that needed to be said), and is now getting its own chance to shine.
So our words are now roughly at the price point of a bottle of cheap wine. And look at it this way: they should last a bit longer, and are less likely to make you ill. Unless that is, like Julian Barnes, you find it ‘choke-on-your-cornflakes funny’. Which we sort of hope you do.
CJ AND PK, JUNE 2017
It was a couple of years ago. We were having lunch in a pizza restaurant. We were also drinking a bafflingly described, boldly overpriced and completely mediocre red: our normal wine consumption.
‘This is appalling,’ one of us said. ‘Shall we have another bottle?’
The second bottle arrived, and the other one of us asked, ‘Why does nobody write about these wines? Why do they only write about the good stuff? Someone should write a blog about real everyday wine drinking and real everyday wine, like this horrible Valpolicella.’
We thought this was such a good idea that we went ahead and did it. After all, we know more about writing than we do about wine, and we know more about wine than pizza. Which made it the perfect fit: Sediment was born.
The duties were unevenly divided from the start. Paul Keers (PK), a man who sees wine as a gateway to sophistication, connoisseurship and worldliness, a man who broods on social rituals, dinner guests and daunting wine merchants – a man who uses the word etiquette without irony – got the smarter end.
Charles Jennings (CJ), being a cheapskate and extremely credulous, believes, like a French bourgeois, that a casual, everyday enjoyment of wine at casual, absolutely rock-bottom prices, is every man’s birthright. So he got all the rest.
That’s how it is. Every week on the Sediment blog we wander along the pain threshold of wine drinking, never knowing enough, or spending enough, to get things right. It would be easy to say that the pleasure of the wine itself makes up for our tribulations. It would also be untrue. We’ve suffered – really suffered – as a consequence of our motto: ‘I’ve bought it, so I’ll drink it.’
This book is a collection of some of our best, but more often our worst, moments in wine. We hope you enjoy them more than we did.
CJ AND PK, AUGUST 2014
PK
Take care of the pennies, they say, and the pounds will take care of themselves. Well, not when it comes to wine.
Down at the bottom of the wine lists, it seems that every bottle is now priced at something + 99p. From the murky depths where CJ unearths bottles for £3.99, to the wines for £10.99 and more which I find up at the snorkelling level.
And I’m forced to wonder why, in this age of electronic payment, the handing back of a penny in change persists – and whether I would feel better about my wine given a tiny, one penny rise in the price of a bottle, in order to round the prices up.
Some people assume that the reason for such prices is psychological – that we read from left to right, encounter the pounds figure first, and have registered the fact that it’s, say, £7 + something, before we recalculate for the fact that the ‘something’ is actually nearly another whole pound. In our minds, we still think it’s essentially a £7 bottle, not an £8 one.
But in fact, the origin of such pricing lay in forcing sales assistants to put cash from customers through the tills. By requiring staff to give change on every cash sale, it meant that they had to open the till, recording the transaction, and thereby reducing the opportunities for simply pocketing the customers’ banknotes.
If I had a penny for every time someone has told me that, I’d have … well, I’d certainly have a penny.
Take care of the pennies? Personally, I don’t want to take care of very many of them. A pocketful of pennies won’t even buy you a newspaper; it will just spoil the line and damage the pockets of your suit. And sometimes you can’t even give them away. I saw a chap once try to bestow a handful upon a Mancunian, but the latter was more interested in taking a corner kick at the time.
Be all that as it may; my concern here is with the pennies in the prices of wine. I once mocked a posh London wine merchant that was selling a bottle of La Mission Haut-Brion for £600.01. I just loved the idea of a City boy thumbing his wad, handing over a dozen £50 notes, and then scrabbling in his pockets for an additional penny. They did apologise, saying it was a computerised price-rise error; but the same merchants are currently selling a magnum of Bollinger Rosé NV champagne for £99.99.
Now let’s be honest. If you handed over a brace of fifties for a bottle of Bolly, and got a penny back in change, would you exit the store, whistling gaily at your financial acumen? I think not.
In fact, I think exactly the opposite – you want to feel, and indeed would probably say to anyone who asked, that this was a Hundred-Pound Bottle of Champagne.
There seems to be a point, in most merchants’ lists, at which prices switch, from .95 or .99, to round pounds. That point will differ from merchant to merchant – but that is often also the point, for them and for me, at which wine becomes Fine Wine.
At Majestic, for example, it seems to be £20. Below that, prices range from £4.99 to £19.99; then suddenly, magically, it’s £22, £25, etc. And it works, on susceptible types like me. Immediately, it’s as if the wines have moved out of the bargains, and into a better class.
That’s because small change has always been a bit … low rent. At the gentlemen’s club Boodle’s until quite recently they used to boil the coins given in change; silver used to be regarded as a notoriously unhygienic metal, due to its more frequent contact with the lower classes. Silver could not be considered as correct tender from one gentleman to another. And supposedly a vestige of this survives when a shop assistant, apologising for giving you change, says, ‘Sorry it’s all silver …’
But St James’s isn’t what it was. Berry Bros & Rudd, my benchmark for wine poshness, don’t bother with pennies; their wines are priced to the nearest 5p; £7.95 rather than £7.99. But that goes right up to a bottle of L’Ermita 2006, at £427.90. Don’t forget to pick up that 10p change, will you?
And then, insanely, they ask for a few paltry pennies on top of their case prices. So at the time of writing, twelve bottles of, say, Calon-Ségur 1996, is £1,064.16. That’s well over a thousand pounds … plus 16p. And right at the very, very top of their list, they had a case of six magnums of La Tâche 1971. It’s £25,000
