I was propping up the bar at José’s eponymous tapas bar in Bermondsey when before you can say Rozinante, the barman offered me two red wines to taste, a bobal and a mencia. Not rioja please note but two relatively obscure yet delicious Spanish reds each with their own distinctive personality. I couldn’t resist a glass of Gramona, a cava that’s so refreshing it almost single-handedly redefines Spanish sparkling wine.

The turbulent, not to mention taxing, events of the past year seem so obvious with the benefit of a wing mirror. True we’d already seen wine sales starting to spiral downwards, but isolation from Europe coupled with yet another above inflation tax hike brought gloom if not quite doom to what was left of the high street. The new Oddbins and Wine Racks clung on. George Osborne riffled greedily through our pocket but failed to spot the gaping hole in it.