Looking suitably serious in the wine aisle of our local supermarket, I must have come across as knowledgeable about the world of grape-based drinks. “Is this one any good?” asked a very pleasant lady, a fellow senior citizen. “This one” was a bottle of Australian Shiraz, selected from the bottom shelf, retailing at around £4.50. Minding my Ps and Qs, I refrained from replying: “No, that’s absolute piss. Don’t touch it with a bargepole”, instead saying, I feel slightly too pompously, “No it isn’t. The wines on the bottom shelf are there for a reason. Try this one,” I added, pointing to an Aussie Shiraz coming in at slightly over a tenner. “But that’s expensive,” she replied. I nodded. “You get what you pay for.”
I am no wine connoisseur and have been caught out misidentifying wine for longer than I care to remember but I know crap wine when I see and drink it and it is, I feel, a simple matter of fact that you cannot buy a decent bottle of wine for under a fiver. In fact, I’ll go much further than that. It is increasingly rare to find a decent bottle of wine for under a tenner.
There was definitely a time when quantity came before quality and the first thing I’d look for on the shelf was price and how cheap a wine was. That was back in the days when I could consume a substantial amount of alcohol with only limited following day after effects. Advancing old age has reduced my tolerance levels and these days it’s far more about less booze and more quality.
I know from personal experience how hard it can be to accept that in order to drink better wine you have to pay a substantial wedge to do so. If you are the type of person I used to be, who thought nothing of getting through a bottle of wine every night, with the assistance I should add of my partner, paying a tenner for a bottle rather than a fiver is a big step. If you are what is known as a boozer – and I think that tag could certainly be attached to me, certainly in my slightly younger day – then a cheap Aussie Shiraz or Argentinian Malbec would certainly have the desired effect, that effect to be some degree of being pissed.
The being pissed aspect is relevant. Why do we drink in the first place? Well, because it makes us feel good, at least until the following morning. I’d like to think that drinking for pleasure, which is to say the pleasure of drinking higher quality wine, has rather become my default position.
Not that we are wealthy, far from it. I still baulk at a wine bottle that costs over a tenner, perhaps only buying it if the supermarket concerned has a special offer on it but now and then I will invest in an insanely expensive bottle, like New Zealand’s Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc which usually costs more than £25, because it is demonstrably better than a bottom shelf number at a quarter of the price. In other words, I’d rather have one bottle of Cloudy Bay than four or even five bottles of cheap wine that has been brought to the UK in huge containers and bottled in Avonmouth, near Bristol. I am not interested in sobriety, but in terms of wine consumption I find that less is more.
I hope the lady in our local supermarket did not find me too much of a pretentious wine snob. I am far from that. But as with most things, the cheapest wine option isn’t the best, even if it does get you as pissed as more expensive wines. I guess if the whole purpose of wine drinking is to get pissed, I suspect this blog will have passed you by! I was that man once, so I do understand!
