The way I think...

I'm often struck by other people's - especially wine people's - difficulty in coming to terms with the way I think. Why, they wonder, do I always have to bang on about all the things I think are wrong with the status quo?

Leafing through this week's Financial Times, I was surprised and delighted to come across an answer to that question - in an interview with one of my literary heroes: the writer, philosopher and playwright Michael Frayn. 

"The very fact that we can say, 'If I were you' is significant... You can't really understand how things are unless you can think and express that they could be otherwise"

Time, Money and Wine. A personal theory of relativity

Poster by Viktor Hertz

Time and money are both rather peculiar. They each share the odd quality of being simultaneously absolute and relative. Anyone who has ever lacked the means to pay a bill, or the time to complete a task, knows all about the implacability of an empty wallet or vacant top half of an hourglass. But... then there's the relativity. The way that five minutes can feel like an hour when you are waiting for something to happen, and how, in other circumstances, 60 minutes can somehow seem to flash past in an instant. A tiny amount of money that means nothing to you or me might offer the difference between life and death for someone in the Third World in need of food, water or medicine.

Relatively speaking, a hectare of Margaux vineyard costs a huge amount more than a hectare of Médoc and even the humblest bottle of AOC Margaux can command a hugely higher price than a more lovingly- and better-made wine with the other 'M' word on its label. But the absolute cost of producing and packaging the two liquids can be startlingly similar.

When I was a consumer wine writer, one of my main tasks on behalf of my readers was to find and recommend bottles of wine that represented especially good value for money. Bargain Bulgarians; cut-price Corbières; Penedes for pennies... Those were the meat and drink of my columns. Naturally, I tried to intersperse them with in-depth introductions to unfamiliar wine regions and penetrating producer profiles, but neither my editors nor my readers really appreciated these nearly as much as lists of how to save a few pounds when filling that week's shopping basket.

What I was rarely bothered about in those days was how and why those recommended bottles got to be as cheap as they were - provided they tasted good. To be blunt, I paid little more heed to their background than a fashion journalist singing the praises of clothes manufactured in Asian sweatshops. Now, with the exception of some non Fair Trade wines from South America and South Africa, wine isn't usually produced by people on slave wages, but everything comes at a cost, and some businesses are a lot less sustainable than others. Bulgaria - and Eastern Europe in general - offers a good example of the potential unsustainability of cheapness. Consumers and critics in the UK and elsewhere were delighted to buy ludicrously inexpensive Soviet era reds made with the help of Californian expertise that was, in turn, facilitated by the eagerness of US Cola giants to barter their product on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

When that barrier was removed, the collectivist agricultural system dismantled and land redistributed, interest in the entire region evaporated at a speed that will be familiar to many pop groups after the release of their unsuccessful second album. Besides, there were bargains to be found elsewhere.

Cheapness is a dangerous long-term strategy in a capitalist world. Make and sell a product with a paper-thin profit margin and no spare cash to spend on brand-building and there's always the looming risk that somebody, somewhere will be even more desperate to make a sale than you are. When Chinese wages rise too far for Western t-shirt and toy manufacturers, well, there's always a factory in Bangladesh eager for the business. 

But agriculture, especially wine, is less flexible. Those better paid Chinese workers may now be - probably are - making higher value solar panels rather than cheap plastic flipflops. Vineyards and winemakers, especially in the old world, find it rather less easy to adopt new skills. The Bulgarian vines are mostly still turning out an annual crop of grapes that nobody wants to buy at any kind of premium price.

The taint of cheapness is not only a concern in Eastern Europe, however. Despite China's flurry of interest in the wines of France's most famous red wine region, the bulk price for Bordeaux Rouge has stubbornly stuck at under 1.20 euros per litre, surprisingly close to what you might pay for bulk Minervois these days and less than the real price 20 years ago - but still roughly twice what you'd spend on some perfectly drinkable wine on the other side of the Spanish frontier.

When I consider the effort required to tend vines, grow grapes and make wine, and compare these ex-cellars prices to the ones charged for a rather easer-to-produce beverage such as say, tonic water, they seem to be simply too low. 

Cheap regionally designated wine, like the €1.89 AOC Bordeaux I snapped in a French Aldi is - for whatever reason - unsustainably underpriced. Just like the burgers that cost-cutting manufacturers produced from horse instead of beef, and the Big Macs that McDonalds made using fat and trimmings 'washed with' ammonium hydroxide.

But 'underpriced' was not a term I often used as a wine critic. Unlike 'overpriced' which I (along with almost all of my UK colleagues) regularly dragged out to describe almost anything from the Napa Valley (or the rest of the US) or Priorat, or any wine that had caught the eye of a top US opinion-former. Time has, of course, proved us all wrong, just as it has given a huge slap around the face to everyone who suggested that Starbucks et al would never get away with charging $4 - the global average - for a cup of undistinguished coffee whose raw ingredients probably struggle to add up to 20c.

