A question I’m often asked is -whether a particular wine is ‘worth it’. The answer, generally, is ‘no’ if the wine costs £3.99 and resembles alcoholic dishwater; ‘yes’ if it costs £19.95 but tastes like nectar and fills you with joy as you sip it. I mention in my book, the second edition of Life’s Too Short to Drink Bad Wine (-Quadrille, £12.99), that Chateau Pétrus, often the most expensive of all Bordeaux wines, is not remotely worth the £9,000 plus you might pay in a restaurant, unless you are a monstrously rich oligarch or a hedge fund manager who needs to show off to his friends, in which case it’s worth every penny. And of course the proposed minimum pricing for alcohol will not have the slightest effect on Pétrus.
The point about the wines in this offer, our last before Christmas, is that they are all worth it and in some cases superb value, not least because Robert Boutflower of Tanners in Shrewsbury has persuaded his bean-counters to reduce all the prices.
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