109. A Fizzy SCAM!

Having been forced to be teetotal for the past eight years, I have become something of a connoisseur of non-alcoholic drinks.  When I eat in a restaurant, I usually have sparkling mineral water with whatever I choose from the menu, whether it be red meat, chicken, fish or pasta. 

Unlike the wines I drank during the dinners of my younger days, when the selection was primarily based upon cost, and the quality of the wines varied enormously, there is, in my opinion, very little variation in the taste and quality of sparkling mineral waters.  One ice-cold sparkling mineral water with a slice of lemon tastes much like any other ice-cold sparkling mineral water with a slice of lemon.  There are some exceptions of course but very few.

Wines vary in quality from the literally undrinkable to the heavenly.  Sometime in the mid eighties, four of us went to a well known and very expensive restaurant in the City of London that was offering three courses from the a la carte menu for only £9 a head.  We anticipated that the final bill would come to around £60 but the wine was so sublime (and so expensive) that the final total came to more than £200.

On the other hand, sparkling mineral water is never undrinkable but then again, never awe-inspiring.  If the quality of wine varies on a ten-point scale from 1 to 10, then sparkling mineral water varies from perhaps 4 to 7 and if the flavour is altered by the addition of a slice of lemon and ice, that range is even narrower.

Recently, I have become aware of a scam that is possibly costing people like you and me, collectively, hundreds of thousand of pounds a year.  I first began to suspect that a deceit was being perpetrated by some restaurants a couple of years ago.

Whenever the bottle of mineral water was brought to our table at a restaurant that we visited often, the waitress would twist the metal bottle top, open the bottle and pour some of the water into a glass that was already loaded with ice and lemon.  She then left the bottle on the table and walked away.

Last Saturday we were in a restaurant in Calderdale in Yorkshire.  The food was excellent and the mineral water was satisfactory.  Just before I emptied the last of the bottle into my glass, I asked for another.  When it arrived I asked the waiter not to open the bottle but to leave it on the table.  Instead of just doing that, he asked me, “Why?”

I wish now that I had told him to mind his own business but instead, I told him that I hadn’t finished the first bottle yet and I didn’t want this second one to start going flat.

When I opened it some ten minutes later, I found that the cap was screwed on very tightly but there was no “crack” of the breaking seal as I turned it.  When I examined the bottle top I saw that it had not been attached to a metal rim.  There was no seal to break.

We have a SodaStream unit at home.  It makes sparkling water at a cost of about £0.05 a litre.  When ice and a slice of lemon is added, SodaStream sparkling water becomes indistinguishable from the “mineral” water I am sometimes served in some restaurants.

I can see why they do it.  The bottle of water I was presented with in Yorkshire cost them less than 2p to produce but I was charged £3.50 for the pleasure of drinking it.  That is some mark up.

Someone should investigate and do something about it!

October 16th 2015

This is the bottle of sparkling mineral water as it arrived at our table this evening.  Notice that the seal is already broken.