As I wrote in wine news last Saturday, the range offered by the most powerful retailers in the UK (many apologies here to the many purple pagers outside Britain) is becoming drearier and drearier as they become more and more dependent on the big brands.
There is a notable exception to this rule however – Marks & Spencer has the opposite problem: some truly exceptional wines that it can’t shift because of their insistence on putting their own rather dreary labels on everything. M&S is exceptional in many ways. First off, it doesn’t believe it is a supermarket (nor did...