Of all the tributes flowing in for wine industry doyen Len Evans, Crikey was particularly taken with Brian Stonier’s piece in The Key Report. For the wine-maker and former book publisher, three of Evans’s characteristics stood out above all others: his “long-term vision of useful and creative ideas to benefit the industry”,  his generosity and his sense of humour.

To give an idea of Evans’s vision, Stonier republishes an extract from the insightful Len Evans Theory of Consumption:

There is an awful lot of wine in the world but there is also a lot of awful wine. No sensible person drinks to excess, therefore any one person can only drink a certain amount in a lifetime…

To make the most of the time left to you, you must start by calculating your total future capacity. One bottle a day is 365 bottles a year. If your life expectancy is another 30 years there are only 10,950 bottles ahead of you, or 5 bottles a week by 30 years equals 7,800 bottles to drink…

People who say you can’t drink the good stuff all the time are talking rubbish: you must drink good stuff all the time. Every time you drink a bottle of inferior wine it’s like smashing a superior bottle against the wall; the pleasure is lost forever – you can’t get that bottle back. There are people who build up huge cellars, most of which they have no hope of drinking. They are foolish in over-estimating their capacity, but they err on the right side and their friends love them.

What part is wine in your life? 10%? Therefore 10% of your income should be spent on wine.

We’ll raise our glasses to that.