Plastic fantastic?

Much has been written about the pros and cons of plastic soldiers and, of course, apart from some Games Workshop Lord of the Rings figures, I haven't actually finished many of the dozens of boxes worth I have  bought.  I don't have any great aversion to them it's just that I never finish much of anything these days and I was positively enjoying painting the Perry Miniatures plastic Prussians.  Some are just poor anatomically (Gripping Beast Vikings) but plastics are getting better all the time.  Price isn't an issue for me but some of them are expensive anyway.  The price variation in plastic historicals seems wider than that in metals.

Plastic is lighter of course and I was reminded of the increasing importance of this when reaching for a bottle of red wine in Houston airport yesterday.  On my way to Bogota again with the lovely S in tow we thought it might be a good plan to grab something red for a nightcap, given that we weren't arriving at the hotel until around 11.00pm.  The selection of red wine was frankly pathetic but there was a likely looking generic Australian shiraz which would act as a suitable relaxant.  Anyway I grabbed it and, shockingly, it deformed under my fingers.  It was plastic!  Or rather, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), to be exact.

Now the Legatus well remembers plastic wine bottles from his childhood, which you could get in hypermarkets like Mammouth in the south of France in the sixties.  One litre for 50 centimes in a strangely industrial looking square bottle, with a flip off cap, which looked like it should contain bleach instead of wine.  Indeed, the taste of this wine was fairly indistinguishable from household cleaner and my father only used it for cooking.  Even at the age of ten my palate was sufficiently developed that I realised that this stuff was to be avoided. I didn't have any again until a holiday I had in the Loire valley with my best friend, my girlfriend and my immediate ex-girlfriend. (only slightly difficult).  It was my friend's turn to buy the wine for our picnic and  as he was someone who could be politely described as careful with money we ended up with one of these litre plastic bottles of red which, after twelve years, was just as bad as I remembered it.

Well, S and I were in a hurry and there wasn't much choice so I paid the (no doubt exorbitant) $12 and picked it up at the gate in that strange way that Houston airport handles duty free.  Incidentally, why is it that wine drinkers are penalised by duty free shops?  There are big savings on spirits but wine always seems to be more expensive than it would be in the shops.  In the end it was worth it financially, as the 18.75 cl bottle of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon in the minibar worked out at about £10, or £40 a bottle. More importantly 18.75 centilitres wouldn't have gone very far between the two of us. 

So what was it like, our plastic-clad wine?  Actually rather good.  Perhaps a little lacking in definition, lightweight, some blurring at the edges?  No it was very nice.  Not that it lasted very long.  Fortunately S had bought one too which we are drinking now even though it's only 4.30 in the afternoon.  Well it's 9.30pm in England anyway.  Her excuse is that it is lunchtime in Vancouver.

The key issue for producers and shippers is that a PET bottle only weighs 54 grammes as against the 400 grammes of a glass bottle. Cutting down weight means less fuel expended in moving it around.  All good news for the environment and the bottles are recyclable (although not as recyclable as glass). There have, inevitably, been questions about plasticides leaking into the wine but this is not the sort of wine you are going to lay down in your cellar.

What with plastic soldiers and now plastic bottles of wine I wondered how soon it would be before we got plastic women which would really finish the Legatus off.  S pointed out that you can already buy very realistic plastic women, not just those inflatable ones beloved of bad comedy films.  They don't complain, nag and you don't have to buy them expensive lingerie (actually some of the "collectors" do I gather) but then the Legatus has always preferred an active rather than a passive woman so that would be one plastic product too far.  Soldiers yes, wine bottles possibly, women no.  Of course the real thing is best in the first two as well, really...