On a biting cold night when a thick blanket of snow lay on the ground, I went on a tapas-bar crawl as a guest of the Tortilla Club, a group of Spanish food and wine aficionados. Starting off at Fino, my first surprise was at how many tapas bars there are in London’s Charlotte Street area. My next surprise was just how much I found myself enjoying sherry with just about everything consumed that night. I enjoy fino and manzanilla as refreshing summery aperitifs, but their warm full-body and appetizingly tangy flavours made them good winter drinks too.

As scenic as the emerald green ocean of vines is in the wild terrain of the Languedoc hinterland, it can all too easily become a wine grower’s graveyard. At a time when southern France's growers are up against the economies of scale that make New World wines so competitive, owning a vineyard is by no means a guarantee of a living. Take the area around Fitou; when the southern French co-operatives of Paziols, Villeneuve and Durban lost their competitive edge, they were absorbed into the more go-ahead Mont Tauch Co-op.

Though the very thought of thirstquenching rosé may be tempting fate, summer of 2010 to date has been kind to those of us whose rosé-tinted glasses are always half full. Late August is the moment when the weather could go either way, a downhill slide towards a gloomy autumn or the glorious afterglow of an Indian summer. The latter, let’s hope, as do England’s winemakers, who are hoping for a great vintage for English wines with one eye on the 2012 Olympics.

Just about everywhere we buy our wine, we are presented with the nubile attractions of youth in wine as if there were no alternative. For obvious commercial reasons, both retailers and producers have a vested interest in wine as fmcg (fast moving consumer goods). While 87.46 per cent of all statistics may be made up on the spot, the fact that 92 per cent of all wine purchased is consumed within 48 hours of purchase has been confirmed by research by Fosters, or Treasury Wine Estates as it's now called.

According to the folk who run the marketing, the wines of the Languedoc-Roussillon now come from the Sud de France, a place ‘where creativity meets diversity’. I was given the chance to find out if the expectation lived up to the hype when I was asked to join a panel judging 150 wines from the region. Although it does perhaps make it clearer where the wines come from, you might think it a little surprising that Sud de France excludes Provence, given that Provence in many minds is the South of France.

I can’t remember a time when there were as many refreshingly drinkable reds for summer as there are today. I don’t think it’s just my own taste that’s changed but I’m increasingly attracted in summer to red wines that are light to medium in body, that have little or no oak, and that do a wine’s job, often just lightly chilled, of refreshing the parts. These are wine that don’t leave you feeling that you’ve been dealt a right hook to the stomach of oak, an uppercut of tannin to the mouth and then floored by a whack of knee-shattering alcohol.

If I had £1 for every time I read that the riesling revival was just around the corner, I’d be laughing. And if I were a rich man, oy, I’d fill my cellar with lots of 2009 German riesling. In fact, compared to much extravagantly priced 2009 Bordeaux, current offers of 2009 German riesling look positively cheap. Riesling generally is good value. Which brings me back to the revival, if that’s the right word for something that never really happened in the first place.

‘Let them drink wine’ goes the cry in Bordeaux as the gap between the Marie Antoinette haves and the sans-culotte have-nots widens. After months of dragging their heels, the bordelais have pronounced, or their cash registers at least have rung to a familiar tune. All the tricks of the Bordeaux trade were deployed to stoke demand for the 2009 vintage. According to the wine exchange, Livex, average price rises over the great 2005 vintage were up 13 per cent until mid-June vintage. Between the 14 and 18 June, they went up to 29 per cent.

I’m not sure who decided that the only drink for curry is lager. It’s true that chilli can be as much an enemy of wine as chocolate and vinaigrette, but it doesn’t have to be. If the spicing is subtle, as it often is in better Indian restaurants in the UK, or, dare I suggest it, in ready-made Indian meals, a good choice of wine can be a thoroughly satisfying partner to Indian food. Why confine it to wine? If you can break through another cultural barrier, sake is a rice-based drink that goes naturally with Indian food.

The race to bring back the new beaujolais vintage started off as friendly rivalry between Clement Freud and wine merchant Joseph Berkmann. 1972 saw Atticus diarist Allan Hall extend it to England. With the official release date of 15 November came the first invasion of planes and boats and trains. Led in France by Georges Duboeuf and his glamorous cohorts of chefs, musicians and film stars, the nouveau phenomenon epitomised what the gamay grape was all about: a juicy, cherryish red with no delusions of grandeur. It was simply a jolly good drink everyone could enjoy with a saucisson.