Why are people drinking less, when wine is better than ever? I have an idea.

Wine is too good. The wine trade is too nice. What we need, to have people queuing at the door (to get in, not to get out), is less fun. Wine needs to be more complicated. Instead of telling people soothingly that as long as they like it that’s all that matters, we need to tell them they’re wrong. Just plain wrong.

Wine should take tips from the cosmetics industry. The papers, at all levels, are full of stories about Six Mistakes You’re Making That Make You Look Old. Or Why You Will Die If You Use This Product Over The Age Of 40. Or What Experts Say You Must Buy Now To Avoid Looking Like A Hag This Winter.

Insecurity, you see. That’s what we need to foster. People will buy vastly expensive cosmetics that claim to do things they can’t possibly do, and will go on buying them, and buying others as well. They’ll believe anything. But telling people that it’s their taste that counts is hopeless. We need stories like Five Ways Your Choice Of Wine Makes You Look Stupid. Or Does Nobody Want To Have Dinner With You? This Could Be Why.

And, please note, cosmetics are specific. Each does one thing, which means you have to buy something else for a different purpose. Use the wrong thing and you’ll be told your skin might fall off. It’s like Victorian cutlery: On Instagram the other day somebody was showing off an entire Victorian canteen of cutlery: not just big knives and small knives, forks ditto, spoons ditto, but fish servers, fish eaters, pickle forks, jam spoons, oyster forks, snail forks, ice-cream forks (yes, really). The unstated purpose, of course, was to foster social insecurity in those who didn’t have them, or didn’t know what to do with a snail fork.

Riedel started promisingly, with a different glass for each wine. That was a thoroughly sensible approach – ‘Oh, you don’t have glasses for this 20-year-old Grand Cru? Oh…’.

If we accept that people just don’t have the cupboard space for a full gamut of glasses, we should insist that if they only have all-purpose wine glasses then only certain wines are suitable. ‘Before I take your order for this particular Grand Cru, could I just check what glasses you intend to use? Perhaps you could upload a photograph on the order form? Otherwise I’m afraid it will have to be the village wine.’

And of course we must push the idea that only this wine, and this wine alone, will go with a particular dish. (We know it’s not true. The cosmetics industry presumably knows it’s peddling nonsense too.) Shepherd’s pie? Five-year-old Xinomavro with 30% new oak. No more, no less. Or, if you must, amphora-aged Malvazija Istarska from Croatia. Make them worried.

And wine merchants are just too nice, too helpful. They should take a leaf out of the car-hire business. You would reserve your wine in advance and pay for it. You would have to collect it in person – at which point you would be told that alas, that particular wine was not available, but something else would be substituted, and did you want to buy extra  insurance in case you dropped it on the way home? ‘Happens so easily, Madam. I wouldn’t want you to put yourself at risk.’ People hire cars all the time, and there are queues – slow ones. They must be doing something right.

If you struggle to get something you value it more than if you have had to make no effort. Buying wine is effortless: this is wrong. Think of the relief with which you squeeze into your airline seat after a delay in which all the airline staff scarpered and the only place to sit was next to a feral adolescent playing games on his phone. Or think of driving anywhere in a city and the relief at reaching your destination after dodging bus lanes, LTNs and red-light-running cyclists. (Cyclists complain too, yet there are more and more of them. Again, that should tell us something.)

There is a years-long waiting list for tickets to the Bayreuth Festival, at which you are locked into an auditorium with hard seats and no aisles or air-conditioning in August, and listen to hours of Wagner. At the Electric on London’s Brixton Hill, kids queue for hours on the street, wearing clothing totally unsuited to the weather, just to get in and have their hearing damaged for life.

Buying wine is just too pleasant. Wine is too risk-free. There needs to be more excitement.

Cork taint, now: that was a proper risk; a risk-taker’s risk. Do you remember the thrill, the nervousness, of opening a bottle, and that first sniff – thumbs up? Thumbs down? And then the long period of tension as the wine opened in the glass, perhaps revealing hidden depths of TCA. Oh, the delicious suspense of it all!

Even that, now, has been pretty much taken away. It’s dull, predictable, reliable. You might as well buy frozen peas. No wonder people are drinking less. (I read today that people are eating fewer peas, too. No wonder.) And here’s another thing: wine sales were rising in the days when TCA affected one in four or five bottles. Now they’re declining. That should tell us something. (Yes, I know they’re actually higher now. But they’re falling now. Don’t spoil the argument.)

There are other ways of injecting surprise into wine.

First, instead of blending all vats and barrels into a consistent blend, every barrel should be bottled separately. Think of the conversations over the dinner table! ‘Oh, this is good, yes, but you should have tasted the other barrel. Now that was something.’ One could perhaps order a case of mixed barrels – why not? In Bordeaux, the great prize would be the journalists’ barrel, that barrique selected by the producer as being the most likely to secure a score of 98-99 at Primeurs time. There might not be much left, but maybe a bit, particularly if it was stretched.

Primeur campaigns should be conducted differently. At Smithfield meat market there was a sale, on Christmas Eve, of all the meat still unsold: you went along with a fistful of cash to wave and hoped to be noticed by the seller. The cellars at Berry Bros could certainly accommodate something like this. And think how much easier it would be for the private clients team. Instead, after a small harvest, of having to explain on the telephone to Mr Plutocrat that he can only have a single bottle, he would have to wave cash in the air with everyone else, and perhaps, if he was lucky or just more brutal, end up with the entire allocation. The publicity would be brilliant, and Mr P could sell off the other bottles to his rivals for cash. Come to think of it, Bordeaux’s Place probably started a bit like this.

Excitement. Risk. An element of unpleasantness. That’s what the wine trade needs. You’re welcome.

Photo by Aleksandr Kadykov on Unsplash