"Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?"

I have never been drawn to the rather depressing notion of everyday drinking. (As opposed to the rather attractive notion of drinking every day.) A great wine for everyday drinking, they say. A great everyday wine. 

“Everyday wine”? You don’t get people promoting “everyday meat”.

An “everyday” item is mundane, unexciting and predictable. You don’t really want to be surprised by your butter, to have a complicated carrot or interesting milk. There’s nothing uplifting about the everyday. And for all the talk of everyday wine, the imagery of wine itself is anything but everyday.

The firelight flickers in the background of a glass of red…the sunset glistens through a glass of white…the bay can be seen shimmering behind a glass of rosé. This is the wine of most promotional images –  a fantasy, at complete odds with this widely expressed enthusiasm for everyday wine.

Everyday wine is usually mentioned in the same breath as kitchen suppers and weekend lunches. But kitchen tables, with their flotsam and jetsam of family life, their rich ethnographic tapestry of stains, last weekend's newspapers and bicycle repair tools, are not where glasses of wine are shown.

Red wine is usually pictured in a glass upon a posh dining table, alongside a place set for dinner. The quantity of cutlery suggests the food is something rather superior to spag bol. The expensive crockery, the napery, the flowers, all speak of a sophisticated meal, the supposedly ideal setting for a glass of red wine. Fires are lit. Wood is polished. There are often candles involved.

A glass of red wine is not shown on the corner of a tray, with News at Ten in the background. You don’t see it standing on a pile of books which haven’t been moved off the coffee table, with just a tiny dribble running down the outside of the glass. You don’t see a promotional picture of a glass of red wine perched precariously on the armrest of a sofa. 

White wine is usually depicted impossibly chilled, the glass glistening with condensation, a bubble winking at the brim. I have been told by photographers that this is often artifice in itself, that the condensation on the glass may be glycerine, and the bubble a transparent bead. Be that as it may; no-one shows a desirable glass of white wine standing on a carpet by a settee.

Rosé is probably the most fantastic, commonly portrayed on a sunny balcony with a bay in the background. It is nearly always shown being drunk outdoors, clearly an issue as far as “everyday” in the UK is concerned. There are those who do drink outdoors every day in this country, but they veer away from rosé wine in favour of Special Brew. Try as some might, barbecues have never become part of our everyday culture, and while dejeuner sur l’herbe is theoretically possible in a London park, there will probably be a bit of stick from the locals for the naked girl in front. 

If there’s any identifiable exterior background to a glass of wine in an promotional picture, it is inevitably of the vineyard from which the wine has come. Why? Do you really want to be transported from your comfortable home to what is, for all intents and purposes, a field? Conveyed to your wine’s dusty origin? I mean, for heaven’s sake, it might be New Zealand. 

On the one hand I have this threat of everyday wine, thrummingly dull and as uplifting as lettuce. On the other, the fantasy notion of wine, a world of sophistication, romance and travel, where all dining is indoor by firelight or outside in the sun, where my rosé can turn a drizzly afternoon into a sunny day – and my glass of red will make, if not a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, at least a Michelin star out of a pork sausage.

Which one is harder to swallow?

PK

More Virgin Wines: My Nightmare Ordeal At The Hands of Shiraz Durif

So I'm thinking about for once raising my game to the extent of going in search of a nice Fitou/Corbières – I can't say why, some kind of vicarious wine tourism, nostalgia for somewhere I once went, with the added bonus of some spicy Mediterranean keynotes and big 'foursquare' (as Hugh Johnson calls them) drinking personalities. Nothing tricksy, but some good manly reds, with a follow-through of espadrilles.

But even as I dream of these possibilities, the doorbell rings and my wife lets in a mixed case from Virgin Wines. She calls up the stairs with her usual forensic rigour.

'Did you buy more wine?'

'I did not,' I shout down.

'Well, it's here.'

Pinpoint inaccuracy

I come down and look at the completely-branded Virgin cardboard box. Just because I bought a one-off case a few months ago, it is now clear that their system has tanked and has concluded that I want more of their fairly easy-drinking, borderline sensibly-priced, everyday wines. Which I don't. I laugh.

'Did they send these because you mentioned them in your blog?' asks my wife. Her tone, normally graven with sarcasm, sounds oddly credulous. I catch the mood.

'Yes,' I say, 'it's possible. It's quite possible.'

Half six

I know, however, in my soul, that it can't be possible, as in the three years of Sediment's existence, we haven't scrounged more than six free bottles between the two of us, let alone a whole case for one person. My heart slowly settles like glue coming off the boil. And, sure enough, when I call Virgin Wines to make sure, it turns out I should have read the fine print in the original offer.

'You joined the Discovery Club,' an almost hilarious man on the other end tells me. 'It was on the back of the voucher. We send you a case every three months.' At £7.49 a bottle, it turns out.

'Okay,' I say in a contralto, and cancel my subscription.

A heart-stopping moment

When I tell this to my Brother-in-law a few days later, he merely observes, 'They all do that. All the mail-order wine sellers,' I understand that he has scant respect for my business sense, but it stings. He then produces a 1983 Châteauneuf-Du-Pape which turns out to have a dud cork, with consequent leakage (somewhere on the unknowable floor of his wine store) and wholesale destruction of the wine, which you might think would put him on the back foot (and believe me, we did take a couple of appalled sips just to make absolutely sure, like callow prospectors willing their Fool's Gold to be real), but no. My shame persists. And £7.49!

(Actually, the guy on the phone did offer me a rebate, bringing the nominal price per bottle back down to about £6, so what am I complaining about? Well, like all stupid people who have made things difficult for themselves, I need to complain about something, even if, perhaps especially if, it's the wrong thing.)

