2009, let's eat and drink well

2009 wants to be the year of the great british food with big chefs telling us that the food we buy from supermarkets is not tasty as the one we could buy from a farm. I still don't understand how consumers can pretend and expect to get good quality at a cheap price, this can only happen for factory produced food where the economies of scale allow it; for natural, tasty and healthy food, it is simply impossible especially when supermarkets are making plenty of money and I have been telling this for years, well before those chefs came on TV.

The funny thing though, is that wine is considered differently from food, like it was made in a factory, whilst is exactly the same. How can we expect to pay a bottle of wine £3 when duty and VAT make £2 thus leaving £1 for the wine and a bottle of mineral water, that do not require any work except the bottling, cost more than that. It is also interesting to read all wine writers now reviewing cheap bottles of wine that before they had snobbed, wines that have suddendly become drinkable.

Wine is like food, it is made with grapes and those grapes cannot be produced in a factory. The quality of the grape depends not only from the vintage but also from the yield of the vine: the lower the latter, the better the grapes and consequently the wine, the more buds are left on the vine during the pruning, the more grapes the vine will produce and the lower quality the grapes and the wine will be, this is why a decent wine cannot cost £3 per bottle. Imagine if you are producing tomotoes in your garden, you look after them and you grown them carefully. If you were going to sell them, will they cost, and more than that, will they taste like the ones you can buy from the supermarket? I bet no.