“Out with a friend at a bar, Graham wished he could order wine …” This is the start of a beautiful story, the story of the invention of Mancan. Wine, in a can, for men. It all started in Cleveland; so far it has mainly stayed there, but the power of globalisation means that we can scorn it from afar. Anyway, back to Graham: he wanted a sauvignon blanc or a pinot but he didn’t want the “stemware”. Stems are dainty: they remind you of green twigs, of girlish waists. They don’t remind you at all of penises (unless they slightly do), and he wanted to be more like his friend with a beer. Thus Mancan was born. Wine, but in a can. For men who want to look like their more manly friends.

Whenever people try to use food as a rampart for their sense of gender-belonging – famously, with the Yorkie, which was decreed Not For Girls in 2002 – I always divine a profound self-hatred and think they are probably comfort eating. Drinking is all comfort drinking. Nobody ever drank in order to get more in touch with their feelings of insecurity and unbelonging. In other words, I have no problem with a precarious masculinity trying to assert itself with branding: no judgment, only empathy.

Putting wine in a can, on the other hand … Most drinks that exist in cans do so under sufferance and would be better in a keg. Drinks that have spent years evolving into can form – Guinness, I’m looking at you – have, as yet, failed. Expats wait in vain. When you find a drink that tastes better in a can than from a keg, that’s because it’s not a proper drink, it’s just a harsh bubble-centred tongue experience, designed to wake you up and deliver alcohol at the same time. There isn’t a physical reason why wine should react with a can, so long as it’s lined, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s not a technological advance to improve the wine, nor even – like the plastic cork – an advance to reduce the cost while leaving the wine unchanged. It’s an advance to alter the social construction of the wine drinker, which is to say, a retreat. The wine drinker who worries about how wine makes him appear to the world is too basic for wine: he should be drinking chocolate milk with vodka in it. Which, by the way, is delicious in a can.