While writing this, I'm thinking of two estates in the southern half of France, growing very similar grapes on very similar land. One - whom we'll call Dom. Trop-Cher (DTC, for short) consistently sells its wine for a much higher price than the other: Dom. Trop-Bon-Marché (DTB). Part of that difference can be attributed to slightly lower yields and the use of more new oak, but by my estimation, that might, at most, explain 15% of the extra cost. The rest is down to the philosophy of the owners. I happen to prefer the style of the DTB wines; Robert Parker, predictably favours DTC, but it's a matter of taste. Both are similarly good. In my previous life as a critic, I praised the family behind DTB for what I saw as their lack of greed. I took too little notice of the worried look on their faces when a pneumatic press unexpectedly needed to be replaced and I positively overlooked the fact that a necessary part of their income seemed to come from renting out rooms in a gite next to their house.

Today, and particularly after reading a recent Decanter interview with Anthony Barton in which he ruefully commented on the lack of real appreciation he got for his policy of moderate pricing at Leoville and Langoa Barton, I feel rather differently.


Excuse my pedantry, if you would, but surely the term 'overpriced' should only be used when it is established that sufficient consumers have been exclusively deterred from making a purchase by what they perceive to be too high a cost. In other words, whatever any critic may personally think of its quality, style or packaging, a $100 Argentine Malbec, $250 Napa Cab or $1000 Bordeaux are technically 'worth' every penny of those prices to their buyers until those buyers stop being prepared to pay them. Like the £250,000 that 700 people have said they'll each pay for a short flight on a Virgin spaceship.

But the thing I failed to understand, as a bargain-chasing hack, was just how close to financial failure some of the wineries I was recommending often came. I recall an Australian flying winemaker disdainfully telling me about how a well-respected Chilean had - unbelievable though it seemed - sold several tons of his best grapes to a competitor during the harvest. The way the story was recounted, it sounded precisely as though the winery owner had pimped his daughter to the local brothel. 

It was a decade later that I learned the background to the deal: the neighbour had actually done the winemaker a favour by buying the fruit for a bundle of cash that enabled him to pay his vintage workers. The bank had offered no support and, without that money, the business would have gone under. Other family-owned wineries I've seen have been forced to sell out completely because of situations such as a UK supermarket reneging on a deal. And then, of course, there are the countless small producers who simply can't afford to make their wine as well as they'd like, for want of the money that would pay for a little more work in the vineyard and slightly stricter selection in the cellars. As they point out, at €1.20/litre there's not a lot of spare change in the till. Stated bluntly, far too many producers of attractively-priced wine are just one lost-customer or bad harvest away from financial disaster. 

(One reason most observers fail to notice this in Europe is the proportion - over half - the wine that is actually produced by cooperatives which are still feather-bedded when compared to individual estates working in the same regions).

When you get behind the scenes you quickly realise how the producers asking the laughably high prices have not only managed to survive the recession but maintain their quality and invest in some marketing, while the fair-price brigade have struggled - and are now often in an even worse financial state than they were before the axe fell.

All of which helps to explain why, based on current evidence, if I had to invest some absolute money or time, I reckon I'd be both relatively and absolutely wiser to do so in a Starbucks franchise than a few hectares of basic Bordeaux.

Sex, Shopping, Wine... and Aldi

Like 99.9999% of the rest of my fellow human beings, I have no idea how Google gets the numbers it does on its 'results', but I have to say that the idea of three hundred million sites sharing "sex and shopping" does strike me as a little strange. How and why did a pairing of these - to my mind at least - rather different activities come to be of even passing interest to so many people?

Okay, I know that "Sex & Shopping" was the title of a British TV documentary series about porn, and that anything that includes the 'S' word sells, but even when you substitute the word 'pleasure', it still looks as though a surprisingly large mass of people associate the process of going out to buy stuff with, well, feeling good...

Now, it would be interesting to know how many of those 129m people were men and how many were women. After all, the accepted wisdom is that the two sexes view the process of shopping very differently. The following cartoon which I came across here 

illustrates a theory that psychologist Steve Taylor explains rather convincingly in a recent Psychology Today article. 

10,000 or so years ago, Taylor points out, men hunted and women gathered. The first of these activities only took two or three hours per day and involved the alpha males finding and killing a beast and dragging it back to the cave as rapidly as possible, before other hunters or beasts stole it from you, or before it went bad. Meanwhile, their female mates were patiently going from bush to bush in the quest for the fruit, nuts and berries that would make up 80-90% of everybody's diet. Obviously, some of the brightly coloured stuff waiting to be picked turned out to be poisonous and some of the apples had worms wriggling around inside them, so the women had to become skilful at taking the time and trouble to sort the good stuff from the dross.

