I am not a wine snob. I simply can’t afford to be. In the UK my average wine purchase was no more than £3.49 for weekday bottles, rising to £4.99 at weekends and occasionally to £5.99 for a bottle for friends. I am aware of what a philistine this makes me, choosing wine by its price bracket, but twenty years ago I travelled through France for a few months and tasted some of the most exciting wine of my life. Bought from co-operative wine makers in small villages, I recall the vin de pays which rolled itself into a velvet wave on my tongue or frolicked like a muddy puppy in my throat. This was straightforward wine, drunk in the region of its birth from grape growers producing wine which can make a warrior of a timid man.
Imagine me here in a Paris supermarket, scanning the shelves for cheap wine, dreading the pinched noses and turned down mouths of my French friends, who disparage my taste in wine, as much as they disdain my attempts to speak their noble language. Ask a group of French people a point about grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation, and there will be huge disagreement between them: so it is with their opinions of wine. The first dispute stems from the way that they are reared and educated to revere the perfect stasis of their own language, but because there are so many rules, they simply can’t retain it all. The second dispute comes from their equally strong conviction that they know all there is to know about viniculture and palate. No two people in the whole of France actually taste wine in the same way. I do know however, that when I found a lovely wine for just over 3 euros ( a Côtes-de-Duras 2008 from Château les Roques, a 14% wine which was 60% Merlot and 40% Cabernet Sauvignon produced from 12 hectares sitting on a small plateau) all the bottles had disappeared by the time I went back two days later.
By choosing wines from the bottom (cheapest) shelf, but keeping to those from small producers, I have found some cheerful companions and haven’t had a wine headache since I came to Paris.
I drink my favourite wine first. ‘Keeping best to last’ just doesn’t bear up after the first few glasses and once ‘les amies’ have got onto their third bottle, they stop caring about my grammar and miraculously I speak much improved French.