March Wine Club

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There are many ways of buying cheap wine, though fewer means of buying good cheap wine. Supermarkets often have bargains. Recently, however, I went to a tasting by a very downmarket chain — they had Châteauneuf du Pape for £6.99 and a Chablis for £5.99. These tasted of nothing, and I was amazed at lax appellation laws which allowed them through.

You can go over to France, and that works fine if you want quantity rather than quality. In a highly competitive market, the better French wines tend to be sold abroad or else by specialist merchants; the hypermarchés frequently sell stuff you would not strip paint with. Or you can go for one of those apparently amazing ‘£40 off per case — our special introductory offer! Wine worth £89 delivered to your door for only £49!’ ads in the colour supplements. You wonder how they do it. Well, wine is priced at whatever level the people who sell it choose. As a journalist, I could do the same. ‘This article, valued at £150, yours for only £110!’ Meaningless. Those wines are OK, and are probably ‘worth’ something between the list price and the super-duper special offer. But they are churned out in huge quantities to fill a voracious and not very discriminating market. You can do better.

Such as buying from Private Cellar, a newish company founded by people who used to work for Corney & Barrow. We have run three mini-bars with them, and the steady increase in sales must reflect readers’ satisfaction. The wines are carefully selected from growers who make only as much as they can while still maintaining standards. It is the crucial difference between the mass-produced and the hand-made.