Bantermarket Blog

Al-Ahram’s premium whisky. I only bought a half-bottle of this, which was itself more expensive than either Highlands Whisky – frowning before I’d started, not a good sign. 28LE, 40% ABV.

It smells like poison. It really does. Like paint stripper. The taste is a lot better though. Mild. Sweet. Slightly grainy. That’s it. Like a completely generic blended whisky.

More expensive that Highlands Whisky Red or Black, and not as good as either. Not worth buying, full stop. 2/10.

Same general idea as the penultimate entry below in volume, ABV and price. The only visual differences are the name and the colour of the label. 24.50 LE, 40%.

Looks and smells similar to its sister spirit. The aroma is oaky: slightly milder then the Red, though, and it’s a bit paler in colour.

I reckon it goes down even more easily than the Red. Imbibed in the same way, it’s rich, oaky, with a sweet, liquoricey mouthfeel. It doesn’t taste that much like the Red really. Another winner!

Slightly better even than the previous one, I think. Thus even better value. But still easily cheap enough that you can mix it with Pepsi or whatever if you want a long drink. So high marks again, 8/10.

The middle-cost wine from Egyptian International Beverages. I’ve had Shahrazad (or however you want to transliterate it) before, their cheapest line of wines, and although I wasn’t bowled over, I couldn’t really make up my mind whether I liked it. This stuff is Merlot-cab sauv, so I wasn’t expecting anything too bizarre. Same style of bottle as the eponymous white which I looked at in December. 50 LE, 12.5% ABV.

Healthy crimson colour, seems thicker than the other reds. Pleasant aroma. Lots of oak, and red fruit.

Tanniny. Again, red fruit. The taste is uncomplicated as you’d expect from the grapes. Not very dry. Is it better than Omar Khayyam? Probably not, it’s just a bit different. The aftertaste however is definitely quite notably good. It’s herby and plummy, full.

I like this wine. Good with red meat, if you can afford to eat it. A welcome change from Omar Khayyam, but I probably wouldn’t say Beausoleil is better than it. Not much more expensive. It does rival al-Ahram’s chief offering closely, and I’d say this is the best of the EIB wines yet. Omar Khayyam is still just the top of the table, though, owing to its being slightly cheaper and probably better on its own. 7/10.

‘Cultural analysis’ forthcoming: watch this space.

I sort of picked this up on a whim with the intention of making whisky sauce to go with chicken. Haven’t done that yet but I’m on my second bottle of the stuff. Egyptian whisky doesn’t have a great rep, but you really can’t argue for the price: about £2.50 for 750ml. Instructively I note it’s only slightly more than half the cost of the same volume of most wines here. Looks like I’ve picked the right languages to study, doesn’t it. Who’s laughing now. Anyway, the bottle is a standard Bolanachi offering with the great old-style Arabic displaying awards etc., the only English is the name and the short company description. Props that they’ve managed to spell ‘whisky’ correctly unlike many native English speakers who put an e in it. 24.50 LE, 40% ABV.

Pale brown colour. Fairly viscous. It smells good. Sweet, heathery, quite mild. Minty, even.

I drink it with a drap of water. It’s surprisingly not bad at all. Much like the smell, it’s sweet, very heathery. Not an overpowering flavour. The aftertaste, especially surprisingly, is quite pleasant, there’s more heathery sweetness and you’re not aware of the strength. A winner.

Astonishingly and incredibly good for the price. It works out about 20p for a stiff glass. Even if it was barely palatable, that would be pretty good. As it is, I’m bowled over. This has to be some of the best lash-cash ratio yet (MAAATE). Good with soda water as other blends, but I drink it straight – it’s really that good. Whisky is probably the only drink I’m at all picky about, so it’s especially notable that this passes muster. 8/10.

Bought from Cheers off the internet (I know, it’s brilliant). It’s made from Bannati grapes from Upper Egypt, which made me especially keen to try it. These are the kind of small, extremely sweet grapes you see being sold on the streets. Pretty unremarkable bottle again, quite a nice design on the front and English and Arabic on the back. 50 LE. Standard 12.5% ABV.

A vivid lemony-strawy colour. For once the tasting notes appear to have been written about the same wine, it does indeed smell like melon. A hint of honey sweetness. The only problem is that the smell is very distinctive: if you have a glass with your dinner and go for a shisha, people will still be able to tell immediately that you’ve had a drink even if you have a mint or some chewing gum. I mean, I don’t really care, but this kind of rules it out for a night out unless you’re alright with potentially getting rage off a taxi driver for being undeniably smashed.

Anyway, quite an obvious appley flavour. This would be great with a water pipe I imagine. Sweet, as I suppose you might expect. Lemony. It’s quite full-flavoured. Great with curry or spicy food. Or probably with fish I imagine, although I’ve yet to try this.

