What did you give up for Lent? Work? Religion? Giving things up? If you gave up wine, having duly purified mind and body, you will doubtless have been looking forward to easing yourself into wine’s answer to a luxurious bubble bath. Unless like Kate Moss and Johnny Depp you like both at the same time, the best place for bubbles is in the glass. I’m not the world’s greatest fan of the sweeter kind, but if there is a right time for the naughty but nice luxury of a demi-sec champagne, Easter is it.

The chief medical officer’s proposals to slap 50p a unit of alcohol on booze have caused a stir. Conveniently forgetting for one moment that it had recently imposed two duty increases, with further rises to follow, the government said that raising prices would be punishing the majority for the sins of the minority (read: ‘sales would go down and we wouldn’t be able to raise as much tax’). You can imagine the cmo’s proposals going down like the proverbial lead balloon too in the wines, beers and spirits departments of supermarkets throughout the land.

You might expect the natural forte of a peninsula surrounded on all sides by the Mediterranean to be its white wines. Until recently though, Italian wine was better known for great rosso. When we thought of Italian white, it didn’t take too long because it amounted to little more than soave, frascati and lambrusco (although the best lambruscos are in fact red).

White wine with fish, red wine with meat, simple as that. Or is it? Think of it as a helping hand and not a hard-and-fast rule, and it makes perfect sense. This pearl was most likely handed down along with tablets of stone in halcyon pre-Delia days when white wine meant sancerre or muscadet and red bordeaux or beaujolais. Fortunately for us all, there are many more exciting vinous fish in the sea, which is just as well, because what a good cook can do with fish, viz. Mark Hix’ recipes, is so much more imaginative and eclectic today.

Jose Mourinho, we’re told, left a £300 bottle of wine for Sir Alex Ferguson after the European Champions League match last month at which his Inter side managed to scrape a nil-nil draw with Man U. Presumably this wasn’t a poisoned chalice aimed at coaxing the wine-loving Sir Alex from the top footballing hot seat that Mourinho no doubt covets, but its very antithesis, namely a bottle of Barca Velha. As Vega Sicilia is to Spain and Grange to Australia, Barca Velha is Portugal’s ‘icon’ wine.

Cape rhythms

One of the meals of my life was at Tetsuya’s where you could bring your own bottle, free of charge, to the eponymous cook’s restaurant reached through a hole in the wall in a Sydney suburb. Raiding their cellars, my hosts handed their bottles to the waiter and the wines were served as unsnootily as if thoughtfully selected by the restaurant itself. Occasionally you come across attempts to replicate the Antipodean BYO culture here. Hullabaloos was a BYO chain, but it sold up, leaving a sole survivor to represent the culture, The Muset in Clifton, Bristol.

“You almost have to ignore the fact that it’s a Fairtrade wine,” says Paul Letheren of the engagingly named Off-Piste Wines, speaking in anticipation of Fairtrade fortnight which starts this Monday. Because, no matter how worthy the cause, the Fairtrade logo alone is not enough; the wines have to stack up against other similarly priced bottles on merit. If not, suggesting that consumers buy Fairtrade for little more than the fact they they’re going to be benefiting a community in a faraway place of which they know little is tantamount to charity, and isn’t that just a little bit patronising?

According to my contacts in the PR world, today is the day for romance. I'm not quite sure how they think we're supposed to fill the remaining 364 days of the year, but amid all the encouragement to ply my love with champagne and say it with flowers and chocolates, one wine PR had the honesty to preface its brazen plug with the words, "Even for those who consider Valentine's Day to be a cheesy, opportunistic marketing ploy, it's still a good excuse to pop open the pink".

True love...

Tuscan-inspired Casa Valduga