MOST of us have a favourite story about wine.

There was the ostentatious chap dining in the large Glasgow hotel who took a sip from his glass, grimaced, called the waiter back over and told him: "This wine is corked!" The old Glasgow waiter leaned towards him and murmured: "Aw the best wines have corks, sir."

A reader once told us of the embarrassing moment of taking her family out for a more upmarket meal than they normally have where the waiter poured a small amount of wine into her glass for her to taste. Before she could raise it to her lips, her young son blurted out to their server: "Mummy usually has a lot more wine than that."

Or the Glasgow women who likes a few glasses of wine when out with her pals, but if she has too many, has disconcerting gaps in her memory about what happened during such evenings. She calls them her Sauvignon Blank days.

Yet for a city that is supposed to have a tortuous love affair with strong drink, there is a quirky oddity about Glasgow's city centre - it has very few off-licenses. The city's licensing board, encouraged presumably by the police, is not keen on handing out licences in the heart of Glasgow to the corner shop enterprises commonly seen in outlying areas where you buy your newspaper and fags in one corner, and pick up some booze in the other. It's to discourage young lads from buying a carry-out to drink in city centre lanes with its potential for drunken abusive behaviour.

So it is left to the supermarkets in the city centre and serious wine stockists such as Oddbins to supply wine to city centre workers buying a bottle or two before heading home, or out to a dinner party.

Oddbins in Mitchell Street - it is opposite the former Herald offices, but it didn't open until after we had left Mitchell Street, so talk about bad timing - is near Central Station which is why the occasional customer will burst in, with only minutes before he catches a train, but has remembered he is supposed to take a present home, and will simply shout out: "Champagne!" as he wishes to grab a bottle, any bottle, but still make it in time for his transport home.

Shop staff would prefer if you took a more leisurely approach to buying wine which is why I was there for the wine tasting challenge called The Palate, which will see the UK's finest amateur wine taster from all the Oddbins branches winning a wine holiday to South Africa. Last year's runner-up came from Glasgow so perhaps it's not all Buckfast after all in the West of Scotland.

Growing up in Glasgow in the seventies, wine selection was often limited to Blue Nun, Hirondelle, Bull's Blood and Lutomer Riesling. Ah yes, Hirondelle. French for swallow, which is what you did with the plonk rather than sip it decorously. And Bull's Blood may well have shared similar tastes to bovine life fluids, we just never knew.

So our wine choices were as limited as our palates in the seventies, but then with growth in foreign travel we learned more about wines, and consumption grew. We in Britain became one of the largest wine importers in the world due to our very limited supply of local wines. We ventured further in our tastes than simply French and Italian wines, finding an interest in the products of Australia, New Zealand and Chile. Consumption peaked about 10 years ago, and then fell with the recession. And our tastes changed.

Chardonnay, once the word and wine on every woman's lips, fell out of favour. Biggest growth in recent years has been Italian prosecco as people discovered the joy of drinking bubbles without the expense of Champagne.

The Palate contest is not about pretentiousness. You are not expected to guess what vineyard the two unnamed wines come from and whether they are from the east or west slopes. You simply have to say what characteristics you detect when you sip it, such as mineral, citrus, and spicy, and what food it would go with. There is no need to be an oenophile or to study for the test. And calm down, Police Scotland, there is even a spittoon if a customer is driving.

Ross McKenzie at the Mitchell Street Oddbins wants to remove the mystique from wines. "I want it to be straightforward for customers. Find a wine that you like. Then ask us to suggest other wines. That's where we come in, helping you with recommendations based on what you prefer." One of the few customers to throw him on wine selection was the young man who said: "Have you got any wine that's passed its best? It's for my father-in-law and I really don't like him."

Another difficulty is people returning from a holiday abroad and avowing they had the best wine ever, and could the shop source it. "It's psychological," says Ross. "Drinking a wine at two in the afternoon on a sunny balcony may make it seem better than when you try it in Glasgow."

Yes there are wine buffs in Glasgow who will discuss the minutiae with staff, checking every detail on the label. But most customers simply want something to enjoy that evening. Although wine consumption has fallen, there is a rise in people willing to spend more on a bottle of wine. If they are going to drink less they are going to make sure it is better than the Blue Nun of old - featureless wines produced on an industrial scale.

Ross explains the arithmetic. "A £5 bottle of wine, when you deduct the duty, VAT and other costs, the winemaker is getting less than 50p a bottle. The tax is nearly 60%. But on a £10 bottle, the tax drops to 37% and the winemaker gets nearly £3 a bottle, so you can see the increase in quality."

So I fill out my card for The Palate contest. Was there a hint of pepper or strawberry there? And if I write this column from South Africa in a few months time, you will know I have won.