The editor of Decanter, Guy Woodward, gave me a chocolate today. Now, this is a turn up for the books. It was his last Celebration and quite frankly, I don’t even think my fiance would give me his last chocolate.
Last night, I tweeted that I supported what he’d said about wine prices in the UK. And I wasn’t just sucking up to one of my employers.
He’d been on Radio 5 Live and his comments were picked up by The Daily Torygraph and was then invited on to the Today programme.
If you missed it, he told the BBC: “From my point of view I’d say that this was a good thing because for too long a lot of producers have been battered down by the supermarkets to produce wine at £3.99 or £4.99, and these days it is just pretty impossible to produce a decent wine for that amount.
“Slowly consumers are coming to realise that there is a huge amount of difference between a wine of say £4.99 and one of £6.99,” he added.
Of course, The Telegraph then called Asda for a comment, who unsurprisingly said Woodward was being elitist and a snob and, as any journalist would do, they turned it into a headline. Can’t blame them, I’d have done the same thing in their shoes.
But Guy has been given a lot of support since his honest comments. There have been tweets and coverage aplenty. He’ll have made a few enemies but it’s something that needed saying. Quite frankly, you can’t find decent wine for under a fiver. Occasionally, there might be a diamond in the rough but quite frankly I’d rather poke my eye out with a stick than drink most wines under five quid. Am I snob? Maybe. Or I might just think life’s too short to drink bad wine and eat Bird’s Eye fish fingers. I’ll take the more expensive wine and that chocolate any day.
