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The fizzy, pink and affordable wine in question. (Image: Archi Banal)
The fizzy, pink and affordable wine in question. (Image: Archi Banal)

KaiOctober 15, 2022

Hear me out: This bad wine is actually good

The fizzy, pink and affordable wine in question. (Image: Archi Banal)
The fizzy, pink and affordable wine in question. (Image: Archi Banal)

Despite being a 1970s dinner party staple, these days Mateus rosé is too often overlooked. Charlotte Muru-Lanning defends the snubbed wine.

I’m not quite sure whether the blame lies on its rosy hue, its fizz, its rotund bottle, its inexpensiveness or its heavily retro associations, but something about Mateus inspires instant ridicule. “What is that?” my friends will undoubtedly shriek as I defiantly withdraw my chilled (and admittedly stupid-looking) bottle from the fridge. 

In a world dominated by lambruscos, gamays, chilled reds, skin ferments, pet nats, piquettes, and painterly-watercolour labels, Mateus is too often the butt of the joke. 

Despite this, Mateus has had some loyal fans. Jimi Hendrix was a fan, but then so was Sadam Hussein and Queen Elizabeth. And now me. All for good reason. As far as I’m concerned, it is exactly the characteristics that Mateus is derided for that in fact make it so charming. 

Mateus was launched in Portugal in 1942, and according to company legend, it was the first Portuguese rosé on the market. A product of its time, the distinctive pot-bellied bottle was apparently inspired by the flask bottles of World War I soldiers. In the 1950s it was introduced internationally and as its popularity grew, it helped to cement wine as a mass-market drink. Alongside other European wines like Black Tower, Lancer’s, Cold Duck and Blue Nun, the then ornate Mateus bottle became synonymous with the idea of fine dining from the 1960s to 1980s. 

Adverts for the wine at the time hinged on invocations of Portugal. Shiny-haired couples frolicked around cobbled streets sipping the wine, while a knowing voiceover proclaimed it as “the rosé wine that’s like a trip to Portugal”. Or the more questionable sales pitch, “discover the rosé wine discovered by the country that discovered the world”. It was sophisticated. It was glamorous. And there was a certain whiff of romance to it. 

Sadly, Mateus’ eventually went the same way as dishes like prawn cocktail, vol au vents and aspic in the public’s eye. From polished to ostensibly passé. Throughout the 2000s, Mateus adapted through rebrands, which included dropping the word rosé (and then putting it back), trading in the opulent packaging for sleeker versions and morphing the bottle into a form that’s slimmer with a taller neck. 

While Mateus has clearly persisted in sales, as evidenced by its proliferation in supermarkets and liquor stores, its reputation is decidedly low-brow. Through no fault of its own, the wine has become a rather tacky reminder of a kitschy culinary past we’d prefer to make fun of than take part in.

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But everything old is new again. Political commentary is awash with observations around how eerily similar our 2022 economy is to the 1970s – the era most synonymous with Mateus’ popularity. Commodity markets disrupted by war, skyrocketing oil prices and spiking inflation, it all sounds very familiar. If we’re going to have the worst of the decade, why not bring back some of the more delightful and whimsical aspects too?

Historical analogies aside, I’ll be the first to admit that Mateus is not the best wine in the world. Not even close. Still, for a near bottom tier wine you can buy from the supermarket and most probably your closest bottle shop, it’s improbably good. 

A glass of Mateus in the Bluff/Motupōhue aka Portugal of the South, and the piccolo-sized bottle. (Images: Charlotte Muru-Lanning)

It’s sweet, but not cloyingly so, thanks to the slight fizz. With its notes of strawberry and watermelon, it’s best served crisp, meaning chilled over ice on a warm day, of which will surely become more regular as we make our way to summer.

I especially love their tiny piccolo bottles, or showing up to someone’s house with one of their gigantic magnum bottles. No matter the size though, Mateus is always a statement. And despite likely initial hesitance from those unacquainted, it’s an easy-drinking wine that tends to win people over when served in the right context: on a balmy day, preferably outdoors and with the right kind of kai.

Because of its slight sweetness, it’s a wine that lends itself especially well to food with some heat. It would work especially well to temper the spice of a chilli-laden curry, an arrabiata pasta or spicy fried chicken. I’ve always been pretty fond of a dainty glass of it to sip alongside a slice of homemade cake or a bowl of pudding as a full on embrace of the feminine. For those so inclined, I can imagine it making an excellent addition to a boozy summer fruit granita or slushy too.

To me, Mateus remains a blushing and effervescent invocation of the past. With a glass of it in hand, the future, or at least the rest of the evening, is rosy.

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Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

OPINIONKaiOctober 14, 2022

Eating less meat is easy and delicious – when you think about it

Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

When The Spinoff’s Chris Schulz wrote about an essentially unsuccessful week of feeding his family a plant-based diet, plenty of plant-based people took umbrage. Nate Ridley penned this response. 

