I Bought It, So I'll Drink It - The Joys (Or Not) Of Drinking Wine. Charles Jennings & Paul Keers

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      I cast my mind back ten years, and I see a thinner, darker-haired, fractionally blither version of myself, limping off to get a bottle of wine, possibly to take to a dinner party, possibly to consume in morbid silence at home. I am spoiled for choice. Within reasonably easy walking distance, there are two supermarkets – a Safeway and a Waitrose – and four free-standing wine shops. There is a Threshers, a Victoria Wine, an Oddbins and a Majestic. There may even be one or two others that I’ve forgotten. They all sell wine.

      Leap forward to the present day, and Threshers and Victoria have both disappeared from our part of town, leaving their premises empty and abandoned, while Safeway, having had a brief fling at being a Morrisons, was rudely turned into an enlarged car park for the even more engorged Waitrose next door. Oddbins at first filled a huge cornershop space, then filled it less convincingly, and finally didn’t fill it at all, but handed it over to a wildly over-optimistic independent wine merchant, who did his best to bring the art of fine drinking to our very slightly substandard neighbourhood.

      The over-optimistic wine merchant kept it going for a good eighteen months before decamping to the other side of the main road and into smaller, more manageable premises, more befitting his bespoke trade ambitions. Meanwhile, another wildly overoptimistic wine merchant succeeded to the ex-Oddbins slot, but with even fewer resources than the first one. Majestic, tucked away from these dissolutions and reformations, picked up the business they lost, and prospered.

      But where are we now, right now? Unsurprisingly, the first over-optimistic wine merchant has gone bust. Pizza flyers and double-glazing circulars litter his shop entrance. The second overoptimistic wine merchant is doing his best with a retail space the size of a basketball court and some comfy chairs, but for how long? In the interim, it must be said, not one but two Tesco Metro stores – those little urban stop’n’shops – have taken root. And Waitrose just keeps getting bigger. Thus, we began the decade with four wine stores and two supermarkets. We now have two wine stores, one supermarket, and two chain convenience stores. I am guessing that this is pretty typical of High Street UK.

      Is there any reason to fret about this? Patterns of wine consumption have changed out of all recognition in the space of a generation, so why shouldn’t the retailing? My parents did their booze shopping in a world of off-licences and one-man suppliers, who kept limited hours and even more limited stock. If you could even find a bottle of Riesling in one of these outlets, the chances were that it was sharing the shelf with a tin of Long Life lager and some Babychams. In the great scheme of things, we haven’t lost much. In fact we’ve gained. So is there any cause for anxiety?

      Well, I’m gripped by a feeling that I can’t quite rationalise and can’t quite shake off: that shopping for wine in a warehouse has stopped being as much fun as it used to be. I can remember going, over a quarter of a century ago, to my first wine warehouse, where I was knocked out by its immensity, its unbelievably exciting range, its stupendous prices, its gritty, authentic, warehouse atmosphere, all concrete floors and industrial lighting. And the fact that you had to buy a minimum of a case, which made me feel like a real grown-up: all that wine and only one liver to deal with it.

      Nowadays the warehouses are still there, with the concrete floors and the draughty ambience, but the wines are starting to look a bit familiar, pretty much like the ones you see in the supermarkets, and the prices are okay but not magical, and the draughty ambience is starting to seem less like a justifiable approach to great value retailing and more like a convention, a reflex, another bit of branding rather than the expression of an ethos. You know what I mean. It’s not exactly special.

      I like wine warehouses. My heart still quickens when I pass one. If they disappeared I would be upset, partly because it would mean losing something I was attached to and partly because the whole retail ecosystem of the country, would dwindle.

      Except, except. How sentimental can anyone afford to be? Maybe my kids will come to regard our notion of a high-street wine merchant with as much amused condescension as I grant the memory of the off-licence with my dad bumbling in on a Saturday morning to get his soda syphon refilled. If the wine merchant goes the way of the milliner and the draper, does it matter? Why shouldn’t we get everything online or from a supermarket chain? Nostalgia is a disease, so let’s embrace whatever the future might bring in as sanguine a frame of mind as we can manage. To which end, I unheedingly take another swig from my Waitrose generic Côtes du Rhône and await developments at the big old warehouse down the road.

       Befriending a Wine Merchant

      PK