Terlato & Chapoutier Shiraz/Viognier 2007

When you have sunk to the bottom, you can only go up. Even Sediment, when agitated or disturbed, will rise. In a bid to remind my palate, not to mention CJ, of what wine is all about – and having sunk to the depths of the cheapest wine I have ever knowingly drunk – I decided to find a good, complex bottle of wine which I might actually enjoy. An interesting wine.

As an aide-memoire to what decent wine is about, I’ve been re-reading Simon Hoggart’s book Life’s too short to drink bad wine. Well, not on the Sediment blog, it’s not, old chum. Not my life, anyway.

But in between making me obscenely jealous of the wines he has tasted, Hoggart also offers advice, including the following: “If you have an independent merchant near you,” he writes, “or a good well-run branch of a chain – the sort that trains its staff and keeps them – make friends.”

Now, from my parents to my business partner, people throughout my life have exhorted me to “make friends”, usually with the complete failure resulting in a sandpit fight. Or its adult equivalent.

Nor can I say that I am “friends” with any other shopkeepers. I have been to our local paint shop several times, but I am still treated as a stranger. Mind you, I have never gone in with what I suspect might be a memorable request for "an interesting paint"...

Nevertheless, I thought I would try out Simon Hoggart’s principle in order to purchase a wine which, in both senses, was not bad. So I entered my local branch of Oddbins with the lazy gait of the flaneur who has nowhere better to be, and an ingratiating grin.

The assistant certainly looked as if he was trained – unlike the staff in my cornershop, he had clearly been taught that his job description was best fulfilled behind the counter, and not outside having a smoke. Nor was he glumly perusing his P45. ("Ah no mate, interesting wine comes in next week - but I'm afraid I'm off to work up the road, in the paint shop...") All systems go, then.

I explained that I was looking for something of a treat, something complex I could drink by itself. He asked what kind of thing I liked, and I said I really liked old clarets with a backbone, like St Estephes. He immediately offered me a 2002 Medoc, which frankly smacked of the obvious rather than the interesting. Then he proposed a Tuscan, a much more stimulating idea.

I said “Hmm…??” in a quizzical manner, meant to suggest, “Perhaps you have something even more interesting hidden away for your friends?”. Clearly this was misinterpreted as “Can I spend a little more?” It led to the offer of an extremely expensive mature Rioja.

It was actually me who suggested the Terlato & Capoutier Shiraz/Viognier. I had seen this mentioned on an American website, as one of the best value wines of the year. (Not cheapest, but best value, a distinction lost on certain wine writers.) And I was intrigued by whether comfortable Australian Shiraz had been lifted into something a bit more complex by a great French winemaker.

“Ah, now that is an interesting wine,” he agreed. He went on to say that it was an unoaked Shiraz, which meant you could drink it younger, and that the Viognier added primarily to the nose.

Reasonable guidance - but what makes this wine interesting to me is the union between one of the great old winemaking names of the Rhone, and an enthusiast from the New World. Like that duet between Bing Crosby and David Bowie. (Well, that was a bit ropey, actually, but you get my point.) What happens when the traditional skills of France meet the modern, affordable produce of Australia?

He suggested opening it an hour before drinking – and added that “opening” really meant pouring it into something like a glass, with greater surface area. All of which was extremely good advice.

As he wished me an enjoyable evening, I liked to think that our exchange had gone beyond the merely fiscal. I couldn’t say he’d become my friend – but perhaps, and who can blame him, he was a little wary of the unctuous grin.

The wine itself was absolutely delicious, a description I am thrilled to be able to employ within the Sediment blog. First I gave it an hour in a claret decanter. The nose is cedary but creamy, and the wine has the richness, the spicy warmth of a Cote-Rotie; but with the weight reduced by the absence of oak, and the little lift of the Viognier (a grape I associate with appley white wines), it just sings off the back of the palate. There’s a lighter, fruity note of summer about it, rather than the autumn and winter I associate with Shiraz. If I have any criticism, it’s that the absence of the oak meant I missed having something to tether the wine down, and make it a slower drink – but perhaps that’s my justification (if any were needed) for polishing off the bottle in a single session.

This was everything I wanted – a reminder of how enjoyable wine can be, and a genuinely interesting treat. And as to my burgeoning friendship with the chap in Oddbins, I will try and remember to report if I go back whether he remembers me, or ushers me outside to avoid upsetting other customers.

PK

TERRAVENTOUX A.O.C. RED

I have seen the future and it comes in a five-litre plastic flagon, filled by a man using a petrol pump.

