The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
What’s top of my whine list
On this, the last Friday of Sober October (a process which, you will not be surprised to hear, has happily passed me by yet again) maybe it’s time to take stock. Especially if your stock of drink (we don’t have a wine cellar, we have a cellar with wine in it. Or did until fairly recently.) is depleting faster than a Brexit majority.
There are, let’s face it, many elements and activities in current social interaction that would drive you to drink, even if it is now obviously one of the great social no-nos to drink and drive. Yet somehow, the two aspects seem to find themselves cleaving together. Of course, there are those who don’t need driving to drink because they’ve already got there under their own steam…
But in the ever-changing world of attitudes to self-indulgence and the ever-increasing willingness to tell other people what they should and should not be doing, even weel-kent phrases are beginning to take on new significance, like politicians saying (or writing) one thing and meaning something totally different.
“Over the limit”, for example, used to indicate the amount you could and couldn’t imbibe if you intended to get behind the wheel of a car. These days when, quite rightly, it is becoming completely unacceptable to drink anything in such circumstances, it has come to mean something rather different. We may be finding a little light relief and oiling the wheels of personal and political interaction by swigging a bit more than we used to but there are, apparently, limits. And the new limit would appear to be on spending more than £5 a pop for a bottle of vino collapso.
It would seem that some Brits (and it has to be said that Brits are at the sharp end of this kind of approach) cannot bring themselves to spend more than a fiver on a bottle of wine. Now of course, north of the border, with minimum pricing, this is something that we have almost come to expect. Except for those of us who bulk-buy in Lidl and find ourselves crouching in the booze aisle in Tesco to see what bargains can be had on the bottom shelf.
According to consumer research group Kantar, UK wine duty covers £2.23 of the cost of a bottle of wine. Then you have VAT, packaging and shipping. So there’s close to beggar all spent on actually producing a quality glug, let’s face it. Inevitably, it’s all down to quality or quantity and which particular limit you want to observe.
New research seems to posit, however, that around 300,000 drinkers have swapped wine for cheaper drink, breaking the barrier. Now, call me a naïve, sentimental fool but in spite of considerable effort, I have not yet managed to find a bottle of gin for less than a fiver.
Apparently, there is now more of a vogue, especially among “young people”, for ready-mixed cocktails and craft beers. And the playing field seems
“In spite of considerable effort I have not yet managed to find a bottle of gin for less than a fiver
to be far from level for us more mature winos. Let’s not even contemplate the Trump approach to tariffs on whisky, but duty is higher on wine and has risen twice as fast as the tax on beer.
Although if recent experience is anything to go by, the last bottle of beer purchased by the beleaguered Significant Other (in an arts venue, what can I tell you?) came in at just under a fiver which caused him no end of angst.
It comes to something when you come to the realisation you are not only a lush but a tight lush…
What with a week being a long time in politics and that astute statement from popular culture of the 60s (thank you Stingray): “Anything can happen in the next half hour!”, you would think that nothing would surprise us any more. The late, great Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, reckoned that the answer to life was 42. And it may yet prove to be so, although I suspect that in the great scheme of things, the numbers might well be a bit tighter than that – given the fact that previous votes on our future as a nation have been measured in very small percentages (generally referred to as “the will of the people”, regardless of how many people that actually means).
I heard Boris Johnson described last week as “23 votes short of a Brexit”. Which I can only assume is the contemporary version of that wonderful description of idiocy: “Two bricks short of a load.” Now, we have actually had “30 votes to pass a Brexit” but the numbers game still isn’t adding up. Yet…
Watch this space. And, with selfpreservation in mind, start considering the number of £5 bottles you’re going to need to cope with an extension and/ or a general election…