Can cheap wines be great wines?
What impertinence! The answer, of course, is an emphatic yes. When you get home after long, tiresome, involuntary activities to regain friends or family, sharing a glass of wine with them can lend the event a joyful profundity. No matter what the wine. There is, moreover, a simple deliciousness about the very best inexpensive wines that is every bit as entertaining as the complicated deliciousness of expensive wines. Sometimes, too, this simplicity is more appropriate to your mood or your circumstances. I can recall many mundane occasions when I have felt much happier relaxing with a bottle of £4.99 languedoc red, with its faint songs of earth and herbs, than I would be making the effort to listen to and understand what a nervy, fine-honed, sumptuously oaked and ineffably refined £100 bordeaux has to say. On those occasions, the cheaper wine is the greater.
