“Bags of fruit.” I remember having trouble with that one. Which fruit, first of all, were the famous bags filled with? Sweet apricots? Mouth-puckering blackcurrants? Tinned raspberries?

The posh wine trade, I have to tell you, is rather sniffy about half bottles of wine. True wine connoisseurs are meant to avoid them.

Philosophy, according to Martin Heidegger, begins with one fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”. The wine world has an equivalent.

A cultural encounter, a bargain, a souvenir, a canny piece of housekeeping: however you look at it, returning from a summer holiday with the car packed with wine satisfies deep instincts.

Fancy investing in burgundy?

As a Europhile, euro-enthusiast republican living on a Eurosceptic island devoted to its monarchy and its national currency, there are a number of revolutions which I accept may never come to pass.

Wine tastes nice. This will, I know, be the most banal sentence ever to appear in Decanter magazine, but it’s an important starting point for what follows.

Every reader of this magazine has something in common. We all enjoy analysing, thinking and talking about aroma and flavour.

Well, what would you do?

A specialised cultural commentator? A trainspotter with snob appeal? A doughty consumer champion in a world of manipulation and pretence? Or a drug user writing for other drug users?