Mark Pardoe MW, the wine-buying director of Berry Bros. & Rudd, has a touching fondness for The Spectator. Either that or his maths is terrible. He shows me some excellent wines, all of which I love. I narrow them down to six and ask whether he might see his way to knocking a few quid off. I suggest a figure and he quadruples it — the discount, that is, not the price. I’m not a great haggler but I thought the way it worked was for the customer to ask for the world and the merchant to give away peanuts, not the other way around.
Anyway, the result is that all the wines have socking great discounts. Mark insisted that each bottle should have the same price (£9.95), meaning that he then had to lop a full seven quid off one wine, six quid off another and so on. The mixed case costs £119.40,
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