A trip to the spring wine tasting of one of the UK’s biggest supermarkets proved strangely fruitless.

I’m not talking about the wines – plenty of fruit in most of them – more the reluctance of anyone from Tesco to divulge information about what’s going on in their wine business.

Lots of information about the wines themselves was on offer. As customary at these things, you’re given a big book with notes and more detailed background about each wine than could ever be needed.

So if you want to know that Tesco Finest Darling Sauvignon was fined with bentonite I’m your man. And if you’re itching to know which of its wines go through cold racking and stabilisation before making it to your fridge just drop me a line.

In the vain hope that someone not connected with the drinks industry might read this, a little description of the set-up at one of these events might help here.

All the major supermarkets hold them, usually twice a year to showcase the wines they hope we’ll be drinking at the barbecue or around the Christmas dinner table. “Did you spit or swallow?”, I always get asked at home, to which the answer is always “spit”, because not to do so would with over 100 wines to get through would (a) see you drummed out of polite wine tasting society and (b) lead to your appearance as a case study in the next issue of the British Medical Journal.

The event consists mostly of proper wine writers slurping and spitting their way through a selection of the range, before going away to write insightful 900-word appraisals of the range for The Times if you’re Tim Atkin, or a Twitter-length summary of two of them if you’re his successor at The Observer.

Hacks like me, who make a living churning out articles about the less sexy stuff, such as merchandising, the supply chain and market trends, also get asked along, and to fulfil our side of the information equation we rely on informal chats or formal interviews with buyers and category managers, so we can give the rest of the industry some idea of the workings of the collective wine department mind.

It was odd then that on arrival yesterday, I was offered an interview with a senior Tesco wine person who then elected to display a straight bat that resembled Geoff Boycott doing an impression of Chris Tavaré in the style of Alistair Cook.

My rivals reading this are by now may be rubbing their hands with glee at the exclusives they managed to extract but I suspect not – it seemed as much a policy matter as personal reticence on the part of the individual.

Which left me wondering what the point had been in forking out the train far to get there. It wasn’t as if I went armed to do a doorstep, Roger Cook-style interview armed with nefariously-obtained facts to throw in a buyer’s face.

Remember, I was invited along and offered some time with a Tesco representative, yet some of the topical but mostly harmless trade issues of the day met with the kind of panicked response of a minister due to appear before the Iraq enquiry on the same day that the Telegraph reveals details of his expense claims.

Odd.