Well yes because UK taxes are punitive. The wine (plus bottle and cork and label) component of a £10 bottle is actually about 3€.
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Really don’t like that! Tastes like a wine from the European wine lake to me.
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I reckon when it comes to wines… one person’s “joy” can be another’s “yuk”…
Trying the wine before buying is best (in my view) but I also observe what the locals are snapping up in the shops, I discuss what’s on offer with 'em if I can (ask their advice)… and have rarely been let down.
Letting a wine breathe for a while can make all the difference and what might seem harsh at first sip… can turn into a mellow delight… with a little patience.
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Too modest by half! 
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As my tastes have got drier I find demi-sec quite sweet. None of the French people I know would touch anything but a brut champagne or mousseux.
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With our pals in Paris… we noticed they would offer champagne “with or without”…
on investigation, I found the champagne was always brut… and delicious… but some of the club preferred to have a tiny drop of violet (whatever) in the bottom of the glass, before the champagne was poured… I tasted that too… and found it equally delicious. hic hic…
I still have a bottle of “violet crémant” in our cave, which we haven’t yet had courage to open as such awful memories of that little drop of violet. But then I do dislike violet, and lavender and those very perfumed floral things. However, a drop of mûr, or myrtille and I’m happy.
It’s often the other way, and as you and your taste buds age you prefer sweeter things.
So a French vineyard that bottles thousands of bottles of its own wine each year is somehow able to tell which one are crap to export to Uk, and keep the good ones for the French market? How on earth do they manage that?
Ok some places in the UK don’t store wine well, so it will have lost some flavour by being too hot. But otherwise the same bottle of wine of same year will taste the same in UK as France. How could it be otherwise??
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chestnut liqueur is delicious with red wine, champagne, anything… hic hic
in fact there are many, many wonderful things in France… drinking and eating is a glorious pastime…
I find kir too sweet, so always mix myself a kir chataigne - funny thing is no one else ever seems interested and everyone opts for kir
Oh dear. It’s one of those wines for the UK market. It’s like pi**.
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That really takes me back. We brought a small bottle of violet back from France in the early 90’s. The only real use we found for it was in sparkling wine, and just a drop which meant it lasted about 20 years. It really did add something, especially if the sparkling wine, of whatever provenance, was a bit dodgy 
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Well that remark had my chuckling… my Paris pals would never serve anything dodgy… 
Paul Strang’s, Wines of South-West France, is little old now (1996) but still a really useful account and history of each appellation and its characteristics that is cheap s/h. If anyone knows of more recent guide to this area’s wines I’d be grateful for the title.
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Le Guide Hachette des Vins is a reliable corner stone, or Paul Strang: Vins et Vignerons du Sud-Ouest that he re-edited in 2009 (not sure if there is an English edition).
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Look at Decanter as well, they have all sorts of articles possibly on line and publish books too.
Thanks, I’ve a couple of Hachettes, but really want something more regional with informative back stories on developments. I’ll check out if the Strang 2009 edition has sufficient new material. to be worth getting, Though TBH, since then there’s been so many interesting developments and innovations around here so I’d really like to find something which covered that. For instance, because our local appellations are tiny, there’s some interesting wines being made beyond their boundaries that aren’t AoC, but one often only learns about them from local newspapers or sommeliers.
Well, I was talking about fizzy of whatever variety, purchased and drunk in the UK 
, which can sometimes be a bit 
. I wouldn’t dare to malign the French fizzy, as I’ve had so much fantastic stuff in France 
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I had a copy that the OH bought me in about 2014 I think. Unfortunately it was destroyed in storage during a massive flood along with about 90% of my book collection in 2018. It served me well for a couple of years of traveling around the South before we moved over.