We don’t purchase mixed selections in many areas of consumption. We commit to a particular variety. We never quite know which sandwiches we’ll make during a week, but we don’t buy loaves of bread comprising two slices each of white, wholemeal, seeded and rye. We are not offered a bag of mixed meats, six white and six red.
And selections have always troubled me, because they invariably contain some things you don’t want. Like Christmas hampers; the providers lay out all of the contents like a wedding photo, and somewhere in the back row you can just spot the things that no one actually wants – the dodgy preserved fruits, the iffy jar of chutney, the tin of pineapple in syrup.
Like boxes of chocolates, hiding their Yardley-flavoured crème centres, which taste as if you’ve just licked your gran. Or like ‘variety’ packs of cereals which, to my intense childhood irritation, and carefully hidden on opposite sides of the multipack, always contained two packets of boring corn flakes. Thanks to such instances of selection abuse, I have always had a suspicion of mixed cases of wines.
I know I am a cynic, for whom the light at the end of the tunnel must be seen as a train coming the other way. But wouldn’t any merchant take this opportunity to offload his duff wine in a corner of a mixed case? The overpriced non-seller, whose subsequent discount will make a mixed case look more of a bargain? Or the simply shoddy plonk, which a customer might then forgive as one bad bottle out of twelve?
And what the mixed case suggests about the merchant is nothing compared to what it says about the purchaser.
Everything about the mixed case suggests failings. That you are ignorant; you simply don’t know enough about wine to assemble a case yourself that suits you and your lifestyle. You feel some kind of middle-class obligation to have wine in the house, and a mixed case is the easiest way of acquiring a small selection. That you can’t be bothered to go through a list yourself and select a dozen bottles. Or that you want the scapegoat of a merchant upon whom you can blame any dud bottles which are subsequently mocked by your guests. ‘Oh, I didn’t choose that one, it came in a mixed case …’
And then there are people who are drawn by price and ostensible savings rather than contents. (No names, CJ …) Indeed, for those who don’t give a monkey’s about what they are buying as long as it’s discounted, there are now ‘mystery cases’, where you don’t actually know which wines you’re getting, just that they’re supposedly a bargain. It’s ‘a lucky dip you cannot lose’, one merchant says, as if you’re buying your wine at the fairground.
(The latest I was offered was a case for £79.99, ‘with contents worth at least £94.99, and possibly up to £140.99’. I admire the judicious use there of the word ‘possibly’ …)
Anyway, the point of all this is that, in a moment of desperation, to replenish my depleted cellar with modest degrees of both breadth and expenditure, I succumbed to a mixed case.
My excuse was a lack of time in which to assemble a case of my own; my reassurance lay in enjoying the mutuality of The Wine Society, that ‘merchant’ which exists solely for its members, and so has no reason to palm anything off.
The Society offers a mixed case of six reds and six whites, all under £6, a price threshold so low I’m surprised anything successful apart from a limbo dancer can get under it.
And yet I have found myself drinking eagerly through a variety of consistently interesting and enjoyable wines. I have not encountered a single undrinkable bottle, which, given our success rate at supermarkets for sub-£6 wine, is quite remarkable. Even the inevitable Merlot was drinkable. No great epiphanic discoveries, but no palate-puckering horrors either.
Given their drinkability and their price, they promote these as wines ‘to serve without preparation or hesitation’, which is absolutely the case, even if hesitation has never offered any previous hindrance to my consumption.
So this is an exercise I may now try again. Far from feeling diminished, my dignity was restored by my temporarily restocked cellar. With the magisterial stride of the cellar master, I could once again proffer a dry white, a rich red or whatever else supper might require.
And all so that, at 8.30 on Sunday evening, I can offer to nip downstairs and bring up something to drink – and Mrs K can turn from the oven and say, ‘It’s a pity we haven’t got a bottle of cider to go with this pork …’
CJ
I cast my mind back ten years, and I see a thinner, darker-haired, fractionally blither version of myself, limping off to get a bottle of wine, possibly to take to a dinner party, possibly to consume in morbid silence at home. I am spoiled for choice. Within reasonably easy walking distance, there are two supermarkets – a Safeway and a Waitrose – and four free-standing wine shops. There is a Threshers, a Victoria Wine, an Oddbins and a Majestic. There may even be one or two others that I’ve forgotten. They all sell wine.
Leap forward to the present day, and Threshers and Victoria have both disappeared from our part of town, leaving their premises empty and abandoned, while Safeway, having had a brief fling at being a Morrisons, was rudely turned into an enlarged car park for the even more engorged Waitrose next door. Oddbins at first filled a huge cornershop space, then filled it less convincingly, and finally didn’t fill it at all, but handed it over to a wildly over-optimistic independent wine merchant, who did his best to bring the art of fine drinking to our very slightly substandard neighbourhood.
The over-optimistic wine merchant kept it going for a good eighteen months before decamping to the other side of the main road and into smaller, more manageable premises, more befitting his bespoke trade ambitions. Meanwhile, another wildly overoptimistic wine merchant succeeded to the ex-Oddbins slot, but with even fewer resources than the first one. Majestic, tucked away from these dissolutions and reformations, picked up the business they lost, and prospered.
But where are we now, right now? Unsurprisingly, the first over-optimistic wine merchant has gone bust. Pizza flyers and double-glazing circulars litter his shop entrance. The second overoptimistic wine merchant is doing his best with a retail space the size of a basketball court and some comfy chairs, but for how long? In the interim, it must be said, not one but two Tesco Metro stores – those little urban stop’n’shops – have taken root. And Waitrose just keeps getting bigger. Thus, we began the decade with four wine stores and two supermarkets. We now have two wine stores, one supermarket, and two chain convenience stores. I am guessing that this is pretty typical of High Street UK.
Is there any reason to fret about this? Patterns of wine consumption have changed out of all recognition in the space of a generation, so why shouldn’t the retailing? My parents did their booze shopping in a world of off-licences and one-man suppliers, who kept limited hours and even more limited stock. If you could even find a bottle of Riesling in one of these outlets, the chances were that it was sharing the shelf with a tin of Long Life lager and some Babychams. In the great scheme of things, we haven’t lost much. In fact we’ve gained. So is there any cause for anxiety?
Well, I’m gripped by a feeling that I can’t quite rationalise and can’t quite shake off: that shopping for wine in a warehouse has stopped being as much fun as it used to be. I can remember going, over a quarter of a century ago, to my first wine warehouse, where I was knocked out by its immensity, its unbelievably exciting range, its stupendous prices, its gritty, authentic,