Devil’s Advocate: Life is Not Too Short to Drink Not Bad Wine

Robert Joseph thinks it's time to accept that, for most people, wine simply needs to be 'fit for purpose'.

Reading time: 2m 45s

Robert Joseph - with horns - and bottles. Image: Cath Lowe and @Robert Joseph/Midjourney AI
Robert Joseph - with horns - and bottles. Image: Cath Lowe and @Robert Joseph/Midjourney AI

Two or three decades ago, when I was a wine critic, it was my job to seek out and recommend wines I thought were exceptional. Like Dave McIntyre in the Washington Post, in doing this over hundreds of weekly columns and an annual wine guide, I hopefully introduced at least a few people to wines they might never have encountered, and saved them from spending money on ‘bad wine’.

Certainly, in the UK in the early 1980s, this was a very real risk. There were plenty of bottles on the shelves that were vinegary, greenly acidic or bacterially spoiled. Actively repellent stuff that justified the expression: ‘life is too short to drink bad wine’.

Today, unless you are voluntarily paddling in the grubbier end of the natural wine pool, wines like these are genuinely hard to find, and even the naturalistas have radically cleaned up their act. Today, there’s OK wine, good wine and very good wine, depending on your taste and means.

Anyone who describes Gallo Pinot Grigio as ‘bad wine’ is the same kind of snob as those who declare Nescafé to be undrinkable and say they cannot imagine why anyone would want to sleep in a motorway motel. As far as their own choices are concerned, they are simply declaring themselves to be maximizers: people who always want the best of everything. But in their comments and implications, they are effectively echoing the ‘let them eat cake’ sentiment that Marie Antoinette apparently never uttered.

Satisfied maximizers are a rare breed, outside the realms of the 0.1% wealthiest people on the planet, and even they are undoubtedly sometimes obliged to put up with experiences that fail to meet their standards. The rest of us who lead average middle-class lives, have to be satisficers who put up with ‘good enough’ for at least some of the time, and in some areas of our lives. Having a top-of-the-line hi-fi system and/or cellar of good wine and/or well-cut clothes doesn’t leave much money for the car you’d like to drive or the camera or the holiday. Or vice versa.

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What does the job?

Which brings me to those useful expressions, familiar to all satisficers: ‘fit for purpose’ and ‘does the job’.

We drive a basic second-hand vehicle that ‘gets us from A to B’ in order to afford to drink good Burgundy. Or we buy basic drinkable red and white in order to afford to go skiing. We freely acknowledge that there are 'better' options but, for reasons of cost or accessibility they are not as convenient.

Clever wine companies and distributors understand this and produce and sell hundreds of millions of litres of wines that satisfactorily ‘do the job’. I meet the people involved in this huge section of the wine industry every year at the World Bulk Wine Exhibition in Amsterdam, and taste wines on offer at under a dollar a litre that would rarely be worth recommending as exceptional by McIntyre’s or my successors, but they’re almost all perfectly drinkable in their style. They don't reflect terroir or have any kind of 'story'; they're an alcoholic alternative to beer and spirits, and they're what most wine drinkers across the planet have in their glasses right now. Inflation may have increased the prices of the wines they drink – a little –  but the much-touted 'premiumisation' has passed them by.

Sales of these 'fit for purpose' wines may admittedly be going down right now, but so are those of 'terroir-reflective' Bordeaux and Rioja. Whatever romantics may believe, replacing industrially-produced wines with smaller volumes of 'our' kind of pricier, more characterful, fare will not solve the challenges facing the wine industry 

And life certainly isn’t too short to drink them.

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