Wine is becoming why oh why

Throughout the 1990s, wine writers gushed like oil wells. Drinkers had never had it so good and everything in the wine world was for the best and getting better.

In the wider world, the events of 1989 suggested to some the triumph of the free market and "the end of history". This was shadowed in the wine world. The arrival of varietals like chardonnay and the triumph of "fruit-driven", twinkle-clean New World wine sold as heavily marketed brands was said to mark the demise of bad wine and the victory of great new Australo-American free enterprise over bad old European state intervention.

Now it's beginning to look more complicated. This has been the worst year for British wine drinkers that I can remember and the free market is revealing itself to be a strange and greedy friend. Here are the details.

THE DEATH OF THE HIGH STREET

Smaller, high-quality off-licence chains like Davisons and Fullers having disappeared, Victoria Wine and Thresher have collapsed into each other and are owned by Nomura, a Japanese investment house which seems interested only in the slowly rising value of its property portfolio. The ranges are dwindling and the shops look awful, their windows full of cheap-beer promotions.

Worse still, the future of Oddbins is uncertain. It is hard to underestimate the importance of this eclectic chain to British wine-drinking culture, though it was just an unwanted pimple on the bottom of its multi-national owner Seagram. A six-month-old rumour places Oddbins in the hands of French company Castel Frëres, owner of Nicolas; the sale is still unconfirmed and questions proliferate. If we lose Oddbins, then the British high street as a great place to buy wine becomes history.

SUPERMARKET DECADENCE

The rise of wine brands has had a corrosive influence on supermarket ranges. Brands can afford to buy their way on to the shelves, and acquire more and more space.

This is not the fault of those in charge of supermarket ranges, who often struggle to keep brands at bay. Fruitlessly, of course, since it is the shareholders who count - and they want the increased dividends which brands bring. Wine buyers for one of Britain's largest supermarket chains have been told to reduce the number of wines they stock further next year, and it won't be the brands which get axed.

None of this would matter if brands offered great value for money. Most don't. They are dull, industrially produced products made by chemists which convey almost nothing of the perfumed beauty and characterful intensity that the best smaller producers of France, Spain, Italy, Australia and California can craft into similarly priced wines.

THE CULT OF STUPIDITY

As a drinks writer, it pains me to say it, but the truth is that Britain's alcohol "culture" is becoming less cultured and more stupid. Moderate drinking and informed enjoyment are beautiful and life-enhancing; drunkenness is pathetic, ugly and sad.

Drunkenness, however, is profitable, which is why the youth-maddening pub chains which now litter our high streets are proliferating, and why quiet, pleasant drinking places in British cities are hard to find. Most beer and all alcopops are sold on stupidity appeal; so, too, increasingly, is wine. Advertisements featuring drunken teenage women exchanging flippant sexual jokes and fat men spitting at fishes are, astonishingly, thought to increase sales of the products they promote.

Why are vulgarity and philistinism considered "cool" in this society? I've no idea, but if you prefer civilised pleasure to stupid intoxication, then now is the time to act by spurning those places and those products aimed at the brain-dead. Especially if you're under 25.