A £10 bottle of wine is a dangerous choice

Britons are better off sticking to cheap plonk – the social consequences of splashing out are profound

This is an interesting place to find ourselves as a nation. Uncoupling from Europe. Possibly months away from Nicola Sturgeon throwing theodolites up on to Hadrian’s Wall and working out where to start digging the ditch. And now a minister is advising us how best to buy wine. Out goes Cameroonian insouciance, in comes the WI but with statutory powers.

The average Briton does not like to pay more than £6 per bottle for wine. More than 50 per cent of them refuse to do so. Just 7 per cent are prepared to pay £10 or more. It has been this way, scholars tell us, since Norman times. Norman being a notorious tightwad in the office throughout the 1970s.

But Mark Price – former managing director of Waitrose and deputy chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, and now minister of state for trade and investment – would like to change our frugal ways. Speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival to promote his book, The Food Lover’s

Handbook, he said that the happy medium between price and quality was £10. At £5, the fixed costs of duty, glass, transport, storage and so on per bottle mean that the actual value of the wine within is just 47 pence. At £10, the wine is worth £3, so you have sextupled your drinking bang by doubling your disbursed buck. “If you buy a bottle for about £10 you’ve absolutely hit the sweet spot of quality against cost,” he concluded.

Wise advice, and one could see in it the germ of some fiendishly complicated Brexit stratagem. Perhaps somehow, encouraging thirsty Brits to buy quality plonk is going to stuff French mouths so full of gold that it will convince them to set aside the instincts whetted to the keenest edge over the last thousand years and not try to knife us to death during the coming negotiations.

Alas, such a plan would crash against the inflexible habits of the British wine-buying public. I would love to believe that our drinking mores are civilised and rational enough that we apply an economic cost-benefit analysis to the booze we bring to dinners or parties. They aren’t. We don’t. In fact, if you were to break down the considerations that go into a purchase of a bottle of wine they would go roughly like this:

50 per cent prettiness of label; 10 per cent colour of wine; 10 per cent colour of hosts’ carpet. Then 15 per cent organisation: some people lead lives that enable them to make a careful, bespoke purchase in a supermarket the day before, while some grab something from their own stocks as they fly out the door. Others forget, hope they pass an offy and summon the energy to pass off a bottle of Chateau de Squirrel Piss as an amusingly ironic gift.

After that there’s 5 per cent guest vs host income differential. Have you got something to prove? Do you want to prove it? Or would you rather look like you’ve got nothing to prove? If you don’t, do you want to prove it? Or would you rather pretend you’ve got something to prove, because it’s so rude to have nothing to prove and prove it?

Also, 5 per cent guest vs host class differential. (Which combination of year and grape will tell them an inherited smoking jacket stands in your wardrobe ever ready for effortless deployment? There are no numbers on a payslip for this. It’s your word against theirs – not that you or they would ever say anything, of course – amidst a welter of opinions, resting on eternally shifting sands. It’s enough to drive you to drink long before you leave the house.

Oh, and 5 per cent years of banked friendship, proportion of friendship composed of point-scoring, past and potential usefulness to each other in respective careers, distance travelled and likelihood of decent pudding.

There is so much a bottle of wine has to say, so many sweet spots it has to hit, that there is very little room left to factor in minutiae like value for money and drinkability. And of course you have to factor in all the things you don’t want it to say as well. An over-potable gift is dangerous. It risks beginning an arms race that begins in pinot grigio and ends in methuselahs of Chateau Lafite being exchanged and bankruptcy papers filed.

Worse, a too-expensive contribution to the evening’s festivities may reveal that you really like your hosts, or that you are excited about seeing them. Your financial investment signifies emotional investment. They will never invite you back. Or worse, they will never stop inviting you back. Imagine being locked into a lifetime of socialising with people you like – every convivial evening adding to the mounting terror of the day when it suddenly ceases and you find yourselves gazing wordlessly over the Ottolenghi salad wondering what it was that ever brought you together.

None of this happens if you top out at £6. But a tenner – a tenner marks the beginning of the perilous way. It leads all the way down into the darkest depths of British neurosis and anxiety, no matter how refined the label on the bottle or the substance within might seem. Best to banish such thoughts and start pouring whatever we can lay hold of. Our national psyche is best seen through a glass of red, darkly.