Now I’ll be the first to admit I am no Oz Clarke, thank God, but the current state of the wine market leaves me a little, erm – off. Admittedly I am basing my criticism on the weekly shop at Tesco – but as they now claim to be the nation’s biggest wine merchant, maybe the multinational dross on offer truly reflects the market.
My first gripe about grapes is the sheer volume of wine from faraway places. There is a perfectly good producer of wine just the other side of the channel – but amazingly Tesco feel the need to stock more wine from the antipodes than they do from France.
The rubbish on offer from the USA and South America also defies belief. In an era when the entire world, let alone the Tesco shopper is being conned into thinking carbon footprints are important, the number of air miles owned by the average wine bottle is quite staggering.
But the thing which really gets my goat is the way wines are labelled by grape variety – as though this means it will taste exactly the same every time – whether it comes from Argentina, Chile, New Zealand – or some drought-stricken part of Australia.
Behind this con lies the rather unpalatable truth that wine is being made on an industrial scale by the same methods the world over. Which to me is a bit of a shame.
I am not overly enthusiastic about many things French, but their supreme Gallic indifference to the one-size-fits-all approach of latter-day wine-making definitely gets my thumbs up. Call me old-fashioned, but if I really want an oak-aged red – then it is rather nice to have had it actually aged in oak, rather than have a few over-sized teabags of oak chippings added.
And I see nothing wrong in getting to know certain areas and vintages.
Worst of all is the abomination of what passes for Rosé in the summer. Vile, sickly concoctions with euphemisms like ‘blush’ come nowhere near approximating even a half decent French Rosé – so why are they thrust at us from the supermarket shelves?
The old chestnut is that suppliers are only providing what people are prepared to buy – but that is just rubbish. They are stocking what they can get the most profit on.
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