slight dimple in one side of the bottle as if accidentally pressed in by a thumb. You can just imagine kicking back in an olive-grove somewhere in the Languedoc munching on warm baguettes and horse salami and washing it down with this stuff. Possibly out of the bottle.
Then you see a whole shelf of them in an off-licence or a supermarket, and you think, hold on a second, these are ALL THE SAME! Every bottle-neck tweaked off vertical by a minutely calibrated 8.3 degrees, every dimple applied with the Chenet patented pouce-o-matiqueTM to a pressure of 22 psi for 4.2 seconds, and all very probably carried out in what you thought was nothing more sinister than a massive nuclear missile silo on the outskirts of Montpellier. Ah, how the scales fall from my eyes (halibut scales, naturally). This is all some big cynical marketing ploy, like pre-faded jeans or "distressed" furniture. Oh, I feel so used and dirty.
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