This is serious. There we were (still) down in the Ventoux, and it was Saturday morning, and what do the locals do on a Saturday morning in that part of the world but drive to their friendly neighbourhood cave to stock up for the weekend? So we did that, only instead of the grim trudge that accompanies a trip to (say) Majestic Wine - the trolley squeaking across the chill concrete, the haggard bankers & lawyers bracing themselves for that next dinner-party - at Terraventoux we found a barely-supressed excitement, a mood both carefree and impossibly eager.

Why? Because of this man with the pump. Don't be put off - there was nothing dubious or furtive or down-at-heel about the cave or the pump, or, indeed, the man. In fact the place was exemplary in its cleanliness, it bourgeois dignity. High-ceilinged, thronged with bottles of red and white (their take on the local Ventoux variety), panelled with sober brown woodwork, somewhere in atmosphere between a gentleman's smoking room and a sauna, everything about it said diginity and composure. But then there were these huge wooden vats, lined up against a wall, each with its own petrol pump. And, turn and turn about, with a pair of Frenchmen on the end of the pump hose, one pouring the wine, the other standing contentedly over his plastic flagon like a dog-owner giving his pet a treat.

Because the majority of punters were arriving with their own flagons for a refill. Costing €2 and holding five litres, these cubis (as they are known) also come with a plastic tap and a convenient carry handle, and will last a lifetime, or a year at least. The booze that flows in? The same as the stuff being sold, bottled and labelled, for €5 a bottle and rising, on the other side of the cave. How much do you pay for the plastic flagon version? A truly magical €1.35 a litre, plus TVA (or VAT as we perversely name it). That is not a typographical error: €1.35 a litre, or €6.75 the flagon. Of wine which, I can proudly report, is light, refreshing, stylish, well-balanced, and which slips down so readily it's almost impossible not to drink at any time of the day or night. I can't tell you how excited I was, watching my own cubi bubble up with the good stuff, knowing that I was now part of a great and profoundly civilizing ritual; and that I could remain very slightly drunk for as long as I wanted.

The only snag is the keeping. Lots of French customers were buying this same delicious wine in BIBs (i.e. Bag-In-Boxes) which keep the grog in a collapsible plastic vacuum bag so that it doesn't spoil over time through contact with the air. Not possible of course in a rigid cubi. So the intelligent drinker takes his cubi home and straightaway decants most of its contents into old wine bottles which he then corks up again, thus minimising the air/spoilage interface.

I fully made a mental note to do this as I watched my cubi fill, but, once back at base, was so distracted by the incredible and unfamiliar bounty now sitting in my kitchen that I forgot to do any such thing until I was at least half-way through the flagon.

Opinions are mixed as to how long flagon grog can be expected to keep, given considerate treatment as opposed to damp-palmed bibulous neglect. A month to six weeks was a rough consensus. Suddenly and belatedly waking up to this problem, I realised that I had left it too late to decant and that the only thing to do was to drink with steady and increasing efficiency through the remaining wine before it had a chance to go off. This I am continuing to do, and although my Terra Ventoux is suffering a bit, it gamely refuses to die on me. Frankly, at €1.35 +TVA a litre, I would drink it even if it tasted like hair restorer. Every palatable sip between now and that state is a miraculous bonus.

CJ

Vino de Mesa, Sainsbury's Basic

How attractive this wine looks, in its Café de Flore carafe. It is as if I am about to enjoy a drink at the legendary café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Where Sartre and Camus lingered, and where the smallest, cheapest goblet of Brouilly costs €7.50.

If only. My location is actually not Saint-Germain de Pres. The contents of the carafe are actually Spanish. The entire bottle actually cost £2.68. And whether it is actually wine, in any basic definition of the term, is something we need to discuss. In fact, we need to discuss the definition of the term “basic”.

For this is Basics red wine, from Sainsbury’s. Like most supermarkets, this is the range where they claim to provide goods of acceptable quality for the lowest price. And the latter part of that claim is pretty unassailable. At £2.68 a bottle, this is the cheapest wine I have ever knowingly drunk.

But what is “basic” wine? And why am I disguising it in a Café de Flore carafe? We are about to find out…

Basics products (“cuttings costs, not corners”) carry jaunty little explanations of their “basic” nature. Lemons, for instance, are “no lookers, great juicers”. In this case, it is “wine for the kitchen, not the cellar”. Note “kitchen” – not “dining room”, “lounge” or even, for the residentially challenged, “supper table”. Must a wine provoke a whole, socially confusing route around the potential layout of our accommodation?

