Yes, I can be lazy and yes, I'm often greedy; yes, I love to gossip and yes, I tend to exaggerate. But no, I'm not, and never have been, snobbish.

In particular I have never been a wine snob.

I had, in fact, thought wine snobs were an extinct species.

I mean there seem to be wine columns in every publication from the Sunday Telegraph to the Beano nowadays, and you hardly need much, if any, expertise to pick up a decent bottle of plonk in ASDA or Tesco, do you? Course not.

It looks, however, as if I was wrong about the demise of the wine snob.

The species may be dwindling but there are still a few out there, swirling and sniffing the contents of their wine glasses - "This one has a lovely nose, darling!" - before ostentatiously rolling the stuff around their mouths and eventually swallowing, or, if you're unlucky, spitting it out.

Me? I pour therefore I drink (unless it's sweet or German).

And the big attraction when I drink is price. Show me a bottle of wine - red, white, "but please, not rose, darling!" - marked down from £5.99 to £3.99 and I'm definitely interested.

Show me a bottle of wine marked £2.99 or two for £5, however, and no quibbling, they're in the basket and I'm down at the checkout.

As I was last week while shopping for groceries with a friend, a friend who likes his wine - and plenty of it.

"What are you going to do with those?" he asked as I popped my two bottles of Argentinean red for a fiver in front of the checkout girl.

"I thought I'd drink them," I said.

"Drink them?" he said, pulling a sour face. "Surely you use stuff like that when you're cooking? It's great in coq au vin but drinking it ... oh, no."

"Snob," I said. "You've drunk plenty of bargain wine when you've been round at my place for a meal. Didn't seem to bother you then -- but then, of course, you didn't know how little I'd paid for it."

A couple of days later I was discussing this episode with another friend who'd dropped by for coffee.

She, too, had suffered a close encounter with a wine snob recently.

She'd gone to a party, armed with the obligatory bottle of plonk - a Bulgarian something or other - and was standing in the kitchen doorway when she heard someone say sneeringly: "Oh, darling! Who on earth brought THIS?"

(Have you noticed how wine snobs always address each other as 'darling'?)

My friend looked and saw a po-faced woman holding aloft her bottle of Bulgarian whatsit.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"I didn't let on I'd brought it," she said. "I went into the living room and enjoyed my own glass of wine."

"Was it the Bulgarian stuff?" I asked.

"Oh no," she said. "It was a nice Australian chardonnay. I never drink anything else ..."

At that moment The Mother, who had been hovering in the background with a plate of biscuits and a big smile, stepped forward.

"When I was younger, what I really used to enjoy was a nice, fizzy glass of Babycham," she said.

Oh, dear!

"Darlings," I said quickly. "How about a glass or two of this lovely Argentinean red I got the other day?"