Lowest: Pol Rémy

So our pals with the fabulously chi-chi place in the South of France turn up at our house in London, waving a bottle of what looks like champagne: right shape, quality label, tinselly foil on the top. Yes, the name, Pol Rémy, apparently rich in comic deceptions, arouses a bit of a laugh, but that's the French for you.

'How much?' they say. 'How much do you think it cost?'

I scuffle around offering prices starting at €15.00, because I haven't had a chance to get a proper look it; but I also understand that this is some kind of Dutch auction towards an unfeasibly low figure, gasps of astonishment, all-round disbelief. What I don't know is that the unfeasibly low figure is actually €1.99 or possibly €2.99 - there's a moment of crisis here, before we settle for €1.99 - at which point I have to assume that the wine itself is actually in negative price territory, given that the bottling packaging and distribution must have cost €1.99 and surely more. Which makes it, in all probability, the cheapest grog I have drunk this century.

'Scary,' I say, and what we explicitly don't do is show any interest in drinking the stuff there and then.

Which means that it disappears into the Death Row which is my wine rack, only resurfacing when some other people are round, people who like a laugh. Out the stuff comes again and what do you know - it's just a vin mousseux after all? Not only that but it has a plastic bung instead of a cork, which is depressing. And it's only 11% alcohol. But there's no turning back and I serve it up superchilled, as cold as Murmansk, and await results.

Mixed: three out of four of us find the stuff undrinkable - so much so that we actually have to tip it away. It tastes like nasal decongestant. The fourth person in the party, on the other hand, savours the bouquet, holds his glass up to the light, smacks his lips with little pattering sounds.

'Maybe it's the drugs I'm having to take at the moment,' he says, 'but I quite like this. Very pleasant.'

The rest of us shout at him, drugs or no drugs: it's not possible to enjoy Pol Rémy, not even in these terrible times. We make entreating gestures involving our arms and hands, but he carries on quite equably. We give up. He finishes his glass and wonders if there's more. There you go.

Which would have been it for Pol Rémy, except for the fact that I later go to the trouble of looking it up to see if there's any mention of it, anywhere. A nagging desire for reassurance makes me do it: I want any references I come across, to be abusive or derogatory; I want to believe wholeheartedly that this was one of the worst - certainly one of the cheapest - wines I have ever drunk; I also want to be told, implicitly, that it was okay to throw away half a glass of the stuff, something which even in the face of the worst wines, seems somehow immoral.

But no: this place adores it, calling it 'A lovely, clean, zesty wine' and much more, as well as suggesting that you might want to pay $8.99 (New Zealand) a bottle. The next site along is less sanguine, but still manages a 'Good dryness' followed by 'Easy and sweet', which makes me wonder; but even the one after that manages a cautious thumbs-up - although the bottle illustration seems to have changed, plus the price, so perhaps Pol Rémy is more chimerical than I at first thought - a Keyser Söze kind of wine, a wine which means as much or as little as the drinker wants it to and looks different each time. Also the quoted price now ranges from £1.23, which sounds right, to £5 excluding tax, which sounds limitlessly wrong.

So: we end up with a variously-tasting, variously-labelled, variously-priced wine, known generically as Pol Rémy - but appearing all over the place in different styles and at different levels of drinkability, encountered by numerous baffled drinkers, none of whose stories tally. Which, now I think about it, is what wine is, anyway. So I suppose it all works out. And €1.99! You'd have to be mad both to do it and not to.

CJ