Or perhaps the idea of keeping it in the kitchen, or disguising its appearance elsewhere in the house, is an acknowledgment of the hideousness of the label, the colour and graphics of which would not happily co-exist with any table setting outside of a cartoon.

There is always a line of cynical thinking, and I am always drawn to it. The line of cynical thinking says that the lurid packaging of value ranges, whether Morrison’s Tesco or Sainsbury’s, is actually designed so that people feel embarrassed checking out an entire basketful. It’s a loud declaration of poverty to everyone else in the supermarket queue – so that even people who really want to buy a week’s worth of Basics feel embarrassed to do so. Supermarkets can therefore offer cheap products, improving both their image and their relative price rankings, while knowing full well that people will top their basket up with more expensive items.

So in the “dining room”, if you have one, this label would immediately launch a whole set of assumptions which might prejudice an evening’s conviviality, from the likely quality of the wine to the parsimoniousness of the host and the dubiousness of any accompanying food. You don’t catch many glimpses of this label on Come Dine With Me.

Indeed, how far would you have read in this post if it had been topped with a picture of that hideous label? Have we all made certain assumptions already?

So, for all those reasons, I decanted the wine into my lovely Café de Flore carafe. This would allow the wine to breathe, hopefully improving its flavour. It would avoid ribald comments from the rest of the household. And it might help me to forget the provenance of the wine and approach it with an open mind.

Basic wine comes, it seems from Spain – hence vino de mesa. Not wine from romantic-sounding areas with tabletop mountains like Algar de Mesa; no, here mesa really does mean “table”, as in table wine. Still, at least we have moved from the kitchen to the table…

Sainsbury’s themselves describe it as being “An easy-drinking table wine with light red-fruit flavours". Now, CJ and I seem to be alone in bringing into the vocabulary of wine description terms such as “challenging”, “sweaty” and “fight-inducing”. Nevertheless, I always find this “easy-drinking” notion intriguing – what else should wine be? Few cheap wines honestly describe themselves as “difficult to swallow”.

In the glass, this has an aroma I can only describe as burnt rubber, with its familiar catch in the nostrils, and suggestion of impending disaster.

But it has virtually no flavour whatsoever, beyond a vague taste of fruit-gums, possibly, but not necessarily, the red ones. As it opens up, a fragrance emerges which is reminiscent of alcohol and wet carpet, like the aftermath of a student party; but still no flavour, until the tang of alcohol finally itself forces its way through and begins to provoke a mild nausea. And a fast-impending headache.

I now understand both of the notions which eluded me. “Easy-drinking” means it is like swallowing saliva – a reflex action, virtually unnoticed, and certainly not troubling your palate. “Basic” means it echos the most fundamental aspects of wine which Messrs Sainsbury can find, viz, it is red, it is liquid and it is alcoholic. Beyond that, the relationship between this and wine is debatable.

There are wines with ironic labels like Old Git which can provoke a chuckle from your dinner guests. Sainsbury’s Basic does away with any need for a wine boldly labelled Cheap Bastard. It might provoke a chuckle. Or it might lead to an exodus, before any similarly “basic” food arrives…

PK

Cremant de Limoux Brut, LIDL (Carpentras)

A trip to France (the Ventoux region, hence Carpentras) and where did we end up? Lidl. Or, as they put it at the entrance to the Carpentras branch of this pan-European dimestore, L'Idéal c'est Lidl! There were caves everywhere around us, vignobles offering on-site dégustation, the whole oenophile experience, obviously, but equally obviously, Lidl required no finding (we were just passing by) and had excellent parking facilities. And, God knows, we could have at the same time picked up ten metres of hosepipe or a welder's mask, the way one is tempted to in Lidl: which you would find difficult (I'm presuming) in the retail outlets of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Anyway, we bought this Cremant de Limoux and enjoyed it with our friends on their heartbreakingly beautiful south-west-facing depth-of-the-countryside terrace, along with a knot of their French neighbours, and it tasted fine. I forget how much it cost (between €5 - €10) but it was fizzy and agreeable and even better if you bunged in some Crème de Cassis or that noix stuff to generate diversity. Can I find it back here in England? No. But three far more vital things emerged from the encounter:

1) The French now drink in moderation. The four French persons there (two men, two women) played up to their national stereotype by talking 75% of the time about food, at least as far as I understood the conversation, which shot past me like jets of steam; but they failed to consume anything more than a couple of self-denying glasses each before disappearing to have their supper. What happened to the long, slow, mature, persistent tippling that one used to associate with the French, particularly in rural areas where ouvriers used to warm up with a brandy at elevenses and go from there? What happened to the light alcoholic haze? Well, I was told, very earnestly, that the French Police now have the power to stop and breathalyse drivers without needing any special provocation. As a consequence, those motorists who used to blunder down the long, unlit country lanes, wine seeping out of their ears after a good meal or a good conversation, have got a lot more cautious. And in Paris, they're too busy earning money, to get lit up. There you go.

