Mouldering away in my cellar are 30 or so elderly bottles with an orangey label featuring a cute little owl. Every year or so, I pull one out and drink it. Wines of similar age are fading fast. Not La Cuvée Mythique. It came from pioneering winemakers in Corbières, down towards the Franco-Spanish border; and when I bought it 15 years ago its spicy swirls of chocolate, plums, cherries and smoke showed the great quality emerging from former gut-rot vineyards at ridiculously low prices. I last saw Cuvée Mythique at the Co-op in 2008, reduced from £5.49 to £4.49, which, after inflation, is even crazier than the £4.99 reduced to £2.99 I paid at the old Safeway.
The man who first brought the little owl to Britain is called Mark Hughes. After running Safeway's wine, he moved on through the wine trade and now has his own retail website, the Real Wine Company. From his house in Gerrards Cross, he sells some lovely southern French bottles that show how the region has gone on improving in the past two decades; but he also has some things to say about the trade itself - particularly its marketing methods.
Three time-honoured ways of selling wine, according to Mark, are sex, greed and fear. In reverse order, fear means telling customers that you're selling out so buy some quickly, and greed means cutting prices. At one of his jobs, he and his colleagues sold the same wine under different labels, one at £4.99, the other "reduced from £9.99 to £4.99". The "reduced" wine outsold the other by miles. Sex means selling wine by image: alluring, exclusive and probably not cheap.
Mark has a variation that you might call sexy with scruples. "When I was in charge of it at Safeway, wine wasn't as important as it is today - it was fun. Now it's such a significant part of the supermarket sales nexus. I have retrenched into what I think are decent wines. I'm trying desperately to stand up for some principles here by selling good wine at a standard mark-up."
Here's one of his, and two others that show how wine on the Spanish side of the border has also shot up in quality since the little owl was hatched.
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LIQUID HUNCHES
Altos de Oliva Gran Reserva Catalunya 2000 (£7.95)
Rich and minerally with spicy fruit (fromvineyardsdirect.com)
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Les Hauts de Força Réal Côtes de Roussillon Villages 2003 (£15)
The fragrant epitome of all that's right about red wine (therealwineco.co.uk)
Scala Dei Cartoixa Reserva 2005 (£26.99)
A massive Catalan blockbuster: drink a week after opening or store in the cellar for 10 years (Oddbins)