A new charter for members
Ruskin, one of the great thinkers
of the Victorian age, an era that
also saw the birth of our Society
‘It’s unwise to pay too much but it’s worse to pay too little,’
are the wise words attributed to Victorian writer and
critic John Ruskin. ‘When you pay too much you lose a little
money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose
everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of
doing the thing you bought it to do.’
Such advice describes well the attitude The Society has
to the value for money that we provide members. Our
simple aim is to provide across our range of goods and
services the best overall value of any wine merchant.
Bad wine is bad value whatever the price, and by ‘good value’ we do not
necessarily mean ‘cheap’: the cheapest wines rarely offer the best value,
we find. The purpose of wine is to give pleasure, so we will never lower quality
standards to meet a price point. For us, good value is a combination of price,
quality and service.
The Society’s Value Charter is published for the first time in the July List which
accompanies this News. This charter explains how and why The Society’s unique model
can provide members with the best of the world’s vineyards at competitive
prices with good service, without the short-term distractions of shareholder
dividends and growth purely for growth’s sake.
As Oscar Wilde, another great Victorian, pointed out: ‘a cynic knows the price of
everything but the value of nothing’. We think that we serve our members best by
striving to be masters of both.