Within the Bounds of Convention

One of my wine suppliers congratulated me on being his best customer for sherry. I assumed he was pulling my leg and remonstrated that I sold barely half a dozen bottles a week. ‘That’s right,’ he responded, ‘but that’s enough to beat the competition.’ There are, of course, some restaurants that sell a great deal more sherry than I do, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule: in the mainstream, it is drunk very little.