that is rather slippery of you, agent sainsbury

I was in my local Sainsbury's the other day when I noticed a peculiar thing: I'd picked up a box of red wine and I thought it looked a bit squarer and squatter than usual. Closer examination revealed the reason for this: it was only 2.25 litres instead of the usual 3, or, to put it another way, the equivalent of three bottles instead of the usual four. This seems to be a general change of policy for Sainsbury's as most of the other boxes had been changed to the new smaller size as well. Rather cheekily, though, the prices didn't seem to have been adjusted down by the requisite 25% (for instance £12.99 for the Australian Merlot is the equivalent of £17.32 for 3 litres), nor was there any signage up saying WARNING: SMALLER BOXES or anything like that. I deem this to be a rather sneaky money-making exercise on Sainsburys' part, and, more importantly, a bid to restrict my wine consumption. This will not do.

Purely for research purposes I dropped into Tesco yesterday to check out the competition, and I see no evidence that Tesco are adopting the same policy, I'm glad to say. Just on the off-chance that this was just a clear-out of old stock I picked one up; compare the relative shapes and sizes below.


[Quick footnote: I meant to link for comparison purposes to this earlier post comparing the (formerly) standard 3-litre pack to the gargantuan 5-litre one I acquired in France. Surely bigger is the way to go, if only to increase the wine/packaging ratio? It's more environmentally friendly, after all.]

I never drink......wine. Oh go on then

Wine. Sometimes a bottle just isn't enough.

That's an advertising slogan that I think could be a winner for the wine industry, though I'd be wanting a cut of any profits accruing from its use. They could pay me in wine, as a gesture of goodwill.

Anyway, if you do decide, in advance of making any oenophilic purchases, that a standard 75cl bottle just won't do the trick, your usual obvious course of action is to buy a box. 3 litres (i.e. four bottles' worth), and because there's no glass involved you can convince yourself that you're saving the planet into the bargain. Plus, you can, once it's finished, remove the internal foil bag, inflate it by blowing into the tap and use it as an emergency camping pillow.

Or....you can avail yourself of one of these (see below). This is a 5-litre box of Côtes du Ventoux from the excellent Cave de Sylla in Apt, which I bought when we were in Provence back in June. See how its bulging beefy majesty dwarfs the puny 3-litre box of Banrock Station Shiraz Mataro which I've included for comparison purposes. Also - the Aussie wine was a very reasonable £12.99 from my local Sainsbury's, but this one was a mere 14 euros, which, at today's exchange rate, works out at £9.38. So that's £1.88 a litre (£1.41 a bottle), compared with £4.33 a litre or £3.25 a bottle for the Aussie one. All depends on the quality of the wine as well, of course, but the Cave de Sylla allow you to do a bit of pre-emptive tasting before you buy, and this was definitely the best of the boxed ones.


Incidentally the legend on the left-hand side reads "un chant plein de lumière et fraternité", which I would translate as "a song full of light and brotherhood". Which is all well and good, though "a big box full of cheap booze" would probably have done just as well. There is a slogan on the other side as well, and it reads "il faut se rendre à ce palais magique" which I think broadly translates as "you must go to the magic palace". I've no idea what that means, but I suspect necking 5 litres of wine at one sitting might grant you some sort of insight. I'll let you know how it goes.

things that annoy me today

Those artfully rustic crooked J.P. Chenet Merlot bottles.

Nothing wrong with the wine contained therein (in fact I'm sipping a glass of it now) despite what they say in Sideways. But.....the first time you see one, on its own, you think, well, that's charmingly rustically imperfect, as if produced in some rustic shed out the back of some rustic French chalet by some rustic horny-handed toothless garlicky Frenchman with grape stems lodged between his toes. The slightly off-vertical bottle-neck, the slight dimple in one side of the bottle as if accidentally pressed in by a thumb. You can just imagine kicking back in an olive-grove somewhere in the Languedoc munching on warm baguettes and horse salami and washing it down with this stuff. Possibly out of the bottle.

Then you see a whole shelf of them in an off-licence or a supermarket, and you think, hold on a second, these are ALL THE SAME! Every bottle-neck tweaked off vertical by a minutely calibrated 8.3 degrees, every dimple applied with the Chenet patented pouce-o-matique^TM to a pressure of 22 psi for 4.2 seconds, and all very probably carried out in what you thought was nothing more sinister than a massive nuclear missile silo on the outskirts of Montpellier. Ah, how the scales fall from my eyes (halibut scales, naturally). This is all some big cynical marketing ploy, like pre-faded jeans or "distressed" furniture. Oh, I feel so used and dirty.