So
PK and I are at a wine-tasting run by the admirable Liberty Wines,
and we're trying to look august and senatorial rather than
betting-shop seedy, so, having arrived late already we sit as
carefully as we can down to lunch and get talking to a mover and
shaker in the high-end wine trade. This is a guy who clearly knows a
stelvin from a bung made out of bunched-up table napkins, and who has
a smarter haircut than either of us, and he makes at least two
salient points, which, coming from him, sound more salient than they
would coming from either of us.
They
are:
1)
Anyone who pays the full asking price for a bottle of supermarket
wine is an idiot. Supermarkets now have such a Byzantine philosophy
of consumer confusion, involving excessive choice multiplied by
incessant special offers, that pricing bears no relationship to
actual value. The only sensible course of action is to wait for one
of your preferred wines to pitch up with 25% off and buy then.
Perhaps
we knew that already, but it's nice to hear it from the trade. On the
other hand,
2)
Give the insanely high levels of duty on wine in the UK + transport
costs + packaging/point of sale materials/tasteful shelving and all
the other crap surrounding the purchasing of wine, there are no cheap
wines left in this country, there never really were, and we'd better
get used (once more, just like our parents) to the idea of wine as
luxury rather than everyday consumable. We don't live in France, and
we're not going to. Unless we actually go and live in France.
Well,
agreed PK and I, he would say (2), on account of being a high-end
wine guy. But there was nonetheless a sobering vestigial truth about
it, or it would have been sobering if we hadn't rather made pigs of
ourselves over a red Burgundy that was sitting, unguarded, in the
middle of the table. And if it was true, it meant that my entire
life's work, to find cheap drinkable grog in the UK, was utterly
wasted (see
footnote).
I know that I might have been trying to live like a provençal
Frenchman, with all the low-cost rough'n'ready douceurs
and general freebies that implies, while having at the same time to
pay London prices, but I thought that there was at least only one
direction of travel, and that was always towards better and more
value-packed wine, if not to the level of living it large in
Manosque, at least to the point where I could freely pour out my
pauper's drink and not choke on it. Why else are we in the EU?
Stricken,
I fell to brooding on things that you can get in this stiflingly
overpriced country that still, just about, represent reasonable value
for money. After about ten minutes, I had thought of:
-
Illegally downloaded music
-
A packet of Tesco value white sliced bread
-
Free newspapers, or, better yet, a copy of The
Sun
that someone's left behind on the tube
-
Cigarettes are still affordable, at around 40p a smoke
-
An Aston Martin DB9. Yes, it'll set you back £130,000.
But
just look at it
-
Getting your shoes re-soled
At
no point could I think of anything which contained the ideas of wine
and value for money within the same larger concept, unless you
include Aldi's £2.99
range, which is certainly well-priced, but which, given my last experience with Aldi, may not be drinkable by humans.
And
then
it occured to me, just as the preceding thought exited my head, that
even as I was thinking that previous thought, I happened to be
drinking some Heidsieck Brut Reserve and writing next to its entry in
the catalogue, Big,
gassy & soapy;
and I saw the merest ray of hope, no bigger than a speck of dandruff.
Because the fact is, if you can scrounge an invite to the occasional
wine tasting, you can
consolidate value and quality, because the stuff's usually good, and
it's free, and damn me if I wasn't knocking back some £50-a-bottle
Heidsieck Champagne as if I had every right to, while simultaneously
calling it Big, gassy and soapy. And not spitting quite as rigorously
as I ought to. Beat that, if you can.
And
here's the clincher. The smart guy in the wine business finished his
gloomy purview with an instance of what he
understood by the value/quality nexus, which turned out to be a
prize-winning Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru, retailing at approximately
£65
a bottle.
-
Try it, he said. It's pretty good.
So
we did. And, to our cost-effective surprise, it was, not least
because we weren't paying.
There
you go: the problem contains the lineaments of its own solution, and
Norman Vincent Peale was right.
CJ
Footnote: none of this is strictly true
Very funny article with an excellent moral; still, at least the AB didn't serve Lidl's best. On which topic, I recall a wonderful letter to the Times a few years ago. One of our higher ranking military men, disgusted at the wasteful extravagance of entertaining dignitaries, gave instructions that all food and wine for luncheon parties was to be bought at Lidl. He served their sausages and a French red to a large group of visiting European top brass and, from memory, the cost was just over £100.
ReplyDeleteApologies - above comment was directed at the Archbishop article but I have managed to post it in the wrong space.
ReplyDeleteI've taken the liberty of moving it to that post for you!
Delete