The future is three for a fiver

Two entirely unrelated events in the world of wine have set me to cogitating on the likely future shape of the drinking habits of UK Man (and, increasingly, Woman). Apart from a vague sense that the shape will be a bulbous one – probably draped in a “shell” suit - I have typically drawn no useful conclusions.

At the vast London International Wine Fair the other week there were over 22,500 wines “on taste,” of which I sampled a pitiful percentage of a single per cent. Among the hopefuls was the Macedonian company Tikveŝ of whom - in a rare moment of insightfulness - BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme ( … just how do they muster that level of portentousness for such frequently anodyne content?) noted that this was the fifth successive year of their exhibiting, in some style, without ever having stirred the slightest ripple of commercial interest in their excellent wines. Randomly, I also sampled good stuff from producers in New York State, Romania and Uruguay – none of which had yet secured “representation” in the UK.

Should they ever do so, they might one day be lucky enough to be selected as one of the wines offered – in a V-sign shaped gesture of some chutzpah not necessarily aimed in the direction of the binge-drinking lobby (the contra part of it, that is) – by one of our leading supermarket chains on a “three-for-a-fiver” basis. Yes! “Three-for-a-fiver!” After extracting excise duty and VAT, the remaining cost is a negative number, which may be seen by the competition as extracting something else of a liquid nature. There are strings attached: you have to surrender some “Clubcard” points – whatever they may be – and, for all I know, give the chief executive droit de seigneur over your first-born but, come on, roll up everybody… we are talking three-for-a-fiver here!