Pleasures of Plonk

My topic today is suggested by a friend's birthday. I know it is Lent but we have to make exceptions. We have sherry before lunch and wine with it on Sundays and argue that Sundays are not part of Lent. A table friend is hanging on to something extra for Refreshment Sunday, a family reward for being brave and giving up driving at 89. A carafe on the table for a meal on the continent is a real pleasure.

It's sour grapes, but you can't beat a £5 bottle
Max Davidson laments the passing of the cheap plonk that has seen him through good times and bad.

Has it really come to this? More than a fiver, minimum, for a bottle of wine? It only seems like yesterday that I could buy a bottle of plonk at my local off-licence and have change from three quid. An entire way of life - not just for me, but for millions like me - is drawing to a close.

'There are as many different attitudes to wine as there are varieties of grape'.

Cheap wine, predict the doom-mongers at The Grocer magazine, is about to become a thing of the past. Soon, according to its annual survey of the international wine market, it will be hard to find a decent tipple for £5 in even the cheapest supermarkets.

The causes are many and complex - too much rain in Europe, too little rain in Australia, the higher price of transport and packaging - but the bottom line is what counts, and the bottom line, for me, is terrible.

It is not just the money: I can stretch to £6 a bottle, £7 at a pinch. It is the death of cheap plonk - the cheaper the better, as every plonk-lover knows - as a lifestyle choice. I feel quite bereft, as if all the friends of my youth were passing away at once.

Farewell, Rioja, my best buddy from Spain, my trusty companion when I was a student! You were there for me when I was young and poor and striving for sophistication and all my friends were drinking beer.

Farewell, Blue Nun! How often I turned up at parties with you tucked under my arm!
Farewell, Bull's Blood from Hungary! You were the cheapest of the lot, but I never held it against you. Remember that strawberry blonde we swept off her feet because she thought you were the cool new thing? You played a blinder that night, old friend.

Farewell, Valpolicella, my plonk of plonks! Have we really seen each other for the last time? You used to come in stonking two-litre bottles, like the great Italian diva you were. Quantity, not quality: you taught me that. And give my love to Lambrusco if you see him.

For serious wine-lovers, whose mantra is that you get what you pay for, the hike in prices is neither here nor there. "I would not normally touch anything under £5.99 with a bargepole," says my colleague Jonathan Ray, The Daily Telegraph's wine critic.

"You can get bargains if you shop around, but if you dig your heels in, and refuse to pay more than a fiver under any circumstances, you will be drinking such poor wine that you might as well not bother."

Those in Whitehall are also unlikely to mourn the passing of plonk, due to the association between cheap booze and binge-drinking. If young people have to pay more than a fiver a bottle, they will drink less, perhaps even drink more discerningly.

So why am I still licking my wounds? Why does a £5 minimum for a bottle of wine seem so much more of a shock to the system than the 50p chocolate bar, or the £1 litre of petrol?

I think it's because wine - more than any other consumer product, more even than clothes - reflects the sort of person you are. Do you sip or slurp?

Let the wine breathe or just uncork and let rip? In restaurants, do you make a beeline for the most expensive wine on the menu, and fantasise about blowing £10,000 on a Château Pétrus 1982? If you are bringing a bottle for your host or hostess, do you feel stingy if you pay less than £12?

There are as many different attitudes to wine as there are varieties of grape; and my own, I realise, is robustly, unashamedly plebeian. At heart, I am still that 19-year-old student, going into a shop with a few pounds in my pocket and scanning the wine labels with a single objective in mind - to find the cheapest.

It would be nice to think that there were enough of us inveterate plonk-buyers, for whom every penny spent over £3 is a source of resentment, to make some kind of a stand on the issue.

I can see us marching down Whitehall with our banners ("Protect Cheap Booze!", "Change From A Fiver!") and bottles of dodgy Bulgarian red in our rucksacks.

It will never happen, of course. Apathy will rule, wine prices will creep ever upwards, and all we will be left with is our memories.

But only fools would decry those memories - of youth, of excess, of self-indulgence in times of penury. Forget grown-up wine. With plonk, the sweetest bouquet of all is the taste of a few pence saved.