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.