A Telegraph columnist tackles the issue head on.

However offensive it might be to feminists, the notion of women being hard-wired to enjoy browsing is certainly supported by the circumstantial evidence to be witnessed in the clothes and homeware sections of any mall, but... and here I'm moving to the nub of the matter, it seems fair to question how much pleasure humans of either sex get from the 'shopping experience' on offer at the average supermarket grocery store.

To be frank, I don't care how many cafes Waitrose introduce into their shops or how many freshly-cooked bread smells or bunches of flowers are deployed to draw me into some of their competitors' stores, to me - and I suspect to a great many other people - supermarkets are all about breakfast cereal, detergent, bottled water... heavy, bulky stuff I'm going to have to lug home.Yes, I love food, so I do actually sometimes enjoy the part of the shopping experience that involves exercising my finely honed powers of selection over the prawns or plums that are going to go into my basket, but to be frank, that only seems to involve a small part of the time I spend in Waitcos or Asburies. And on the occasions - the majority - when I'm in a hurry (especially when accompanied by my kids) I actually balk at the choice. If the first apples I see look sufficiently appealing and fairly priced, I may unashamedly pick up the kilo or two that I need and happily tick off an item on my list.

Belying her feminine stereotype, my partner is no fan of any kind of shopping (I actually dislike the process less than she does) and we've handled the fruit-and-veg-selection issue, for the moment at least, by doing the middle class thing of getting a weekly box from a nice company called Abel & Cole who even provide recipes to go with the ingredients. The loo roll, soap powder and cereals also usually arrive at our door from a supermarket van.

The Abel & Cole box

And then of course, we use independent butchers and fishmongers and I make forays to shop at various supermarkets and to see what's on their shelves and in their shoppers' baskets. Which brings me naturally to Aldi and Lidl. Probably inevitably, the Germans have already created a word for 'shopping experience': Einkaufserlebnis. For all I know, they may even have one that precisely describes how it feels to push a trolley around one of the German discounters' stores. The term would have absolutely nothing to do with pleasure, other than the satisfaction of handing over less cash after your long wait at the checkout than you might elsewhere. These are utilitarian places with little to distract you from the business of hunting and gathering - even if that involves picking up unexpected items such as the frozen lobsters I saw at €5 in a French branch of Aldi last week.

For a male or female wine lover - someone who loves to cast their eyes slowly and thoughtfully over shelves packed with wine - the discounters are about as close to a pleasure dome as a railway station bookshop would be to an aficionado of great literature. But, of course most normal people are neither bookworms nor wine buffs, which is why there are now so many fewer book and wine shops on high streets across the globe - and so much online buying from the likes of Amazon. A small range of perfectly good, nicely packaged bottles, may actually suit a lot of people a lot better than the scary 'wall of wine' favoured by the traditional larger stores. Especially when they are really attractively priced. The extraordinary growth of the discounters - and the number of people who shop at them as well as at more premium stores - certainly suggests that the old-fashioned hypermarket is rapidly becoming the dinosaur of the retail world.

Both images from linksonjack.com

The clumsiness with which the lumbering T-Rex's of the UK market are trying to defend themselves against the threat from the discounters is brilliantly lampooned by a Lidl advertisement noted here by Contagious.com blogger Dan Southern, who is also responsible for the discovery of the glorious image below from the Simpsons.

Pleasure is, by definition, an essentially personal emotion. Some people get some of their kicks out of writing blog posts like this; some, hopefully get at least a little pleasure out of reading them. Maybe desperate housewives really did often enjoy their outings to the local supermarket; maybe the colours of all those boxes and tins added something positive to their lives that they weren't getting from daytime television or their nuclear families. But that was then and this is now. Today, for every hunter-male or gatherer-female who really wants to spend a few minutes thoughtfully selecting between a Gigondas and a Vacqueyras or a Rioja and a Navarra, I'll bet that there are probably 20 who'll be far happier to grab the inexpensive, award-winning Rhone or Spanish red from the tiny range at Aldidl, or simply to receive a delivery of the stuff they bought last time*. And the sooner the wine industry understands this the healthier it will be.

Nicely packaged bargain Bordeaux on sale
in Aldi, France last week

************

* Support for the picture I'm painting of the average wine 'shopping experience' comes from University of Adelaide-based academic Larry Lockshin as described in this piece by Australian writer Tony Love. According to Lockshin's research, buyers spend 40 seconds selecting a bottle. Over 80% of purchases are based on recognition of a wine the consumer has previously bought; only half of the buyers pay attention to grape variety, region, brand and vintage. A third focus exclusively on price (though not necessarily on cheapness). And all of this came out of post-purchase research in Australia, arguably one of the most wine-sophisticated in the world. Don't kid yourself by imagining very different results in any other country...