'My terrible discovery', says idiot

What have I bought, though?

I haven't gone through the case with any thoroughness. In fact I haven't gone through it at all. I've just emptied it out in fuming silence. Only a 2003 Navarra of some kind has caught my eye: potentially the one classy item in a box of leftovers. Otherwise, so far, of an evening, I listlessly reach into the wine rack and grab one of whatever Virgin has sent me, white, red, I'm stuck with it now. So far, I have got outside a gristly Bel Olivier Vin de Pays Sauvignon; a Coorong Sounds Shiraz Durif (the Durif part new to me, possibly responsible for the fog of tarry morbidity that hung around the glass); and, as I write, a Finca Manzanos white Rioja, which ought to be fine - I mean, who doesn't like a white Rioja? - but which makes my eyeballs hurt just as much as the Sauvignon.

Nine bottles to go. Why does PK not make these mistakes? I'm as intelligent as him, I'm certain of it, reasonably certain, anyway. Nine bottles to go. Does anybody read the fine print?

CJ

Win a Year's Supply of Wine!* (*If you don't drink very much…)

The best competition prize ever offered was surely when Woolworth’s said you could win your weight in Pick n’Mix. Fabulous! Your own weight in confectionery! Of course, it would never be allowed nowadays. The health lobby would be down on you like a ton of Twix.

I am not one for competitions. I have never, for example, won anything on the lottery, although there are those who say I would give myself more of a chance if I actually bought a ticket. But even I have been tempted recently by competitions proclaiming that I could win a year’s supply of wine. It sounded like my ideal prize. However…

The obvious thing to ask is, a year’s supply for whom? Gerard Depardieu? (When the French actor had emergency multiple open-heart surgery, doctors warned him to cut out his four to five bottles of red wine and three packets of Gitanes a day. Of course, he responded. He stopped smoking.)

To avoid supplying such prodigious consumers, promoters state, in their terms and conditions, how they define “a year’s supply of wine”. And depressing reading it makes.

For example, “A year’s supply” of Virgin Wines has been widely offered as a prize, by a train company, a travel agent and, in an unusual drink/driving combination, the AA. “One lucky winner,” they said, “will receive five cases throughout the year – each containing 12 specially selected bottles. That’s one case every three months – plus an extra case for Christmas.”

All three competitions defined 60 bottles as your “year’s supply”. Five bottles a month. Or four if that “extra case” is for your Christmas party. Is one bottle a week a reasonable supply for anyone who enjoys wine?

Tesco were a little more generous in their version of the competition. Their “year's supply” in a 2011 competition was 12 cases, more than twice as much. But “12 cases as selected by the Promoter in its sole discretion”. A worrying proviso to anyone who has seen some of the stuff the Promoter selects, in its sole discretion, to put upon its shelves.

Indeed, Tesco ran a similar competition to win a year’s supply of Hardy’s wine. (It would be too easy to suggest the second prize was two years' supply of it…) The terms and conditions define the prize as 12 cases of Hardy’s wine, plus one bottle signed by William Hardy, upon which they place a total retail value of “c.£656”.

Now I don’t know how they put a retail value on a bottle of Hardy’s wine signed by Mr Hardy – or, for that matter, one signed by Mr Laurel. But 145 bottles into £656 comes out at a fraction over £4.50 a bottle. And getting through nearly 3 bottles a week of £4.50 wine from Tesco sounds to me more like a penance than a prize.

A generous promoter might define “a year's supply” by expenditure rather than quantity. Last autumn Majestic, for example, offered £100 in wine vouchers every month for the next year. Now that’s a proper year's supply, whether you choose 16 £5.99 bottles a month or, with the opportunity to choose quality over quantity, a handful of higher-priced wines.

But that same amount was offered more than ten years previously, by Horse & Hound magazine, that stalwart of the huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ and, I see, drinkin’ set. Their prize was “one year’s supply of wine to the value of £1,200.” The same £100-worth of wine a month; but back in 2001, when prices were considerably lower. 

“Quarterly dispatches of £300-worth of wine will be delivered to the winner’s nominated address,” they explained – but added the intriguing constraint that “No more than 72 bottles of wine to be sent in any one quarter.” That would still be an impressive 288 bottles, or 24 cases a year. Now that’s what I call a supply.

But why the constraint? Surely the Hunt weren’t going to drink wine that cost less than £4.16 a bottle? Did the transport costs of so many bottles to the Shires threaten to eclipse the cost of the wine? Or… was the health lobby beginning to rear its head?

For when Oddbins offered this prize in December, they took a very cautious position. “Oddbins is a responsible retailer,” they declared, “therefore ‘a year’s wine supply’ is based on government guidelines.” I work that out to a maximum 120 bottles or 10 cases a year. Unless, of course, you’re a woman – when a promoter would presumably be justified in saying that, following government guidelines, you should drink and therefore win rather less. 

But the thing is, most people do not drink their wine on their own. Obviously a year’s supply of, say, haircuts is limited to an individual winner; but you wouldn’t offer someone a year’s supply of electricity, and then try to divide its consumption between members of a household. My wine is shared with family and friends – why should my year’s supply be defined by my personal consumption?

The meanest year’s supply I have seen was offered by a serviced apartment company based in Reading. In the New Year, they ran “a Prize Draw to win a year’s supply of wine”. And they declared that “The winning prize shall be 12 bottles of wine.” 12 bottles? One bottle a month? Call that a year’s supply?

I don’t think I will be entering. Nor, I suspect, will Gerard Depardieu.

PK