The drinks locker is the one part of provisioning where France makes you look like a genius for almost no effort. Back home I would agonise over a wine merchant's recommendations and pay accordingly. Here I walk into a Carrefour, fill a trolley, and come out with a fortnight of decent drinking for the price of one good London bottle. The skill is not finding good drink. It is deciding what is worth its weight and its space on a boat that pitches.
I keep our locker under the starboard saloon berth, low and central, where the weight does least harm to the trim. Glass is heavy and it breaks, so the first rule is to think hard before every bottle goes aboard. A full case of wine is around 18 kilos, a 24-can slab of beer about 8, a three-litre box of wine roughly 3.3. Multiply that across a fortnight's drinking and you are carrying tens of kilos that have to live somewhere low, dry and wedged so nothing rolls when the boat heels. Before I stow a single bottle I ask the same question I ask of food: does this earn its weight and its space, and where will it sit when we are hard on the wind in a chop.
Wine: where the value is
A perfectly drinkable bottle of vin de France costs around 5 euros in any supermarket, and the 4 to 8 euro band is where most of the everyday cruising wine lives. During the autumn foire aux vins you will see bottles at 2 and 3 euros, and some of them are honestly fine for a Tuesday at anchor. I do not bother going below about 4 euros for anything I plan to enjoy rather than just cook with.
For a two-week cruise with four adults I reckon on roughly a bottle a day, so a dozen to fifteen bottles. That is the practical limit before the weight starts to matter. Rose in summer, because it suits the heat and the food, and it is the one wine the whole crew tends to agree on. A few reds that take a knock well, nothing I would mourn if it rolled off a shelf in a swell.
Bag-in-box is the cruiser's secret. A three-litre box equals four bottles, weighs less than the equivalent glass, does not shatter, and keeps for weeks once opened because the bag collapses and keeps air out. Most supermarkets carry decent rose and red in box from around 12 to 16 euros for three litres. I always carry at least one as the house pour. If you want to talk your way to the good local stuff at a market or caveau, the phrasebook in boating french 60 phrases covers the words you need.
A word on the regional wines, because France rewards a little curiosity here. Buy where you are: Muscadet on the Loire and south Brittany coast, crisp and cheap and perfect with the local oysters; rose from Provence on the Cote d'Azur, where the whole region drinks little else in summer; the bigger reds of Languedoc when you are working the Gulf of Lion. You are not buying these as a collector. You are buying the thing the locals drink with the food you are about to eat, which is almost always both the cheapest and the best choice. A supermarket near a wine region carries that region's wine at prices a tourist shop on the quay will never match, so the inland hypermarket run beats the harbourside cave for value every time.
Avoid the trap of carrying wine that needs care. Anything you would lay down, decant or worry about is wrong for a boat. The whole locker should be drink-it-now wine that takes a knock, lives at locker temperature, and owes you nothing if it gets warm. Save the good bottle for a restaurant ashore.
The apero bottle that earns its keep
If you carry one spirit, make it pastis. It is the drink of the French apero, especially in the south, and a single bottle goes an astonishing distance because you drink it long. Ricard and the rest sit at 40 to 45 percent alcohol, but you dilute it roughly one part pastis to five parts cold water, which drops it to something you can sip through a long evening on deck. A 70cl bottle therefore stretches to dozens of glasses.
It needs nothing but water and ice, which matters on a boat. Pour the measure, add the chilled water and watch it turn cloudy yellow, then the ice last because the anise reacts badly to cold going in first. Buy it at the supermarket for a fraction of the bar price. The whole ritual, and why it suits the anchorage so well, is something I get into in apero anchorage.
Beyond the pastis I carry a bottle of decent gin and one of whisky for variety, and that is the locker done. Spirits earn their space because they are concentrated: one bottle, many evenings, no glass graveyard. A 70cl bottle of gin gives roughly 20 to 28 measures depending on how heavy your hand is, which on a boat with a thirsty crew is still a week or more. The same bottle in beer terms would be a slab and a half of glass rolling around the bilge. Concentration is everything once weight matters.
The mistake visitors make is to bring spirits from home, paying UK or duty-free prices, when the French supermarket sells the same brands for less and saves the carrying. Buy the spirits in France with everything else. The only thing worth bringing from home is something genuinely hard to find locally, and there is very little of that.
Beer, cans and the weight problem
Beer is where the boat fights back. It is heavy, it is bulky, and warm beer is a poor reward for carrying all that glass and liquid. I switched to cans years ago. They stow flat, they chill faster, they do not shatter, and a 33cl can of supermarket lager runs well under a euro by the slab. A pack of 24 lives in the bilge near the keel, the coldest part of the boat, and I pull a few up to the cool box before sundown.
If you want something better than industrial lager, French supermarkets now carry plenty of small brewery beer, and Brittany in particular has a real beer culture worth dipping into, with cider too: Breton cidre brut is cheap, low in alcohol at around 4 to 5 percent, and goes with the crepes and the seafood far better than wine does. Just remember every can or bottle you carry is weight on the move, and the colder you can keep it the better it rewards you. I stow the beer in the deepest part of the bilge against the keel, which on a boat afloat in 16 or 17 degree French coastal water stays usefully cool even in a heatwave, then move a few cans up to the cool box an hour before the apero so they are properly cold when it matters.
Soft drinks, mixers and the things crew forget
Tonic, lemonade and a few cartons of fruit juice are the bits that get forgotten until someone wants a drink at ten in the morning. I carry long-life UHT juice because it keeps unrefrigerated for months, and a couple of bottles of sirop, the concentrated cordial that French children live on. A splash of sirop de menthe or grenadine in water makes a cold drink for the helm that is not alcohol and not warm fizzy rubbish.
Mixers are mostly water on a boat, which is the honest truth of cruising drinks. Which brings up the real constraint behind all of this.
Do not drink the tank dry
Every bottle of wine you carry is a bottle of fresh water you did not have to find. That sounds glib until you are anchored off an island with a 200 litre tank and no shore tap for three days. Drink is part of your water planning, not separate from it. I keep at least a dozen 1.5 litre bottles of supermarket mineral water aboard as both drinking stock and emergency reserve, refilled from the tank when the tank is full and good. The whole question of tankage and rationing I work through in water management boat.
The locker that has served me best is unglamorous: a box of rose, a dozen mixed bottles, a bottle of pastis, two slabs of canned beer, UHT juice, sirop, and far more bottled water than seems necessary. It costs little, it weighs what a boat can carry, and it means the apero never fails. In France, that is the one meal of the day you must never get wrong.
