You can get excellent wines at bargain prices

Do you ever think of a wine having a shape? Or have you ever thought that trying to describe a wine in words – fruitand-nutspeak – can spoil the sensory experience? I’ve been reading a new book by one of my favourite wine writers. The Goode Guide To Wine: A Manifesto of Sorts is by UK-based Jamie Goode. It’s published by the University of California Press, and these are amongst the very many thoughtprovoking questions that it raises.

Perhaps I’m alone in the wine confraternity in thinking that a great deal of wine writing, at the serious end of the spectrum, can be spectacularly dull and, essentially prosaic. This may be the reason why I have written only one book about wine, and that was quite a long time ago!

Jamie’s book is far from dull if you’re someone who finds wine essentially pleasurable and, if you like, rather more than a drink. He’s very good on the late Roger Scruton’s description of wine as a ‘virtuous intoxicant’.

What I’ve done this week is to put together a selection of five wines that are, in a sense, a bit more than just intoxicants. The kind of wines, I hope, that will elicit a response of ‘Oh, that’s interesting!’ when you taste them.

More importantly, in these troubled times, they are all bargains and all easily accessible through supermarkets. I hope they also demonstrate that a bargain can be €7 or €40. It’s all relative.

Lidl has attracted opprobrium from the wine snobs for offering a Barolo, sometimes called (by that kind of person) the king of red wines, for small money. It’s a generic but it has bottle-age and plenty of Barolo character. So, if it upsets the snootier consumers, I’m all for it. I wonder if the same people are upset at SuperValu’s cutprice Meursault, one that I’ve seen elsewhere for over €60.

Aldi’s excellent Riesling at €6.99 is so keenly priced that it may be dismissed by a certain kind of consumer. In which case, there’s all the more for the rest of us.

These five wines are more than just intoxicants