Why Tesco's woes are raising a cheer in Germany

A small - or possibly fairly sizeable - bomb may be about to explode in the heart of UK retailing. In the wake of the revelation that Tesco, the country's biggest grocer, had overstated its latest profit warning by a cool £250m and the reported suspension of several of its top executives, there is a strong likelihood that the company may have to face some very tough questioning. And so may some of its competitors.

Adrian Bailey, Chair of the UK parliamentary Business Committee has been quoted - in International Business Times - as saying that "We may well as a committee want to look at this. Not just at Tesco but at what is going on in the retail industry and in the relationship with the suppliers to see if the issues we came across two years ago are still there."

According to 2012 House of Commons documents "In April 2008 the Competition Commission completed an enquiry of the UK grocery market, following long-running concerns that the four major chains exploited their market power to put undue pressure on suppliers and to compete unfairly with smaller retailers. Although, in the Commission’s view, the country’s supermarkets were delivering a ‘good deal for consumers’, it concluded “the transfer of excessive risk and unexpected costs by grocery retailers to their suppliers through various supply chain practices if unchecked will have an adverse effect on investment and innovation in the supply chain, and ultimately on consumers.” 

There are very few wine suppliers who would say that Britain's supermarkets no longer apply 'undue pressure' on the companies with whom they deal. Indeed most freely admit that they would greatly prefer to sell to the German discounters Aldi and Lidl, than their UK counterparts. As one said to me recently "The discounters drive a hard bargain but you know precisely where you are with them. They buy what they say they are going to buy, for the price they agree to pay".

Consumers also increasingly appreciate the way the discounters do business. Lidl is seeing annual growth of 18% in the UK, while at Aldi, the figure is 30%. Tesco, by contrast, is slipping backwards at a rate of 4.5%

Most analysis of the differences between the discounters and the established UK retailers have reasonably focused on the former chains' smaller outlets, more limited ranges and service levels - and lower margins. What few have mentioned is the fundamental philosophical gap between working practices of the two groups. The discounters, despite their size, are little different from any corner shop or market trader: they buy stuff and then sell what they have bought. Compare this with the model now applied by Britain's biggest supermarket chains - including the middle class darling Waitrose, and you might be looking at two sets of political parties, so wide is the difference between them. Coopbury, Asdrose and Morisco et al rely for part - often a big part - of their income on a wide range of payments that have little or nothing to do with the simple business of buying and selling. Some of these payments are more voluntary than others.

It was to handle the involuntary ones that a Grocery Code was established last year, along with a Grocery Code Adjudicator (CCA) in order, in the words of Farmer's Weekly magazine, 'to tackle unfair supermarket buying practices'. According to a July 2014 report in that same publication, last June's  GCA annual conference revealed that "80% of suppliers had experienced an issue with a retailer, but only 23% would consider giving evidence. Fear of retailer retribution prevented 58% of respondents from raising issues, while 40% worried the GCA would be unable to do anything."

Where the GCA has been involved, it has actually proved to be effective. Tesco apparently 'retracted requests for shelf-positioning payments' after evidence was brought to the GCA, while 'The Co-operative stopped asking suppliers to “compensate” it under joint business agreements' after the adjudicator was informed. Uncovering these practices was not easy, however. It apparently involved 'forensic auditing (retailers trawling communications to find ways to claim money from suppliers)'. Following the recent revelations, it seems fair to imagine that Tesco is about to be the target of rather a lot more forensic auditing.

Successful GCA-mediated cases are rare because, as Graham Ruddick wrote in yesterday's Daily Telegraph, "Many suppliers are too scared to speak out against a larger retailer for fear of being delisted or replaced by a rival, so they suffer in silence and agree to the unreasonable demands being placed on them."

Ruddick lists a set of recent instances that serve as an indictment of the way retailing in general is conducted in the UK, and the regularity with which retailers renegociate deals they have already agreed. In 2013, "Debenhams demanded a one-off fee - a rebate - from suppliers worth 2.5pc of its outstanding payments and said it would apply a 2.5pc discount to orders it had already agreed with suppliers" while, general retailers Argos and houseware specialists Homebase "applied a 2pc rebate to future orders". John Lewis, parent to Waitrose and every Briton's model retailer, "told suppliers last year they would be subject to a rebate of up to 5.25pc on annual sales". In May, motoring accessory retailer Halfords sought to fund a £100m turnaround plan with help from one-off payments by its suppliers amounting to up to 10% of the cost of their annual sales to the retailer. In another Farmers Weekly article, readers are warned against retailers tracking their - the farmers' - profits and using them as a basis for rebate demands they want to levy. In another context, this would sound very like the kind of protection racket operated by the Mafia.

