In the run-up to the biggest wine shopping spree of the year, the final six weeks, it is time to recall the seven deadly wine sins:

1. Greed or covetousness. The big one. Almost everyone in the wine world, and that includes grape growers, wine producers, middle men, wine merchants and wine buyers, has committed this sin. Unprincipled Bordeaux proprietors and negotiants
cannot launch their annual new vintage campaign without it. British merchants, fuelled by it, regularly make risible “vintage of the century” claims in their wine offers. Every Easter, there is a rash of so-called “half-price champagnes”, because supermarket buyers covet those magic, post-
millennium surplus year profits, when they flogged four times the usual amount in one weekend. Revealingly, one major supermarket wine supplier told me that, fond of talking up his wines for his clients, he had great difficulty in the blind tasting section of the master of wine exam, sorting wheat from chaff. Omar Khayyam got it right when he said, “I often wonder what the vintners buy. One half so precious as the goods they sell.”

2. Pride. The wine sin bin heaves with this one. I would cite grandiose label descriptions, devoid of all meaning, and often imitating phrases that in restricted cases do actually mean something. Step forward “reserve”, “grand cru exceptionnel”, “cuvée prestige” and “extra reserve”. Deceptive domaines and shabby châteaux whose names are conscripted to pass off mass-produced wines as the product of single vineyard estate are the guiltiest here.

3. Wrath. Supermarket and off-licence wine buyers’ particularly sinister sin, well-known to the trade but little known by shoppers, whereby popular wines are delisted because their producers refuse to pay shelf-space fees and to stump up for promotions.

4. Sloth. Again, plenty of choice here, but I think in particular of the slothful behaviour of high-street wine buyers who are too lazy to stock anything other than the achingly dull and at worst downright disgusting bland brands, such as Blossom Hill, Gallo and Jacob’s Creek. The sloth sin award also goes to the producers of these wines, too idle to credit their customers with good taste.

5. Lust. Contrary to popular belief not much of this in the wine world, but my vote goes to the marketeers of the ridiculous Rude Boy and Babe Chardonnay: “For the girl that wants it all! And gets what she wants!”

6. Envy. What the blinkered, hidebound French and, to a lesser extent, Germans, Italian and Spanish have been seduced into by the success of New World wine producers - notably the Australians, whose single varietal, inexpensive, easy to enjoy, fruit-filled wines continue to grow like topsy.

7. Gluttony. The sin of all who buy quantity, rather than quality. Hell and damnation all round, I’d say.

jane.macquitty@thetimes.co.uk

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