2) The French don't smoke any more while they drink. This is too sad for words. I remember the Frogs smoking while driving, smoking while eating, smoking while working, smoking while talking (especially), having a quick cig in between cigs as a purely parenthetical kind of smoking, smoking in the bath, smoking around small children and domestic pets, smoking en plein air and in absolutely tiny and apparently unventilated lifts. I can still remember being taken (when young) to a restaurant in Paris and being kippered in fag smoke from the moment we entered (it was a low-ceilinged basement, which certainly helped trap the pall) to the moment we left, and even then thinking this is the way to go. Our host (immensely civilised Parisian lawyer) not only smoked between courses, but between mouthfuls, which required some dexterity on his part. So now, when not a single Frog lights up while on a social call on account of even the French submitting to the New World Smoking Dispensation, not only do I feel mutely cheated out of the opportunity to ponce a gasper for my own enjoyment (not that I smoke, of course); I mourn the way yet another once-actual pleasure has sidled off into the murky indefensible netherworld of mere nostalgia. Drinking a glass of wine and enjoying a quiet cig: a caesura in time, as Richard Klein very nearly put it in Cigarettes Are Sublime. And he was very nearly right.

3) I bought a whopping great plastic flagon of red wine with a tap. Not from Lidl. Of which more. When I've had a chance to drink some of it.

CJ

Le Fontegnac, Vin de Bordeaux

This post is something of a riposte, following CJ’s remarks about wineglasses. What may have seemed to many like a casual, passing reference to ‘human-head-sized wineglasses with foot-long stems that smart people drink from nowadays’ is clearly a reference to my fabulous Riedel Sommeliers Bordeaux Grand Cru glass.

This magnificent example of the glassmakers art (see picture) is, indeed, 5.5 times the size of CJ’s puny Paris goblet. It is not, however, the size of a human head. Well, maybe a baby human. Or an adult mango.

However, I can do no better than quote from Riedel themselves: “This glass, first created in 1959, is not a design gimmick but a precision instrument, developed to highlight the unique characteristics of the great wines of Bordeaux. The large bowl (capacity 30 oz) brings out the full depth of contemporary wines made from Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot.”

(And it will not get “trashed in the dishwasher”, because it won’t fit into the dishwasher.)

Given CJ’s last post, I simply had to compare it with his wretched little Paris goblet, that hideous little tennis ball of a glass condemned by George Reidel himself as “the enemy of wine”. A glass too thick and too small to enhance the flavour, too shallow and open to enhance the bouquet, and too mimsy to suggest generosity. Favourite of the hired caterer and the student party – and almost impossible to purchase nowadays.

(I kid you not; as I travelled downmarket, from John Lewis via Robert Dyas to Poundland, I still found it impossible to buy a Paris goblet. Eventually, Select and Save of Hammersmith offered me 6 for £3.99; one is in the picture above, and if anyone wants the other 5…)

You will see from the photo that the Riedel glass is considerably larger. 5.5 times larger, in fact. Along with the enhanced enjoyment of my Bordeaux. I think I did imagine that, seated at the head of the table with my tasting glass, I would immediately appear a knowledgeable connoisseur and masterful seigneur.

However, the glass may also convey the impression that I am intending to drink around 5.5 times as much as everybody else. Or to drink 5.5 times faster. Or I may just look a bit of a knob, sitting at the head of the table with a glass the size of a coconut.

Anyway, this being Sediment, I cannot, as Riedel suggests showcase “majestically structured red wines in all their complexity and finesse.” Frankly, they are strangers to this blog. But in all fairness to this “precision instrument”, I thought I had to find something which exhibited at least one of the “unique characteristics of Bordeaux.” Which Le Fontegnac, £3.99 at Sainsburys, clearly does. It comes from Bordeaux.