The law has a way of dealing with gangs who threaten businesses with violence as a means of exacting cash, but it also sanctions businesses who abuse their employees. A boss can't simply demand that his workers hand over a percentage of their agreed wage in return for a - still uncertain - measure of job security.

Whether or not the world's wine suppliers will ultimately benefit from the fallout from the Great Tesco Profit Warning Scandal of 2014 remains to be seen, but I'll bet that a couple of German retailers are already raising a glass or two of celebratory good-but-very-inexpensive Sekt.

Drinking the Kool Aid

From strangecult.com 

Every so often, somebody gives me a phrase I really can't let go of. UK-born PR person, Louise Hurren, who earns most of her living by helping small Languedoc producers gain some kind of visibility outside their region, did precisely that when she used the expression "I guess I must have drunk the Kool Aid, because I felt utterly enthused about – well, everything" in a nice recent blog post. She was writing about the seventh annual wine bloggers conference in California, and it was the combination of wine bloggers and Kool Aid that really worked for me. For those who have forgotten, or who are too young to recall, Wikipedia helpfully offers this reminder that: 

"Drinking the Kool-Aid" is a figure of speech commonly used in the United States that refers to a person or group holding an unquestioned belief, argument, or philosophy without critical examination... The phrase derives from the November 1978 Jonestown deaths, where members of the Peoples Temple, who were followers of the Reverend Jim Jones committed suicide by drinking a mixture of a powdered soft drink flavoring agent laced with cyanide.

What a perfect description, I thought, of so many wine bloggers and, indeed, other wine writers and enthusiasts: people who have become so enthused about wine in general, or a particular region or style - and quite especially 'natural' wine - that any critical faculties they may ever have possessed, seem to have been totally nullified. 

Almost every wine region covered in Decanter magazine (and most other similar publications) is described in such glowing, uncritical terms that I regularly have to check that I'm not reading a piece of advertorial, paid for by the area concerned.  'Natural' winemakers like Frank Cornlissen, self-taught producer of some pricy but ludicrously faulty wines, are written about indulgently by bloggers who would struggle to find a single positive word to say about a popular commercial brand. 

On one side of the fence, the cork-supporting Kool Aid drinkers applaud the improvement in the quality of natural closures and see no real cause for concern that at least one bottle in every eight or nine cases of £40-per-bottle Burgundy is still spoiled by TCA (and a lot more are randomly oxidised). And on the other, the screwcap gang refuse to understand why the world hasn't seen the logic of their argument and rushed to seal Chateau Margaux with the same closure as San Pelegrino.

Among some of other most obvious cases of Kool Aid consumption are the authors of articles and books about wine and health with titles like "Why Wine is Good For Your Heart" that present a laughably one-sided and fundamentally misleading argument. (For anyone who's interested, wine really is good for us - but only in annoyingly meagre doses of less than a glass per day).

Of course, the Kool Aid drinkers - and some more balanced wine lovers - regularly accuse me of being a one man ice bucket challenge, a glass-half-empty type who's always more than ready to find fault. And I plead guilty as charged: the more fawning the courtiers the greater the need for the monarch to have his jester.

Sackbuts and Sauvignons - why ancient isn't enough

Curious ad, by courtesy of "Tom" on Flickriver

What kind of music do you most enjoy listening to? Do bagpipes, sackbuts and recorders feature heavily? Do you drink much mead? Do you wear wooden clogs? A few of my multitude of readers across the globe may have a positive answer to at least one of these questions, but only a few. A somewhat larger number - including the keenest classical music enthusiasts - may, like me, have recordings of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven by musicians playing 'original' instruments, but I'll bet that most are, again like me, quite happy to hear the Goldberg Variations sound the way it does when performed on a piano rather than a harpsichord.

And how about grapes and wine styles? Do you drink a lot of Uva di Troia, Lemnió or Rkatsateli? These are all interesting ancient grape varieties that can and do produce attractive wines. Whether any of them has the crowd-pleasing appeal of Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and Pinot Grigio, is another matter. 

So what? You may cry. It doesn't have to be every grape's or wine's vocation to please crowds. Indeed a failure to do so can be very appealing: how many of us have a favourite coffee bar around the corner from the far busier Starbucks? But these are personal opinions, and we should pause before expecting others to share them - especially when their livelihood is at stake.

