Last Wednesday morning was extremely nerve-wracking for me. Not only did I have to drive into London during a tube strike, a trying experience in itself for a country boy, but the reason I was going to London was we had arranged a sampling session of all of Aldi’s range for the nation’s wine journalists.

We have held a similar event each year at this time for the last six years but this doesn’t prevent me experiencing something close to what actors must feel on the opening night of a show. You have prepared well, worked hard but now you are in the hands of the critics. A very vulnerable position indeed.

To be fair, journalists have generally been kind to Aldi over the last few years and they understand what we are trying to do – offer great value for money across a range of prices – but this knowledge does not prevent nerves creeping in as one poorly showing wine could generate an unfavourable review. To reduce the risk of this happening I taste every wine before the doors open to ensure they are as they should be and none are corked or have any faults. At least then journalists can review the wines as we intend to sell them.

This year we have an extended range of special wines which will hit the stores in late November. All of these were included in the tasting to give them the chance to be incorporated into pre-Christmas editions. I think we have a fantastic offer this year and I am keeping my fingers crossed that the journalists thought so too!

How do you define what you are tasting? That is a question I have been asking myself a lot lately. It is relatively easy, though still harder than you might think to describe the taste of wine but how do you then translate this to defining the wine.

Why bother I hear you ask. Well as a wine buyer it is important that I get what I paid for so that my customers are able to drink the wine I intend for them. I need therefore to be sure that when I perform my quality control checks what I expect to taste is what I actually do taste, and when they don’t match problems occur. Let’s consider the potential scenarios when my expectation doesn’t meet the reality.

1) The product is faulty. I telephone the supplier. He samples the product and agrees with me. We take appropriate action to rectify the fault.

2) The product is faulty. I telephone the supplier. He samples the product and tells me that there is nothing wrong with the wine.

3) I am wrong. My memory of what the product should taste like is faulty and there is nothing at all amiss with the sample I have tasted.

Fortunately any of the above scenarios are relatively rare and when they do occur they normally fall into category one. This is simple to sort out as there is agreement about a problem and from that point it is generally pretty straight forward to find a solution.

Scenario two is a little trickier and I need to use my powers of persuasion to show that there is indeed a problem. During the three years I have bought wine this has happened only twice and in both cases came down to the fact that one small batch was faulty. This is not ideal but in the end the problem was resolved.

Scenario three frightens me to death. How can I be sure that my memory is correct? This is deeply worrying as the obvious answer’ to continue to trust your memory’ doesn’t sound particularly methodical or foolproof, and where you end up if you stop trusting your memory I don’t want to consider.

In order to repair my growing paranoia I last week visited a supplier who has expertise in defining wine. Six of us tasted 12 of Aldi’s wines and described the appearance, aroma and taste and ranked the wines on a scale of 0-20. This is a similar process to the method described by the Institute of Wines and Spirits and anyone having taken one of their courses will be familiar with the approach. The advantage of this method is that you are using the combined ability of all the tasters and take an average score. We then took the process a stage further and decided on the key components (about 15-20 of these) that marked out the characteristics of each individual wine and having done that gave each characteristic a score between 1 to 9. What is achieved is a description of the fingerprint of each wine and this can be used as a definition of the wine in case of need.

I am convinced that this is a sound, scientific approach which will help both me and my suppliers in the quest to produce better wine for Aldi customers. I now need to convince my suppliers and get their commitment to this process.