Chips with everything – an exposé!

Chips with everything – an exposé!

I don't suppose that Arnold Wesker could have known how prophetic the eponymous title above would turn out to be when he wrote his acclaimed play in 1962.

Essentially a depressing study of the class system of the time, Wesker's play, ‘Chips With Everything', employs National Conscription to make his point that class barriers cannot be broken down, no matter what.

Also, as a leading member of a group of young British playwrights of his time, dubbed The Angry Young Men', Wesker would no doubt have used a typewriter to record his words.

The PC world was a generation away and yet it is just as true today, as it was in his drama, to say that there are chips with everything. I'm using one (?) now as I write on my laptop!

However this is neither the Literature nor the Arts Column, or the Technology Column for that matter. It's not the Food Column either, though that's closer! No, this is the Wine Column and I'm talking Oak Chips, not the above! And asking, are there chips with everything in wine making?

Several years ago Cork Talk had as its headline, 'Planks in Tanks', which revealed to a mostly incredulous readership of the time that there were winemakers in Australia who were suspending oak planks in their stainless steel fermentation tanks in an effort to impart some oak flavour to their wine, at a fraction of the cost of using oak barrels.


Read more in this week's print edition or go to e-paper >>