VALUE FOR MONEY

A few years ago, I travelled to Italy with a wine-loving chef and restaurateur: Jacob Kenedy, owner of the splendid Bocca di Lupo, in Soho. After a suitably epicurean couple of days in Rome, Jacob took me to his family home in Sperlonga, a pretty little coastal town about two hours’ drive south.

We immediately headed to the local greengrocer in search of provisions, where we also discovered an excellent local red wine, sold from the barrel and priced at a paltry one euro a litre. A plan was hatched to buy a lot of it and export it to the UK; it would, we were convinced, make a terrific house wine for London restaurants.

By the time we had done our sums, however – bottling, labelling, transport, duty, VAT – and worked out how much we would have to charge our customers, we realised the idea was a non-starter. Our bargain-basement red would have cost something like £8 a bottle before we had even made a penny on it.

How, I wondered, do the UK’S big retailers manage to sell wine for £5 a bottle or even less? Admittedly, they have economies of scale in their favour, but a £5 bottle would still cost them £2.88 in tax and duty, and a further 36p in packaging and transport. How do they manage to spend a decent amount of money on the actual wine and still turn a profit?

The answer is that they don’t. On average (according to the London-based wine importer Bibendum’s figures) the cost of the wine in a typical £5 bottle is just 47p; by contrast, the wine in a £10 bottle costs £2.87. In other words, by paying twice the price, you should get a wine that is more than six times higher in quality.

Thanks to an unbroken line of rapacious Chancellors of the Exchequer, wine in the UK has never been as cheap as in Sperlonga, or indeed anywhere from Calais southwards, and it is not a situation that looks like improving. A sliding pound and the spectres of trade barriers and import tariffs mean that wine prices will rise sharply over the next few months; it may seem counterintuitive, but the best way to combat this threat to our drinking pleasure is actually to spend a bit more. With this in mind, my selections for

The Oldie’s monthly wine offer are adapting to the new climate: I will try to seek out wines that I consider excellent value, even if they are nearer £10 a bottle than £5. Wines that, I hope, are a pleasure to drink, not semi-industrial plonk.

We start with a mixed case of what you might call ‘fireside reds’: the sort of wines that will comfort you of an evening while all is chilly and dreary outside, and spring is but a distant prospect. I have chosen three from Waitrose’s selection – two from France, o ne from Portugal – and, for me, they tick all the right boxes, as well as being offered at a substantial discount.

They are not ‘fruit bombs’ – the somewhat disparaging winespeak phrase for sweet, over-ripe, very concentrated reds, often heavily oaked, and often from the sunbaked vineyards of Australia, California and South America – which is not to say that they lack flavour, just that fruit and tannin are seamlessly knitted together, giving each wine character and complexity. And, while they are eminently drinkable on their own, they are also perfect for partnering a plate of something comforting from the stove. You can also enjoy the warm feeling that comes from having spent your money wisely.