This goes down a dream, I love it. And I’m not usually mad on white wine. Guilt-free, too – it’s organic, and made by Copts. Fairly good value I think because you’d definitely pay quite a bit more than this for a wine this good at home. So Beausoliel white is quite highly recommended. 7/10.

This’ll be my last post for about a month until I’m back from my holidays at the end of January. In the meantime, !صحة

Another Bolanachi brandy. This one might be a bit better, I hoped. The label itself is exclusively Arabic except for the name in English/French. Probably a good sign, in that it doesn’t have any pretensions. As an aside, and don’t tell the filth you heard it here, this would be a fantastic candidate for taking slightly more than your legally permitted allowance into Britain because the volume and ABV are only written in Arabic. Even if your bags are searched and even if then the customs officials can read Arabic letters and numbers, you can feign ignorance as if you were the stereotypical nauseating expat prick. The perfect victimless crime: fuck you Nicola Sturgeon you fun-sponging bitch! 18LE. 33% ABV.

Ahem. It does look a lot better than Vat 20. There’s that appealing mahogany colour even when you pour a fairly small glass. The aroma is quite rich, though equally different from the other brandies: it’s grainy and slightly bitter, only vaguely cinnamony. Leafy, heathery, even. Not all that unlike some kinds of Highland malt whisky actually I might say.

The taste is definitely palatable. It’s quite grainy like the smell, in fact. And again, a bit pleasantly bitter. Not fruity. Really quite different from the other two brandies I’ve supped so far. Perhaps even herby and heathery like the smell? It also has a bit of that waxy quality that I mentioned in conjunction with the zibib that we’d associate with Clynelish whisky. Definitely slightly reminiscent of a Highland malt whisky, I think. Problem is there’s still a wee bit of the ‘ughhh’ sensation like Vat 20 or Bell’s, yuck.

The best of the brandies so far. 1884 has about the same courage of flavour as Vat 20, yet also less of the unpleasant shuddery grain alcohol taste. So I reckon it beats both Vat 20 and Vieille Recolte at their own games. Some of the greatest value yet. It’s decent on its own, and quite good as well mixed with cola, orange juice, mirinda, whatever. I’ve taken to mixing it with Mountain Dew: get a pint glass, pour about 100ml of brandy and a can of Mountain Dew into it, mix, and enjoy. It’s a suprisingly very tasty result, and even after one of those I’m pretty buzzing. When I bring brandy back home from KHEgypt, this’ll be the one. 6/10.

My third dry red from Gianaclis. This one is a bit more expensive, indeed it goes over my usual £4.50 a bottle limit (lad). 2009. The front label looks like any old shitty overpriced French red. You’d probably pay £15 a bottle for this if it were French and sold in Britain. But there’s equal Arabic on the back and it’s mis en bouteille blahblahblah Gianaclis. Carignan-Grenache. Pretty good combination of grapes I reckon, this way the normally headache-inducing tannins of Carignan are mollified somewhat. Anyway, don’t care, 55 LE, 12.5% ABV

Even less viscous that Omar Khayyam. Probably to do with the grapes, and it’s not stronger alcohol-wise. It has a delicious aroma. Damson, chocolate, and a definite vanilla undertone.

It’s quite watery in the sense that you can drink it quickly, but conversely the flavour is quite deep and complex if you take your time over a glass. And at £5.50 a bottle on a 22-year-old’s budget, I should hope you’d take your time over it. Not very tanniny, which is a bit of a relief actually. Berries, a bit of a blackcurrant flavour, a bit of spice, chocolate, vanilla. Mmm, yes. Soft. All sorts of fairly common red wine flavours really, though quite perfectly balanced. I might even recommend this to a double-breasted blazer-wearer were he to find himself in this nightmarish foreign land devoid of Montagé or St Emilion or whatever.

It’s a good wine. Assuming you’re not French, that is. It is about £1.20 more expensive that Omar Khayyam, that yardstick of north African reds (‘euh I SAY, old bean, letting ETHNICS make wine?’), bottle-for-bottle, yes – but certainly worth it once in a while. I think I’ll even bring some home for my mother. 7/10.

One of the (very slightly) cheaper normal-strength wines. Gianaclis, naturally. No picture, you can basically skip this wine altogether I reckon. The bottles are quite nice in a sort of fashionable way, they feature different paintings by current Egyptian artists and serifed upper case English letters. The grape isn’t named, not a good sign, so it’s in this spirit of the loss of the distinctive flavour of an individual grape or classic combination of two that my less than entirely positive opinion on Obelisk ought perhaps to be considered. Think of Omar Khayyam v Obelisk as being like Glenfiddich v Johnny Walker sort of. Something like that, don’t care. 41LE. 12.5% ABV

Looks just like Omar Khayyam really. Smells of red fruit… can I get a bottle of wine please EMM blahblahblah? Aye well this is Sainbury’s Basics cab sauv, classic, it’s a good wine, easy drinking… blahblahblahblah. Anyway, there’s a pleasant slightly herby aroma I’d say but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

I don’t think it has a very distinctive taste. Somewhat dry. Red fruit. A little bit tanniny. It could be any old supermarket cab sauv from some nameless Chilean valley, plus an emphasis on the plum flavour. There’s nothing really wrong with that, of course, but when you consider it’s only a teeny bit cheaper than the pretty good Omar Khayyam you sort of wonder why you’re drinking this one.

