Deliverance

 From now on I want my milk "overdelivered" at no extra cost, and the postman had better buck his ideas up too

SEEING as we’re coming up to Christmas – and to demonstrate that I’m up on the buzzwords in the business – I thought I’d "overdeliver" this month.  I was always told that all things in moderation are okay, and that you shouldn’t really "overdo" anything.

But this latest bit of hip jargon has got me thinking.  I’m fed up with my milkman merely delivering my milk in the morning.  From now on I want my milk "overdelivered", which, in my book, means more milk than I can drink, delivered earlier, with extra kumquat yoghurts, a croissant and a newspaper – but at no extra cost.

Then perhaps he could stick around and do a bit of DIY.  And the postman had better buck his ideas up too.  By its very definition, to "overdeliver" cannot possibly make any economic sense.

How can it be possible to up the quality while maintaining costs without a dip in profits? As you can see, I haven’t fully figured out what "overdeliver" means yet, but I reckon if I write some extra wordage this month and slash my fee I’ll be half way there.

Maybe, by this time next year, we will all be "megadelivering" before we move on to "hyperdelivering" in 2005.  God only knows if we’ll have any energy left after that.

It would seem that most of us won’t be overdoing it this Christmas, according to a survey commissioned by Ernest and Julio Gallo. Apparently, 28 million Brits have a dinner party at least once a month, resulting in a £3.5 billion spend on home entertaining.

We’re entertaining friends at home more than we were five years ago and, despite the best efforts of those "buryme- in-a-Y-shaped-coffin" Sex and the City girls, this applies to nearly half of the younger adult population aged between 25 and 34.

Contrary to popular belief, they’d rather be at home in a pinny.  Respondents were asked, "How much would you spend on entertaining six people?" Unfortunately for the food and drink industry, nearly half (47%) said they would spend no more than £8.33 per head (food and drink), which wouldn’t even buy a single bottle of bog-standard house wine in most bars and restaurants these days.

There’s a moral here somewhere for those in the on-trade.  Society is certainly evolving. In my day, looking for social security involved signing on down at the job centre.  But, according to David Warburton, professor of psychology at Reading University, who conducted Gallo’s study, "social security" is now something that young people – faced with mounting job insecurity – are seeking at home.

Regularly shafted at work, it seems they are choosing to spend more time at home with close friends and people they trust, and who can blame them? This might be bad news for the on-trade, but it’s good news, I would have thought, for the branded wines dominating take-home sales.

It is also encouraging to learn that people are becoming much more confident in the way they choose their wines.  Almost onethird (27%) of those surveyed feel sufficiently  knowledgeable to base their selection on either grape variety or country of origin.

The sheer fear factor, it would seem, is diminishing.  16% choose their wine according to recommendations by friends or the wine press, while only 7% go on price alone. Thankfully, only 4% look simply for special offers. 

And, as we might expect, there are the usual differences between the sexes.  Apparently, 20% of men choose a wine according the description on the back label, while the same percentage of women admit to choosing a wine completely "at random" – pin-the-tail-on-theplonky, I guess.

However, my favourite statistic from Gallo’s survey is that, when asked who does the cooking for dinner parties, 52% of men said they do it, while 80% of women are under the impression it is up to them.

On the food front, more than a third (35%) of those interviewed (1,278 in all) serve traditional "meat and two veg" at their dinner parties.  While this might come as a surprise to celebrity chefs and those who have elevated food and wine matching into a branch of philosophy, the rest of the drinks business can afford to be philosophical about these very conservative tastes.

After all, "meat and two veg" offers considerably more food and wine matching opportunities than the nation’s second choice of food. Seventeen per cent said they would serve Indian, which is nice for the lager boys.

The remaining categories, in descending order, are "New World BBQ" food (11%), Mediterranean (or Pleb Med, as I like to call it, also with 11%), Italian (9%), Chinese (7%), French (zut alors! with only 4%) and Thai (3%).

No mention of those following the fashionable Atkin’s diet who will, I presume, be tucking into a festive feast of "meat and two meat" this Christmas.  And speaking of Christmas, I’ve once again shoe-horned all my shopping into a one-day SAS-style operation scheduled for Christmas Eve.

Aaah, the smell of plastic, the tinnitus of the tills, the cut and thrust of nabbing the last vol-aux-vents in M&S.  Don’t you just love (buzzphrase alert) the "theatre of the aisles"?