Every year, hordes of wine 'experts' - aka journalists and bloggers - fly into old wine regions such as Turkey and Georgia and gush over almost everything they see. "Thank God", they cry, "that your vineyards have been unsullied by internationally popular varieties such as Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon... We just love the fact that we can't even pronounce the names of the grapes you use, let alone spell them... As for your amphora... Well you should make all of your wine in them; it's your point of difference after all... And under nocircumstances plant any of those pesky international grapes!"

And then they fly home. Some, I'm sure, settle down to a daily glass or two of Öküzgözü, Boğazkere or Rkatsateli, but most will have moved on - and back - to the Rhônes, Burgundies, Bordeaux and Spanish and Italian reds and whites they were drinking before their flight to Ankara or Tbilisi. It was my Meininger's Wine Business International colleague, Felicity Carter, who first drew my attention to this kind of condescending inverted-colonialism, after finding herself among just such a group of visitors to Georgia. 

As she said, hearing some of her fellow travellers' comments, was rather like listening to visitors to primitive parts of Africa enthusing over the cleverness of the primitive people's sanitary arrangements and the absence of mobile phones. Yes, there is something interesting about anything that has survived over the centuries, from a type of pie to the language historically spoken by the inhabitants of a particular region. And, yes, it would be a pity to see the pie or language disappear completely. But do most of us actually regularly want to eat that particular culinary delicacy or learn to converse in Welsh? I doubt it. And how well could the Welsh survive if none of them spoke any other languages?

Telling a Turkish wine producer that he shouldn't use internationally popular grape varieties is rather like telling the owner of an Ankara gelateria that she shouldn't serve vanilla or chocolate ice cream. When I last flew through Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, roughly half of the Turkish wines on sale in the Duty Free shop were produced exclusively, or partly from non-indigenous grapes. People with time to spend before or between flights, similarly had the choice between a traditional Turkishtantuni,or a chicken or meat döner, or a Burger King Whopper or a Basilico pizza. I don't believe that the people who run that airport are part of an international conspiracy to promote globalisation; they're giving their customers - Turkish or foreign - what they like. Just as Turkish Airlines is doing when it offers its passengers a glass of Turkish Syrah.

The nice people responsible for promoting the wines of Turkey, Georgia or wherever did not, by the same token, spend large sums of money flying in all those experts simply in order to hear them saying complimentary things about the way their winemakers go about producing their wines. They want to sell those wines overseas. No, I'd correct that. They need to sell those wines overseas, and in some quantities. And anyone who suggests that there are lots of consumers in London or Lower Manhattan who are just itching to lay their hands on some Rkatsateli or Öküzgözü is lying - if only to themselves.

Most humans, like most other animals, are creatures of habit. We return to the same places on holiday and the same favourite restaurants, and we buy the same foods and wines: the ones we like, and find easy to buy. It's no accident that vanilla and chocolate ice cream are so popular across the globe, nor that consumers from Manchester to Moscow happily queue to buy Big Macs and drink Starbucks coffee. This is not to say that Rkatsateli or Öküzgözü - under more pronouncable names, most probably - won't ever find a substantial following outside their own markets. But it won't happen by itself, or because a few bloggers and wine writers think it ought to, simply on account of their ancient heritage and 'different-ness'. Or not until most of us somehow discover the delight of wearing clogs and listening to sackbuts.

Why oh why no WiFi?- an open letter to hotels across the globe

Cartoon from blog.rottenwifi.com. Rottenwifi is an apparently useful
app I discovered after writing this post.

Dear hoteliers,
I know from my own experience of trying to run an office and home that maintaining a WiFi - or indeed any internet - service that works reliably, consistently and at a good speed isn't easy. And I understand the challenges of offering WiFi to unpredictable and potentially large numbers of people.

I grew up in a hotel and well remember breakfast being the hardest meal of the day to deliver satisfactorily, with lots of grumpy, stressed and possibly hungover people expecting precisely the cooked breakfast they have requested (eggs boiled for 4.5 minutes) to be delivered to their rooms at precisely the same time. But good hoteliers understand the breakfast problem and come pretty close to overcoming it.

The parallel with WiFi is quite close. While some of the people who want to go online are tourists casually wanting to check their Facebook, or to browse the lists of local restaurants to decide where to dine tonight, others - principally but far from exclusively business travellers - will have urgent emails to receive and send, Skype calls to make, boarding cards to download... And there's a high chance that they'll be as stressed and grumpy as the man calling reception from room 207 to complain about his overcooked poached eggs.

Of course, a growing number of business travellers and wealthier and/or more organised tourists now rely on global internet roaming services for their smartphones and tablets, but dear hoteliers, these aren't - yet - the mass of your customers. Some of you charge guests an hourly or daily rate to go online; some offer the service for nothing. In my experience, the old notion of getting what you pay for does not necessarily apply here. I seem to have paid for rotten - often non-existent - WiFi almost as often as I've been given it for nothing. But, and here's my point: some hoteliers do seem to have got their WiFi to work as well as their breakfasts.

