Why does anyone drink wine?

You will be scandalised by the suggestion, of course, especially those of you who spend several hours every week drinking it, reading about it or discussing it. But most wine is actually rubbish.

I’ll let you off the hook if you drink wine only with food. But wine drunk on its own is often a terrible drink, usually consumed for appearances’ sake, or because the drinker lacks the confidence to complain, or for want of any alternative source of alcohol. Our judgment of wine is also notoriously flaky — influenced as much by the appearance and weight of the bottle as by its contents. One winemaker sent the same wine to a competition under three different labels. One was rejected by the judges as ‘undrinkable’; another won a double gold medal.

Why do we happily risk buying such an unpredictable alcoholic drink? Any pub selling beer where there was a one in three chance your pint would be disgusting would go bankrupt in a week. Shouldn’t more of us follow the example of the late gastronome Julia Child, who when asked to name her -favourite wine replied ‘gin’?

Yet surely the popularity of wine means it must be good? Well, that depends how much you believe in individual preference and rational choice.

Drinking wine is a social norm in certain circles. To request anything else marks you out as a deviant. And the fact that wine comes in two colours makes it possible for hosts to offer their guests the illusion of choice without really offering any choice at all. These bifurcated choices (‘red or white’, ‘still or sparkling’, ‘tea or coffee’, ‘Labour or Conservative’) typically give the illusion of autonomy while actually inhibiting it. Kingsley Amis thought ‘Red or white?’ the three most depressing words in the English language.