Are you happy with your relationship with wine? I’m finding mine a bit complicated. Last week, my wife and I went to a swanky restaurant for dinner. The second lockdown was coming, and it was our last chance to have food brought to us by people who weren’t driving scooters. And of course I wanted to order some wine. A bottle of wine, in fact. A 75cl bottle of red wine, to be precise.
Except of course, when it comes to wine, that isn’t being very precise. A waiter handed me a long and tightly printed list, which was vaguely reminiscent of the incomprehensible pages in the middle of my grandfather’s copy of the Daily Telegraph on which share prices were printed. Roughly 46% of the items on this impenetrable document were 75cl bottles of red wine. I scanned the names for something familiar and saw various references to tempranillo, which rang a bell.
But the prices! They were so incredibly varied. The most expensive items cost literally 100 times the price of the cheapest. I’m well aware that wine prices differ a great deal, but this seemed a huge span for one restaurant. The food menu didn’t invite you to choose between several hundred quid’s worth of caviar and a Twix. I was startled by the range – and became worried that the cheap wine bottles weren’t 75cl at all, but quarter bottles, or small samples, or bottles from a bistro in a model village.
And that’s not something you can check. It’s embarrassing to ask the sommelier if the inexpensive wines are actually very, very tiny or if, conversely, the expensive ones are in fact enough wine for a whole year – a sort of wine contract, with a generous monthly fixed limit, like with phone data. You can only say you’re having the beef and are looking for something “relatively full-bodied”, or “on the lighter side”, or “fruity” or – and this would be really going for it so good luck – “oaky”. Can reds be oaky? Or is that just whites? Chardonnay? Oaky chardonnay? Not oaky merlot. That sounds like a small-time criminal.
Anyway, after two or three minutes of light worrying, my eye fixed upon a little cluster of chiantis within the list, which I thought I could vaguely gesture at to the sommelier and then order the most expensive of the three. Oh yes! That was my plan! I swear! This was a special occasion – last restaurant meal before lockdown. Now this “most expensive of the three” was well down towards the bottom of the price range overall, but it was the big shot in its little section. I don’t want my wife to think I’m mean, and I’d calculated this wine to be the most inexpensive way of achieving that goal. It was splashing out, but in a controlled way. There’s a splash, but you’ve put down a waterproof mat. So not the sort of splash that might damage a costly wood floor.
The ordering didn’t quite go as planned. The wine waiter was clearly the alpha male and took control. Thank God for capitalism and the licence fee because, in a hunter-gatherer society, he’d be taking my food, not providing it. Anyway, I gestured to the three chiantis, and he then persuaded me to buy the most expensive. Except he hadn’t persuaded me, I was going to buy it anyway, but it looked like he had. Now I didn’t seem generous and free-spending – the suave fine-wine expert who likes all the right things to be oaky – I just looked weak.
I really like wine, of almost all kinds, which is a huge disincentive to becoming a connoisseur. Why learn about it, why refine my palate, when that can only undermine the simple chemical joy I currently take in plonk? But I find this so hard to admit under wine-ordering or wine-discussing conditions. The social pressure to seem interested and a bit knowledgable and yet keen to learn more – to sip and nod and study the label and say “Yes, that is raisiny” – is overwhelming and, in retrospect, mortifying.
Wine, people sometimes say under circumstances in which I’ve got some in my mouth and am trying to look wise about it, is actually a great investment. “Oh it’s much better than investing in [insert name of something I also haven’t invested in]!” they say. “Is it really?” I reply in the aftermath of a scholarly swallow. But the key to a successful wine investment, it appears, is not to drink it. Drinking it has a very negative effect on the investment, which is why many wine investors take the precaution of holding their investment elsewhere. Not necessarily offshore – but a safe distance away from their corkscrew.
It must have been this sort of wine that some robbers pinched from the cellar of a Nottingham wine merchant last month. The company is a trusted repository for many celebrities’ wine and whisky collections, including a stash belonging to the late singer Whitney Houston. Houston’s booze was left untouched in the two raids, whether out of incompetence or respect we don’t know, but the valuable alcohol of other household names and TV stars was apparently filched in daring raids that involved burrowing in from surrounding derelict buildings. The thieves then snuck into the cellars in the daytime, when the security alarms were deactivated, and were only discovered by chance when an employee happened to go into the cellar to fetch a bottle. By then £50k’s worth was gone.
What a weird state of affairs: all that lovely booze, just sitting there, under Nottingham, never being touched until now: there to accrue value and then be sold, possibly without it even having to be moved.
I’m surprised it didn’t occur to the wine merchants just not to tell anyone about the robbery. How many of those celebrity investors would ever have come for their wine? Whitney Houston never came for hers. It’s investment wine, not drinking wine – it’s notional, like a currency. Is it really necessary for notional wine to be backed by actual wine? The pound is no longer backed by gold. Perhaps it’s time to take wine off the wine standard.
