Wine - Roger Scruton finds himself doing it by halves

When I began my disreputable career as a wino, British merchants bottled their wine in their own cellars. There was a disadvantage in this, which was that you had to distinguish the honest from the dishonest merchant. But the disadvantage was offset by many benefits conferred on the drinker, the wine trade and the planet. Now that all wine is bottled at source, millions of tons of glass are shunted around the globe, consuming vast amounts of unnecessary energy and destroying all hope of incorporating wine bottles into a programme of effective recycling. Moreover, the wine merchant has ceased to be a connoisseur, maturing wine on the premises, balancing wood age and bottle age, meeting the special needs of eccentric clients and in general taking charge of a process that is far better conducted in a damp English cellar than in the bone-dry chais of Provence. The merchant is now a middleman, whose contribution is limited to tasting and storing, but not maturing and enhancing, the final product. In the case of cognac - which, unless stored in wood for decades in a damp northern climate, is not much better than cough mixture - bottling at source has in effect destroyed the trade, as it has destroyed the trade in wood port and old Madeira. True, no modern Duke of Clarence could end up drowned in a butt of malmsey; but no modern Duke of Clarence would have the pleasure, before that final immersion, of knowing what real malmsey tastes like.

From the drinker's point of view, the worst effect of the laws that compel people to bottle at source is the virtual disappearance of all bottles smaller than the 75cc Eurojar. My career was launched at a time when Berry Bros bottled their own, with labels totally free from winespeak, emphasising through their laconic brevity that they must be taken on trust. And all Berry Bros wines were available in whole bottles (70cc), half-bottles, magnums and imperial pints. The last measure was particularly attractive to the beginner. It enabled you to pour the bottle of claret into a single large glass and allow its fumes to waft around your dinner. And it provided just about enough to drink, while enabling you vehemently to deny that you had consumed a whole bottle on your own.

Berry Bros still do their best to match the imperial pint with its nearest metric measure, the half-litre - streamlined, however, for the global market, which requires bottles to be convertible, when empty, to candlesticks in the vulgar Terence Conran style. Most Berry Bros house wines are available in this size. But the rest of their list, like the lists of so many merchants today, consists mainly of Eurojars. Even half-bottles are being phased out. I fully concede that half a bottle is not enough to finish a meal. But it is certainly enough to start it, and there is no better accompaniment to a solitary sandwich than a half of old Meursault, followed by another of Chateau Lafite.

Still, Berrys have tried their best to make half-bottles available to their regular winos, and have some excellent French classics, including (at £6.45) a 1996 Chateau La Tour de By - one of those consistently aromatic Medocs that need no tasting notes to introduce them - and a lively Cotes-de-Nuits Villages from 1998, which did a lot for my digestive system following an angry dish of wild boar.

Like many other merchants, Berrys have a full selection of sweet white wines in halves - a half-bottle being just about the maximum that those not in full training can digest. And they keep a stock of the most important halves of all - the white burgundies with which to broach the topic of a meal, before launching fully into it. Admirable though Berrys's white burgundies are, however, I must here recommend a visit to Majestic Wine. Though culpably negligent in general when it comes to the smaller sizes, Majestic has secured half-bottles of a Chablis - a 1996 premier cru Cote de Lechet at £4.99 - which was so good that Sam the horse didn't get a drop of it.

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