From D'Or to door – it's wine through the post

It’s years since anything remotely interesting has come through our letterbox, as it seems that the only people who use the postal service nowadays are charities, estate agents and Virgin Media.

So how about wine?  A flat, plastic ‘pouch’ of wine through your letterbox? This is the premise of Decanting Club, whose subscribers are posted a 150ml sample of wine each week. 

There will be those who see this as an ideal way of “exploring” different wines, which can then be ordered by the bottle. Then again others, of an indolent nature, will see it as an ideal way of drinking wine without going further than their hallway.

Sot let us persevere with this concept. After all, it would appear to remove the anxiety associated with courier deliveries. And which of my generation, raised on Ice Pops in plastic tubes, will even need a glass?

The trouble is, there is something disturbingly surgical about these pouches. The red looks and feels like a blood transfusion bag. The white as if it should be attached to a pole as a saline drip. Or, worse, to the receiving end of a catheter.

One of my first thoughts was that they could be an ideal way to smuggle wine into venues where bottles are banned. Concerts, football matches, airline flights etc. On a cursory pat-down body search, it would just feel like the blubber of overweight. Or, for a certain section of the wine-drinking ‘community’, a breast implant.

Unfortunately you would then have to get your pouch open. There is a knack to opening plastic packaging, which I do not possess. Witness the half-destroyed blocks of cheese, or the frozen peas bursting from their bags as I wrench them open. Sealed to convey wine through the post without leakage, it will clearly take more than my fingers and teeth to open a wine pouch. – and in the present climate I do not intend trying to get a pair of scissors past that same security search.

So home drinking it is, then. Where I did try drinking the wine directly from the pouch, and made a complete mess of a perfectly good shirt. You try drinking from the corner of a plastic bag.

Does the food-grade plastic taint the wine? No. That concern surely faded years ago, when we started drinking water out of plastic bottles, where I suspect taint would be rather more noticeable than in an industrial-strength Red.

I was posted a perfectly serviceable, fruity yet taut Vinho Verde, which they then sell at a slightly ambitious £10.92 a bottle; and a repellent Valpolicella (£12.59), with a bouquet of stuffed toys and  bizarre notes of peanut and cardboard. But the intention is that you drink it (from a glass) in the week it arrives; do not assume, like me, that any modern wine packaging, like wine boxes and sealed goblets, is all about preserving wine indefinitely. This one may have suffered while I was distracted drinking other wines from actual bottles.

The Decanting Club costs from £4.50 to £6.50 per 150ml pouch, depending on your subscription. This, they say, is “cheaper than a glass of wine in a pub”, which it probably is. It depends on your pub. And the size of their glasses.

But £6.50 in the supermarket would get you an entire bottle, with just as good a chance of liking the result. Only, if you do like it, you can then drink the full 750ml. You can cook with the rest if you don’t. Or, if you’re CJ, drink it all the same.

Of course, these are not wines you will find in the supermarket. Which reinforces the idea that you are “exploring wine”, by trying “rare grapes from undiscovered regions”, and sharing details on their website. It’s a poor substitute for the sort of “exploring” of “undiscovered regions” I was brought up on, Boys’ Own stories of proper explorers, like Livingstone, Scott and Shackleton. But then I suppose their kind of exploring has become somewhat tiresome (“Oh no, not another unaided charity walk to the South Pole with a novel kind of hindrance…”). So we’ll have to make do with staying on our sofas and exploring the world of wine. That or the world of Haribo.

With an increasing number of wine merchants offering Enomatic tasting in store, there is competition in the sampling market. But the idea of wine coming through your letterbox each week? It’s all good fun, until someone loses an eye.

But in the end, of course, you’ll still be buying and getting a case of wine delivered, which will inevitably arrive when you’re out or in the toilet.

Unless they post you 60 pouches through your letterbox instead.

PK