*Our wine patiently awaiting collection…*

At the end of July, we ordered and paid for 60 cases of lovely French wine – Côtes du Rhône, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and other favourites – from a chateau we’ve known for years. And we arranged for our usual, dependable freight company to collect it and bring it home to the wine lovers of Orkney.

Two months later we’re still waiting. And, after a long period of patchy communication, we’ve finally heard an explanation.

All the freighter’s imports are consolidated at a depot in Belgium, where there’s currently a 5,000-pallet backlog. They’re shipping them across the Channel as fast as they can, but with a driver shortage, a fuel shortage, and increased customs paperwork, nothing is moving very quickly.

They reckon it’ll be next year before they’re able to get our delivery to us.

We’re looking into alternative carriers, though all of them seem similarly backed-up. Meanwhile, we’ve plenty stock of other wines that we imported some time ago, or that come from the cavernous warehouses of importers based elsewhere in the UK. There’s no prospect of a wine drought any time soon, and panic buying is definitely not necessary!

But it is disappointing to be running out of customers’ favourites. And it’s especially frustrating to be running out of wines that are included on restaurant wine lists.

In the shop it’s easy enough to suggest and discuss alternatives: we have hundreds to choose from. But if a wine list features a tempting description of a juicy Gigondas, say, and the Gigondas is marooned a thousand miles and several months away, it’s annoying for the diner, and embarrassing for the restaurateur.

No doubt the wine supplier will get the blame. We don’t mind! But who do we pass the buck to? I have to bite my tongue occasionally when customers – who trumpeted their support for Brexit a couple of years ago – now complain about their favourite wine being missing from our shelves.

*Château de la Gardine: if you’re going to be stranded somewhere, there are worse places…*

Before my working life was filled with whisky, cheese and wine, I used to work in manufacturing. Twenty years ago, industry’s most respected advisors were great advocates of the JIT philosophy – Just In Time.

The idea was that manufacturers – all businesses really – should make themselves as ‘lean’ as possible, by holding only as much inventory as was needed for immediate delivery. Anything that was going to be needed by customers in a week or a month’s time shouldn’t be lying around in your warehouse – and on your balance sheet.

Rather, you should picture yourself as being in the middle of a conveyor belt. As this week’s deliveries go out to your customers through the front door, the raw materials needed for next week’s production should be arriving through the back door.

It’s not an entirely daft idea. It can lead to efficiency and even sustainability if it results in reduced wastage of materials and energy.

But it has obvious dangers too, as the current shortages of fuel, supermarket goods and Châteauneuf-du-Pape prove.

In Orkney we’re at the end of a long supply chain. To get our pallet of wine, the chain has to link from the Rhône to Antwerp to Tilbury to Glasgow to Aberdeen to Hatston, and finally to Broad Street.

We can easily live with a link being broken for a day or two because of bad weather in the North Sea. But this months-long breakage further down the chain is something new.

We don’t expect Just In Time wine delivery. But ordering in July for pre-Christmas delivery doesn’t seem unreasonably rushed. So, what have we taken back control of?

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 6th October. Other diaries continue to appear weekly. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.

Diary of a Shopkeeper, 3rd October