“No problem, monsieur, but please, give it some age—at least five years.” We nodded in intimidation as the lady at Roger Sabon proceeded to fill our 20-litre plastic canister with Châteauneuf-du-Pape. It seemed strange that Châteauneuf would be offered in bulk, but the confirmation came in the form of a pack of labels with the text: mis en bouteille par l’acheteur. The wine cost five francs (less than a euro in today’s money). The Côtes du Rhône, three. Per litre. We took sixty.
I grew up in France. I was too young to drink wine, but I remember exactly where the little signless shop was, on the corner of the street coming back from school in Villeurbanne, a district of Lyon. A man with a large moustache sat behind a thick wooden counter with a dozen canisters behind him — they were called cubiteners. The wines were labelled with numbers instead of names: there was 11, 12, and the highly regarded 12.5. This referred, of course, to their alcohol content. Provenance was not a topic of conversation, but they were likely table wines from Lyon’s adjacent wine regions, Beaujolais and Côtes du Rhône. People came to the shop with their own bottles to fill, or like us, with a canister: five litres per week for a family with two adults, or ten if you had guests. Bottled, labelled wine was for Sundays — sometimes.
We moved back to Poland in 1984 but continued to buy cubiteners of wine in France
