Quite a few things have got up my nose this past month. One of them was the exquisite, if subtle, perfume of the 2005 vintage of Les Hauts de Smith, but you don't really want to hear about that do you?
One rank pong, unfortunately, was that associated with the latest wheeze to extract money from gullible retailers with a new own label awards – which invited me, for a fee of £500, to join its panel of judges.
Naturally, I turned down the chance to swig yet more of the largely revoltingly indifferent gunge to which supermarkets now append their own labels, when once it was an area replete with splendid bargains. It wasn't because the money was a joke, but because the competition is.
Only Sainsbury's and Majestic, from what I gather, felt as I did and turned down the chance to participate. Perhaps it's time to run a competition to decide the best annual wine competition: entrants can swallow their own medicine, at a entry fee of, shall we say, £10,000?
I won't be recommending Chinese wine because of Tibet
Boycotting things with which – or people with whom – you do not agree can have a dramatic effect. The seventies boycott of trade and sporting links with the apartheid regime in South Africa worked. On the same principle, I won't be recommending Chinese wine – because of Tibet – or writing about those from Israel.
But can you carry it too far? Should I extend this disavowal to Californian and English wine because of the American and British invasion of Iraq? Should I have banned French wine from my Guardian column, as a number of readers insisted I should, when that country carried out nuclear weapons testing in 1996?
And, today, should we boycott Tesco? The retailer has left an extremely nasty taste in the mouth over its wholly disproportionate hounding of critics of its expansion plans in Thailand. I am seriously considering forgetting to attend the next Tesco wine tasting. Although I am no longer a member, I urge all members of the Circle of Wine Writers to consider doing likewise.
If I still published my Superplonk book I'd be happy to chuck Tesco out unless they do the decent thing and stop its Thai subsidiary from pursuing libel claims which run, in one case, to an obscene £16-million.
Malcolm Gluck is the wine critic of The Oldie magazine
I won't be recommending Chinese wine because of Tibet
Want more stories delivered to your inbox?
