This is the third and last summer despatch from our retail specialist Andy Howard MW. See also his reports on the current offerings from Tesco and Waitrose.
When I really started to get hooked on wine back in the late 1980s, the UK wine market was very different from how it is today. Supermarkets stocked only modest ranges of not very interesting wines; specialist merchants serviced their own local clientele (online shopping was just a pipe dream); and a group of long-forgotten independent chains (Augustus Barnett, Bottoms Up, Peter Dominic, Threshers, Victoria Wine and Unwins) competed with the off-the-wall...