To the legendary railways such as the Trans-Siberian, the Orient Express, the Glacier Express or the Eurostar, we must now add the wine train , a convoy of 32 wagons and 400 meters long that leaves Tilbury (Essex) every Saturday with 650,000 bottles on board, travels 160 kilometers to the town of Daventry, in central England, and unloads its precious merchandise so that from There it is distributed to supermarkets throughout the country, and anyone who wishes can have their favorite chardonnay, syrah, malbec, merlot or cabernet sauvignon.
To big troubles, big solutions. A perfect Brexit storm, supply chain cuts and a lack of truckers have left one in five orders in the UK late, with meat, coffee, frozen meals and toys shorting out. How Santa Claus and the Wise Men will manage to keep up with the demand is a mystery, and the British have been buying and freezing turkeys and chickens for Christmas for weeks, lest they run out of them. Wine, however, will not be lacking.
With the pandemic, the British drink more wine than before but of lower quality, and they buy it online and not in stores
Although alcohol consumption has been declining for decades as a result of the obsession with weight and the recommendations of doctors, the English are among the largest wine fans in the world, drinking 1.22 million liters a year. There are those who are abstainers or prefer another type of liquor, but those who give white, sparkling, red or rosé drink an average of 108 bottles a year. Most on special occasions, ranging from birthdays to celebrations of the victories of their soccer team, but for 16% it is part of the daily routine.
At Tilbury, part of the Thames harbor complex, dozens of workers, often in the rain, take hours to board the wine train the containers loaded with wines from Priorat, Bordeaux, the Australian valley of Coonawarra, La Rioja, Mendoza, Chile, Tuscany or the South African region of Stellenbosch. The weekly journey of the bottles on the train tracks, as coal used to be carried and cars still today, does not solve the problem of the lack of truckers one hundred percent, but it does alleviate it notably. You do not have to depend on them to transport the merchandise to the central warehouse in Daventry, and once there it is the vehicles of the supermarket chains such as Waitrose, Budgen, Tesco or Sainsburys that collect your orders.
With the pandemic, the alcoholic habits of the British have changed, and their wine consumption has increased by 16% (somehow they had to kill time at home and console themselves for so much misery), but it has turned to cheaper bottles ( average of ten euros) purchased over the internet instead of the more expensive ones that are sold in specialized stores. The largest wine consumers in the world are the United States (a reflection of the country’s population), but individually the first are the Portuguese, with Germans, French, Spanish, Lithuanians, English, Irish and Argentines in the positions of honor. Not so the Russians, Poles or Scandinavians, who prefer vodka, of which a couple of shots are equivalent to a bottle of wine.
With the emergence of the new variant of the virus and the return of fear, restrictions and freedom cuts, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has launched a campaign to “save Christmas” as if they were Private Ryan from the film, in the middle of a national debate on whether it is convenient, necessary, supportive, prudent or whatever you want to call the celebration of traditional work holidays (many companies have already canceled them). People, from the experience of the last two years, are with the fly behind the ear and expect anything, such as new confinements, the return of social distance and the prohibition of family and friends gatherings of more than six, eight or ten people. Two thousand five hundred workers from Eastern Europe have come to clean, pluck and pack chickens and turkeys on special visas, and the cost of a puzzle, due to Brexit fees, has risen 40%. But there will be no shortage of wine, nor will the vegetables from Almería and oranges from Valencia, which travel from the city of fallas to Barking, a London suburb, in another special convoy. Today the Glasgow train robbers would not take the sacks of Royal Mail money, but boxes of mandarin oranges and Montsant wines.
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