My Sunday morning was full of talk about vegetables. That’s not unusual – that day is when my partner and I plan our meals for the week. But it had been made extra spicy by having just read Chris Schulz’s story about trying to get his family to eat a plant-based diet for one week.

Seeing our way of eating presented as well-meaning but ultimately kind of gross and too difficult to maintain was, frankly, annoying. The truth is, as with most things, eating mostly plants can be great, but it might require employing a little brain power at first to get out of old habits and ways of thinking.

Vegetarian food doesn’t mean no-fun food. Find the recipe for these vegetarian nachos here. (Photo: Emma Boyd)

Shifting towards eating more plants doesn’t have to mean giving up on animal products entirely. I’m not a vegan, I love butter. I’m not even a vegetarian. My partner and I still eat meat, just less of it. A lot less. As a culture, we’ve readily accepted the idea of “sometimes foods” like cake and takeaways, foods that can be harmful to our bodies when we eat too much of them. In our household we take the same approach to meat; the only difference is that the harm we’re trying to minimise is to our environment.

Usually we aim to have only one meat-based meal a week, and it’s actually turned out to be great. Let me tell you, diverting our food budget towards mostly vegetables saves a lot of money, which means we feel way more comfortable buying nice cuts of meat for those meat meals that we do have. It’s a treat food, not a staple, which means we are able to serve it that way.

That’s the problem with the meat substitutes that Chris leaned on in his week of plant-based eating. They take eating a plant-based diet and make it more expensive than eating meat. Then, on top of that, they’re generally disappointing on the plate – but of course they are! You’re comparing them to the real thing, and as convincing as something like Impossible meat can be, it’s never going to be quite the same. Think of it like CGI in a movie: it can seem incredibly real, but deep down your brain is very good at spotting the tiny things that are wrong about it.

I totally understand the market for fake meats. Real meat is tasty! That all too often gets lost in this discussion. It’s really easy to get meat to taste good. From its ready abundance of fat (a key ingredient in tasty food) to its willingness to brown in a pan, getting a delicious meal out of meat feels like way less of a mission than cooking an equally good vegetarian meal. If your cooking habits are centred on meat it can seem daunting and unappealing to change to eating a bunch of vegetables.

Plant-based
During his accursed plant-based week, Chris Schulz leaned heavily on expensive vegetarian “meats” (Photo: Chris Schulz)

To make matters worse you may well have been turned off plant-based food by past experiences. All too often vegetarian or vegan foods are bland, flavourless and a little sad. I put this down mostly to lack of salt, a side-effect of those two diets’ crossover with the healthy eating movement. Here’s a little secret that my chef friend told me years ago: “salt is flavour”. When salted well, almost anything becomes tasty. Want to know why restaurant food almost always tastes better than when you cook at home? They salted your food properly. A bunch of behaviours from people with meat-heavy diets make more sense when you remember this. Lots of people augment or append otherwise plant-based meals with bacon or sausages, saying that it makes it taste better, and that is true. But take a look at the dietary information on a packet of those meats, and then connect some dots.

Of course, it’s not just as simple as salting your food. Learning to construct entire meals out of mostly vegetables can feel challenging, but there are definitely ways to make it more achievable. Buying one or two good seasonal cookbooks is an absolute game changer, especially if they’re locally written and based around the vegetables you can likely find in your regular supermarket. Having a bunch of recipes on hand that can guide you on making the most of cheap seasonal vegetables takes a whole lot of stress out of planning a week’s worth of meals.

Chris should’ve made these quinoa chickpea pancakes with spring vegetables and harissa tahini (Recipe and photo: Ginny Grant)

And honestly, I find great joy in the diversity of food that we manage to cook. Eating mostly plants has not in any way narrowed the kind of foods we eat. Stir fry, curries, pasta, lots of hearty soups through winter, quick and easy slaw and halloumi wraps in summer. We try to attempt at least one new recipe each week and while they’re not all going to be winners, they’re usually pretty good. From time to time something is good enough that it becomes a staple. This chickpea curry recipe from Emma Galloway is a regular in our house, and is good enough that guests always ask for the recipe.

Ultimately we’re not trying to live a holier-than-thou lifestyle. We’re not special; that’s sort of the point. If it’s achievable in our life, it’s achievable in yours. We manage to do this while also cooking gluten-free due to my partner’s coeliac disease. Her diagnosis initially seemed like it would result in challenging dietary changes, but what at first seemed incredibly difficult to manage very quickly became just normal, something that didn’t even warrant thinking about. That has also been our experience of eating mostly plants; it very quickly became normal, then easy, and now I don’t think you’d ever convince me to go back.

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