… which always involves opening several bottles of wine.

I hear you! “He calls that ‘work’!”

But, tomorrow I’m going to be tested …. to be filmed talking about these bottles with our Grant. Telegenic Grant does most of our broadcasts … and does them in a charming, relaxed way. I, the ancient one, struggle, in front of a camera. So I’m trying to memorise my thoughts on these wines so my comments can appear spontaneous. Alas, my memory has gone somewhere. Isn’t old age wonderful?

Anyway. What we are going to try and do tomorrow is persuade more people to pay more for their wine. This, in these straightened and doom-laden times sounds bonkers.

But it isn’t if you aim at more pleasure for your £, rather than more liquid for your £.

The wines I am tasting give me and thousands of customers at least twice the pleasure of most of the wines we sell. They are exceptional. Not because they’ve got famous names or are posh in an airy-fairy way, they are simply more concentrated. Wine is largely water. These wines just have less water. Makes a big difference. They have also taken longer to make and more money has been making them. More manual vineyard work to ensure concentrated perfect grapes, meticulous fermentation and long maturation mostly in expensive (£800) new barrels. Finely finished by exceptional winemakers. They have to cost more. But not a lot more. Which wines are they? Click on the tile ‘Vineyard Partners’. 30,000+ people buy cases of these wines year after year.