Definitely not a bad wine. It’s just poor value. You’d expect it to be significantly cheaper than Omar Khayyam, but as the more famous wine is notably better and in the same style yet the equivalent of about 20p more expensive, there’s practically no reason to drink Obelisk. A bit of a shame, I suppose. 5/10.

Long overdue: the fabled ‘black wine’ of the Nile valley. Tonic wine, synonymous for centuries with Coptic celebrations and Saidi tradition, but also with riotous excess from the time of the Pharaohs right down to the present day, is truly Egyptian, yet familiar to us northerners in the form of the much-loved Buckfast. Mentuhotep IV said ‘iirp’; your average Botros ‘Abdel-Massih says ‘nabiz’ – I say ‘let’s get stoated’. I also say ‘I hate the SNP for their restrictions on civil liberties’.

It’s a nice bottle. Arabic in a traditional cursive style on the front, and equal French to make it seem, rather jocularly I think, more ‘civilised’ than it actually is. There’s a drawing of a cherub supine on a wine cask holding up a glass of the good stuff (King Robert from Game of Thrones anyone?). Gianaclis. The French name for this one is another classic, if this is really what Saidis do for altar wine I might start attending Mass in the Coptic Catholic rite. 36 EGP – not bad considering a bottle of Bucky costs about double that these days… and 16% ABV, here we go!

It pours thick, viscous, a deep reddy-black colour. The smell is very full, cinnamony, sickly sweet, cola-y, fruity, strongly alcoholic. Pretty much like Buckfast.

Long story short, it tastes like Buckfast. Extremely sweet. Full-bodied. Cinnamony, spicy. Distinctly reminiscent of cola, but violently alcoholic. As long as you understand that this is a very different (and ancient) style of wine and that it’s only even superficially slightly similar to modern-day pinot noirs or chiantis or whatever, I think this is a good wine. The taste, I think, causes a psychological element in getting you extremely drunk with astounding speed when supping this noble beverage. I limit myself to a couple of small glasses if I’m at home because any more than even that small amount and I start feeling rather frightfully mad wae it. It’s quite nice with blue cheese or gouda, not so much with dinner itself. Best, though, with a few of your pals and a few smokes. A bottle each and you’ll be living the… eh… high life (ahem) in no time.

It’s nice to know that the Buckfast of our hearts has such a venerable progenitor. This original and equally uncomplicated style of sweet strong wine certainly gets you fucked fast (ho-ho-ho) just the same. For all the mewling protestations of the SNP/fools in double-breasted blazers/Guardian and Independent columnists and so on, tonic wine, or whatever you want to call it, is a deeply traditional drink which has been made in a similar way for thousands of years. It has delighted and intoxicated peasants and the urban poor in centuries past, as well as Pharaohs, Caliphs, Popes, Sultans and Kings just as much, and now it does the same for us. God bless black wine! May Alex Salmond rot in the ninth circle of Hell. 9/10.

We cruised into Drinkie’s near Korba on Friday night, saw this and practically shat ourselves with surprise. ‘This is a new beer?!,’ I asked incredulously. ‘A new beer,’ the man behind the counter replied in a monotone. A new beer, that is, as of only a couple of months ago: I’m part of Egypt’s wheat beer revolution. Or something. Anyway, turns out Sakara Gold does come in bottles, and these Weizen half-litre bottles look practically the same as them. 8.50 each, 4% ABV.

It pours like other wheat beer, but it’s not the same head explosion as Erdinger. A healthy yellowy-brown colour. Slightly transparent, if you have it out of a dimpled pint glass (lad) you can see through it somewhat. The head disappears quite quickly though. Sakara Weizen has a pleasantly mild aroma, a nose of sweet wheat, yeast, banana.

The taste is quite mild as well. It’s wheaty, obviously, and there’s a distinct banana flavour. Not terribly complex. A hint of spice. Not much body, and certainly a bit of spice in the aftertaste. Moderate carbonation, quite refreshing.

Quite a good wheat beer, I think. I’d hesitate to compare with with Luxor Hefeweizen because, as you can tell from the flavours I’ve mentioned, it’s really quite different from it. I could umm and ahh about it for a couple of minutes, but let’s say 8/10.