Jamie Goode’s recent LinkedIn post bemoaning the fact that most wine is ‘boring’ and ‘not worth drinking’, and his implication that the only ‘interesting’ stuff is to be found at natural wine fairs, attracted predictable rounds of applause from people who have a particular view on what wine ought to be.

But it raised several questions.

First, there’s the obvious one of how to define ‘interesting’. At this year’s WBWE bulk fair in Amsterdam, professionals were evidently sufficiently interested’ in a sample of the Zaria Dubai Chocolate flavoured wine’ on show in the Silent Tasting area, for the Argentine producer, Cuatro Fincas’  to run out of it. I’m guessing that the tasters - and especially the Masters of Wine attending the fair - were thinking more of their customers’ than their own drinking pleasure, but how many of them, or those same customers, would line up to buy an artisanal orange wine or pet nat?

For the sake of argument, let’s accept Goode’s reasonable premise that the majority of wine is ‘boring’. Is that a recent phenomenon? Well, I guess there was intellectual ‘interest’ to be found in the diversity of faults to be found in the poor quality wine that, as Goode says, used to be ubiquitous. And I recall Burgundy superstar Lalou Bize-Leroy telling me that she preferred ‘horrible’ wine to stuff that was ‘pas mal’ - not bad - but there is no reason to believe that a modern wine drinker would find any reason to consume the reds and white that made up most of the 100 litres the average French citizen was pouring down their gullet every day when I moved to Burgundy in 1975.

The town of Beaune may have been surrounded by vineyards that were producing - relatively - more affordable wine than today, but most shoppers in the Casino, Carrefour and Coop supermarkets were loading their trolleys with returnable litre bottles of red vin de table from unnamed regions a lot further south. These were priced according their ABV; beginning, I think, at 10%.

This wine served the same purpose as beer would have done for people living in northern Europe; it was a convivial alcoholic beverage and lubricant for food that neither demanded nor deserved any thought. And, while quantities have plummeted over the years, I don’t think as much has changed as some wine people would apparently like to imagine. Whether the liquid in the glass is Heineken, Coors or Corona; Pinot Grigio, Prosecco or Merlot, it’s often consumed in the same way as a cup of coffee or tea, a Coke, a canned tomato soup, or a plate of fries or chicken wings.

To say that these are not ‘interesting’ is like making the same accusation against daytime TV, or most EDM - Electronic Dance Music: that’s not what they are for. Some people - let’s call them uncompromising aesthetes - will agree with Goode that this makes all of this stuff ‘not worth’ consuming, and that’s entirely their prerogative.

I love really good coffee, beer, soup and wine, but when someone offers me a mug of Nescafe, ‘builders’ tea or Heinz soup on a cold day - or a glass of Heineken or ‘industrial’ Merlot, I won’t be saying ‘no thank you’.

Note 1: in case anyone was wondering, I didn’t think the Dubai Chocolate flavoured Zaria wine ‘worked’,  And most of Cuatro Fincas other flavoured efforts - mostly in cans - were too sweet for my palate, but I have to admit to having been impressed by their simpler Chocolate, and Lemon-&-Ginger-Twist, provided I didn’t think of them as ‘wine’.

Note 2: Confusingly, there is a New Zealand winery called Zaria which I believe has no conection to the flavoured Argentine examples. Someone appears not to have registered the name, or isn’t protecting it properly.