Something told me, however, that this was not going to have the sustenance of such great Bordeaux as 1947, 1961 or 1982. That something was, in fact, the back of the label., It says without a hint of shame, “It is recommended that this wine be consumed within 6 months of purchase.”

So, one for the Paris goblet, then. An aroma of wood – not oak, which could be promising, but wood as in Colliers – a dank, dark kind of scent. Then a shallow, fruity flavour, climaxing with palate-clenching tannins. Altogether reminiscent in my mouth of a leaking biro.

Not, I imagine, the kind of description usually employed by enthusiastic sommeliers. Interestingly, the bouquet in their Riedel glass was immediately enhanced, presumably because the wine had room to breathe. (Room? It’s got an entire apartment.)

But this was a bad thing. M. Riedel talks of his glass “unpacking the various layers of bouquet and delivering a full spectrum of aromas”. I could feel my nasal hairs cringing.

When it came to taste, again I have to say that the wine was, marginally, improved; less punishing on the palate. But that was probably because, given the surface area of a CD, it could evaporate faster. The aftertaste was just as acrid.

Where does this leave us regarding CJ and his dodgy wine/decent glass equation? Well, like an actor in a spotlight, a glass precision engineered to highlight the quality of a wine will highlight poor quality too. And if I have got to suffer the indignity of drinking wine at £3.99 a bottle, I am not simultaneously risking ridicule by cradling it in a glass the size of a small bucket.

PK

ASDA CARRACCI 2008 SHIRAZ/CABERNET

Three quid. That's what it cost. For a complete, 75cl bottle, entirely filled with red wine. Three quid. It spoke to me at ASDA, not a place I normally find myself in, but I had to get some really cheap pillows and I saw this stuff and the wino in me couldn't take his eyes off it, so I grabbed two bottles, tucked the pillows under my oxter and lumbered off to the check-out looking (quite plainly) as if I were off in search of a park bench, a rain-free day and a homeless friend.

Then I had qualms once I got home with my pauper's treasure. Three quid is not much for anything. The price of a Saturday Guardian is starting to nudge that; likewise a chocolate brownie at a motorway services; a packet of shoe insoles is probably a bit more, a discount CD bought on impulse during a visit to a rotting British seaside resort, maybe a bit less... I mean, three quid is next to nothing. Did I really want to drink this stuff? Anyway, I brooded on it for a bit until I remembered a discussion I'd had with PK.

The gist of which was that he couldn't understand why anyone would dishonour a good wine by serving it in a cheap wine glass; whereas I didn't much care either way, the old Paris goblet having numerous virtues, including near-unbreakability, a comforting fit in the hand, good mouthful-to-contents ratio. But he went on about a good big glass being necessary to let the grog breathe and warm up and open out and tell its story to the drinker. So I invoked a reverse rationale: arguing to myself that a dodgy wine, if served in a decent glass, will be framed so effectively by its container that it'll taste like the Ribena of the gods.

Do we have any of those human-head-sized wineglasses with foot-long stems that smart people drink from nowadays? Of course not. If we ever did have them, they got broken long ago, trashed in the dishwasher or snapped carelessly in two by my delinquent fingers. But I poked around in a forgotten kitchen cupboard and what did I find but some pleasingly weighty Edwardian-looking things in cut glass or crystal, which I can only assume were given to us by someone because we quite obviously neither could nor would buy objects such as these, not in this lifetime.

So I poured ASDA into one of these Mrs. Keppel glasses, while using a regulation Utility goblet as a control (see illustration), let it settle/breathe/decompose for a few minutes, and took a swig.

My standards (see previous posts, and indeed this post) are lamentably low, but I have to say that even served in gleaming cut glass in a well-lit and temperate room, ASDA's Carricci was pretty challenging. Once I'd uncrossed my eyes and taken a reference sip from the Paris goblet - just in case the fancy glass had recently been washed in bleach or had a dead spider in the bottom - I decided that it tasted, essentially, of suede. It was disappointing. It was disappointing because I'd convinced myself that a £3 bottle was the answer to a vulgar prayer; and that even if it wasn't, I could re-invent the stuff, Pygmalion-style by dressing it up and endowing it with a phoney accent. A shabby new world would then be mine for the asking.

