Wine

As everyone is aware, there are many varieties of wine. In my own cellar, for example, one may find, amongst others, Shiraz, Malbec, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon (only for the cleaning lady, of course, and for chucking into stews), Rioja, Chianti, Frascati, and Chablis. I'm seriously considering opening a Chablis in half an hour or so, in fact, to accompany the seriously good chicken on ciabatta sandwich that I have just created, which I shall consume in the conservatory.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that, generally speaking, the better the quality of the original raw materials, the better (and, consequently, more expensive) the resultant wine.

Generally speaking.

Something is confusing me, though. It is a truth universally acknowledged, is it not, that cheap, shitty raw materials result in cheap, shitty wine? Hence, for instance, at the bottom, Working Class end of the scale one finds rhubarb wine, elderberry wine, dandelion wine, and so forth. What could be more common and brutish than those pathetic weeds and vegetables?

So how come house wine always languishes with them at the very bottom of the bibendary scale, often going for no more than seven or eight quid a bottle in a restaurant?

Given that, even with the current property crash, a house nevertheless still costs at least upwards of £150,000, you might reasonably expect any wine that's produced from one to reflect such initial investment. And that's before you factor in the substantial extra costs of having teams of peasants harvest the bricks, tread them, and then transfer the ensuing juice to vast fermentation tanks.

There can only be one answer: House wine is manufactured from condemned, slum dwellings. Drinking it is therefore the equivalent of eating condemned meat. Consequently, just as condemned meat is generally diseased, so, too, is house wine. House wine gives you salmonella and E-Coli. It probably gives you BSE, too. This is why people who drink too many bottles of house wine always stagger around and fall over, like BSE afflicted cattle.

QED, I think.