January Wine Club | 5 January 2013

I’ve always been baffled by the French attitude to wine. Either they drink too much or too little. When I was a student, a long time ago, I spent some months travelling around the country, including a few weeks at the house of a friend of a friend of my father. Every day my host drank an entire litre bottle of red — probably Algerian — with his lunch and another litre bottle with dinner. I would have been insensible, round the clock. But if you were in a restaurant, people would assume that a single bottle was ample for three or four diners, possibly preceded by a small scotch. If you were lucky.

And these days the French are drinking less and less wine. In the past 30 years, consumption has more than halved to barely more than one bottle a head per week. In part this is because they are consuming less but better wine.