But it wasn't. The wine tasted of suede all the way down to the bottom, whichever glass I drank it from. And I'd bought two bottles! Luckily, I palmed at least half of the second bottle off onto No.1 son (who either didn't notice or couldn't be arsed to complain) and that dealt with the problem, such as it was. And the thing is, although this experiment was a bust, I still feel moved to try and find ways to deceive the senses by re-contextualising the drink. Already I am planning to decant the cheapest of beverages into baronial containers, consume it blindfolded, smoke while drinking, eat cheese before during and after, glug straight from the bottle and out of unfamiliar receptacles (tea cups; ink bottles; Tupperware). The mind/body nexus is mutable and capable of being tricked. I will not let this one go.

CJ

Familae Piccini Chianti Riserva 2007

We have two categories of wine in our household. There is The Cellar, which My Affianced believes is protected by trip wires and light beams like something out of Mission Impossible. The Cellar is wine for guests, for special occasions, and for that dim and distant day when some of it might actually come to maturity. (Like sons, that day never seems to be when the calendar predicts, but moves to its own, unfathomable timetable.)

And then there is kitchen wine, so-called because that’s where it’s kept, to be drunk everyday, cooked with, or downed by sons and friends without repercussions. It’s a key tenet of my choice of kitchen wines that (a) they are inexpensive, and so can be used in a carefree fashion, and (b) that everyone will like them. Hence one of the staples of the kitchen wine rack is Chianti.

Chianti has a bit of tradition behind it. The very word classico on a label suggests something more serious than one of those New World attempts at ironic humour, or a gruesome pun on a region of France. (Goats Do Roam, anyone? Languid Duck? Or should that be Long Dog? ) Chianti is also a lighter red, which suits My Affianced more than the heavyweight stuff. (Which, of course, is in The Cellar…)

So when I spot what appears to be a bargain in the Chianti region (as it were), the chance of a kitchen wine with cellar interest is just too good to miss.

When it comes to wine, a little knowledge can be a dangerous (and occasionally expensive) thing. Bear that in mind, CJ. Knowing that riserva means a chianti has been aged for a statutory number of years, and knowing that modern chiantis succeed by blending just a touch of another grape with the traditional sangiovese, I was immediately lured to the Familae Piccini Chianti Riserva, which ticked all those boxes. Plus, it looked like a bargain.

Piccini’s regular, bog-standard Orange Label chianti was in Sainsbury’s at £6.59; but the better Superiore, normally £7.99, was reduced to £5.32; and the top of the range Riserva, normally £10.99, was reduced a staggering 50% to just £5.49. For the top of the range! An eleven quid wine for half price! And – here was the clincher – it had a security tag!!

Now call me miserly, call me mad, but I have never bought a wine from Sainsbury’s bearing a security tag. Frankly, if I was spending enough on a bottle to merit a security tag, it wouldn’t come from Sainsbury’s. So this was confirmation that I had spotted a real bargain. Along with the luxury condoms and the Mach 3 razorblades, this was clearly a shoplifter’s favourite.

And was it my imagination, or did the woman on the check-out give the label an appraising look as she removed the tag. And give me an admiring glance, too? Clearly a man, as Damon Albarn would say, who knows his claret from his Beaujolais.

Well. Once I got home, I did some research, as we who have a little knowledge of wine are wont to do. Am I in good company amongst the reviewers?

And here, in November 2008, is Jane McQuitty in The Times recommending the Piccini Riserva 2005, a “a bright, beefy, leather, truffle and spice-laden chianti” – reduced to £4.99.

In December 09, here’s the York student website recommending the 2006 Familae Piccini Chianti Reserva: "Rich and fruity. Good with lamb. A bottle for that Sunday roast with the housemates, perhaps?" – £5.49 was £10.99, Sainsbury’s.

And in April 2010, here’s Tim Curran in the Mirror : "Sainsbury's has superior Italian red Familae Piccini Chianti Riserva DOCG 2007 with its cherry flavours that go with red meat and game (half-price at £5.49 until Tuesday)."

So, what we are actually talking about here is a five quid wine. Not a security-protected, £10.99 bottle, unless you are unfortunate or stupid enough to buy it during the rare periods when it is not reduced. A wine which every year sells for £5, or thereabouts. A little knowledge which, frankly, changed my whole perspective.

As a five quid kitchen wine, this is perfectly good; fresh, light, inoffensive, moderately fruity and with a slight spiciness on the palate to give it some grip.

But as an eleven quid cellar wine, it is shallow, lacking in depth or complexity, with no richness or depth. It disappears in the mouth, with too little aftertaste.

Take your choice as to which is an appropriate response. The wine’s the same, it’s the expectations which are different – driven by price, and a little knowledge. Oh, and a security tag.

PK