Unreliable  WiFi is, to a hotel, not unlike faulty natural corks to a wine producer : something over which one has limited control, but which potentially leaves customers with a memorably unsatisfying experience.

So, dear hoteliers, here's my proposal: test your WiFi on a regular basis and ask your guests how happy they are with the service you provide, and if the response is not what you'd wish, blast your provider and go on blasting them until they get it more or less right.

And, dear winemakers, if you are still using natural corks, for goodness sake, test every single batch you are delivered. You won't spot the ones that will allow your wine to oxidize more quickly than you'd like, but you will find some with noticeable TCA. Revealingly, the producers who maintain that they never have any problems with cork taint tend to be the ones who don't have a rigorous testing regime; what they should be saying is "our customers aren't complaining " which is a very different matter. After all, do you always complain about the annoyingly inefficient WiFi in the hotels where you stay?

******************

Since posting this, and discovering Rotten WiFi, I've coma across this review of the app from earlier this year:

noodlelive.com/blog/app-of-the-month-rotten-wifi/

I rather like the idea of naming and shaming places with bad WiFi. But maybe we should launch a RottenWine app too.

When 15% may not even be enough...

The old vine Mallorcan
wine that helped me
make it through the
night.

What do you do when you are alone in foreign land and you're trying to make sense of the fact that, a few hours earlier, you've watched a coffin containing your mother's body slide into a crematorium furnace?

This, as you may have guessed, isn't a hypothetical question. I'm writing this at 10pm in Palma de Mallorca, the island where  my mother lived for three and a half decades before falling victim to Alzheimer's and a cruelly slow descent into death.

To be honest, my first thought was whisky - good Islay malt most probably - and that's almost certainly what I'd have resorted to if I were at home. But I'm in Mallorca and good malt is less readily available. So, I've walked through the town in search of inspiration and happened upon a cafe-restaurant serving Galician diced beef, pimientos del padron  and a local red - Jose Ferret Veritas Vinyes Velles (old vines) 2010 - that boasts both a Mundus VinI gold medal and 15% alcohol. I was offered the choice of a glass or a bottle. I opted for the latter.

The food is fine - everything you might want from beef and pimientos and when I first tasted it, I could easily see how the wine earned its medal. It's rich, fruity, and nicely supported by oak. Now that I'm three quarters of the way through the bottle, I'm not so sure. There's a sweetness I could do without and the oak is a little showy. But - and this is an important 'but' - the thing I'm really appreciating about this rich, fruity red is the alcohol.

To be honest, I'm not 100% convinced by the 15% on the label. The actual strength might actually be a tad higher. But, in the mood I'm in tonight, that's not something I'm going to worry about. (Don't forget that this Mallorcan red is performing as understudy for an absent 40% malt whisky).

The point of this post as I'm still unfortunately sufficiently sober to appreciate, is that even those of us who love wine (and whisky) sometimes drink it for reasons that are not directly related to subtlety and complexity. Would I be happier, sitting here  tonight in a Palma restaurant, with a 13% Rioja? I very much doubt it.

To be blunt, whether I knew it or not, what I was looking for when I left my hotel was the slow slide towards oblivion that alcohol can offer more effectively than any other narcotic I've tried. This raises all sorts of questions about alcohol-in-moderation messages that I'm frankly not in the mood to discuss at this precise moment. All I can say, now that the bottle is almost empty and I'm asking for the bill,is that people who cavil at high-strength wine are like the people who cavil at the speeds attainable by Ferarris and Harley Davidson bikes. Sometimes, whether we like to admit it or not, the alcohol is what it's all about.

************************

I did in fact write the above post while sitting at my restaurant table with the bottle in front of me as I drank it. Rereading it now, I think I might change the last line to read "a lot of what it's all about". I do care about what I drink; if alcohol was all I wanted I could simply have lined up and knocked back a few vodkas.I don't actually have a problem with doing that either, but what I appreciated was something that tasted good, and packed the punch I sought. Getting 15% (and stronger) wine right isn't easy, partly because of the apparent sweetness that goes with the territory, but it can be done, and done brilliantly - as the people who dismiss such wines out of hand ignore.. It's worth remembering too that getting lower-strength wine isn't simple either, especially as temperatures rise; I've had plenty of horribly unbalanced 12% wines.

Who really made money out of Rudy Kurniawan's fake wine?

... A key question for many fine wine collectors now is where the rest of Kurniawan's fakes are lurking.

Some information may yet emerge from billionaire collector Bill Koch, who bought many wines off Kurniawan. The Indonesian has agreed to pay Koch $3m in damages and tell 'everything he knows' as part of an out-of-court litigation settlement.

