Spectator competition winners: pretentious wine writing

In Competition No. 3231, you were invited to supply an example of pretentious wine writing. Space is tight and the standard stellar, so to make way for the maximum number of winners I’ll pause only to commiserate with unlucky losers Brian Murdoch and Basil Ransome-Davies before handing over to those printed below, who earn £25 each.

Keen to self-identify, this Australian merlot arrives sans label in a bottle refreshingly untainted by phallic thrust or feminine curve: a box, in fact. A wine with important things to say about the way we live now, it’s a living refutation of the prejudice which asserts that vinicultural outcomes stem from biochemical composition or geographical provenance. Savour its complete absence of bouquet; noselessness hasn’t been deployed so pertinently since Gogol and the surely intended reference to the coronaviral symptom most injurious to connoisseurship is cemented in the glass, where its colour, the bluish red of deoxygenated blood, demands we engage with our age rather than its vintage.