There are fears the pyschological damage caused to fine wine buyers will be difficult to reverse, but many of the major auction houses have cautioned that counterfeiting still represents a small part of the market and stringent checks are in place. 

'People have been robbed of the joy that is old and rare wines,' said Maureen Downey, of Chai Consulting and who has inspected Kurniawan wines for several clients, including Koch. 'They simply do not trust the system. That is the real tragedy of this debacle.' 

Just read this extract from this Decanter news item and pause over the bit that I've highlighted. Wealthy fine wine buyers have, it seems, been "psychologically damaged" by paying hundreds of thousands of whatever currency they favour on wine that evidently tasted fine but turned out to have been blended in an illegal immigrant's kitchen.

Pull the other one.

Wine has probably been faked and adulterated since man first started pressing grapes. According to Pliny the Elder, 2,000 years ago, Roman nobles were being efficiently fooled by fake Falernian wine. The ancient author unfortunately refrains from informing us whether the aristos in question rushed off to seek psychological treatment.

I can readily imagine that the elderly people who were duped into investing their life savings into fraudulent wine investment schemes may genuinely be feeling some justified pain, but the billionaires who flocked around Mr Kurniawan and his friends and associates were no more or less badly treated than all of the people who, over the years, have bought and hung forged paintings on their walls.

The scandal of the Rudy Kurniawan case about which rather less fuss is being made, is that most of the $20-30m of wines he is believed to have produced, passed through other sets of hands on their way to the final buyer. Lots of people have taken a margin on those sales. Where is all that money now? How many of those experts are lining up to return their share of the rotten gains?

Knowing what's good for you

For the better part of 25 years of my professional life, I firmly believed that my notion of a 'good' and a less good wine mattered rather a lot. I was bolstered in this belief by newspaper, magazine and book publishers who payed me to express my views on paper, and by the astonishing success of the International Wine Challenge of which I was co-founder and co-chairman.

Admittedly my notion of 'good' did not always coincide with other critics' but that's the nature of criticism after all. The arbiters of taste who failed to share my enthusiasm - or lack of it - for a particular wine were quite simply wrong. As of course were the consumers who were sufficiently deluded to follow their advice. As a Brit, I naturally particularly equated this wrongness with some of the top US critics. How could they possibly like the over-alcoholic, over-oaked, over-priced red  monstrosities to which they regularly awarded points in the high 90s?

Today, my views have changed pretty radically. I still am clear in my mind about a good and a bad wine but I'm far readier to try to understand why others think differently. It's rather like no longer saying about apparently mismatched couples that "I can't imagine what he/she sees in her/him", but trying to understand the attraction. I personally don't choose to spend my money on Starbucks coffee or Big Macs or Krispy Kreme donuts but I can see why so many people do so - in preference to what I might have chosen.

Sometimes it is simply a matter of what they are used to, culturally or socially; we all inherit and adopt tastes. Sometimes the appeal lies in something other than the flavour. I'm writing this in rural France where non-Frenchmen and women who regularly holiday and quite possibly have houses here, attune themselves to happily consume rustic wine they'd complain about if it were offered to them in their own countries. People wanting to embrace 'natural' wine also recalibrate their palates to accept smells and tastes they would previously have rejected. When in Rome...

The brain can also find a reward in consuming something that is said to be 'good' or 'expensive'. I'll bet that many of the less well-off people who apparently relish the occasional opportunity to eat Foie Gras or caviar would not choose to make either a regular part of their diet if they won the lottery. I know of plenty who'll drink Champagne when offered it, but actually prefer Prosecco and, to return to my point about Starbucks, there are those who unashamedly admit to liking Nescafé more than a freshly brewed 'real' coffee.

To the critics, it's all a matter of education. Of teaching the misguided and unsophisticated what they should appreciate. That principle can work very well, of course. Even today, I'm occasionally surprised and heartened by someone saying that their journey into the higher levels of wine enthusiasm was helped at an early stage by something I may have written or said 20 years ago. And those moments reassure me that I wasn't wasting my time - and that the critics writing today aren't wasting theirs either. But I've shifted my perspective.

I still use my knowledge and experience - and personal opinion - of what's good and bad when judging at competitions like the IWC or Mundus Vini, when working with consultancy clients or when benchmarking our Le Grand Noir wines against competitors'. But I'm increasingly intolerant of intolerant critics. I know when I'm right, but I'm far less confident of saying that others are wrong. After all, those Big Californian wines I thought so little of are still selling well at the prices I laughed at, and the critics who praised them still have their audiences. And the art critics who mocked their colleagues for supporting - what they thought to be - meretricious artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are still waiting for time to prove them right.