Obviously, many wine merchants and supermarkets will deliver wine to you – by mail or other means – and, with most retailers having an on-line presence, the definition of “mail order” is very blurred these days. But there are differences in what the purely mail order and online merchants and wine clubs do, chief among them being that often the wines are “pre-selected” and if that sounds alarming it’s because most of the time it is. The sector – with about 5% of the UK market – is bestridden by Direct Wines, set up by Tony Laithwaite in 1969. They run The Sunday Times Wine Club, Telegraph Wines, Averys, British Airways Executive Wine Club, Virgin Wines – which was started by Rowan Gormley, who now runs Naked Wines – and of course Laithwaite’s itself (formerly Bordeaux Direct). I’m relieved that their Barclaycard Wine Service appears to be defunct because even the idea of having a credit card company that charges up to 27.9% interest against a base rate of half of one per cent choosing anybody’s wine gives me the willies. Dunno if the Richard and Judy Wine Club is still going. Don’t care either.

All of them have some good wines but they’re unlikely to send them if you don’t ask for them – why would they? Importantly, there has been a uptick in quality generally from some of their outfits and the fact that – to the astonishment of many in the trade – a couple of years ago Laithwaite’s took a delivery of their own in the form of Justin Howard-Sneyd MW from Waitrose, where as head of wine he took their list from primus inter pares among the grocers to nobody-in-second-place. Hopefully this signalled a seriousness of intent as far as quality is concerned. They don’t generally do anything much under six quid – presumably distribution costs are too high. (From Laithwaite’s, try Alegria Old Vines Cariñena £6.99, Alma Andina Torrontès- Sauvignon Blanc £7.99, Giesta Dão 2010 £6.99 – all by-the-case prices. A few favourites from Virgin: Ca’ di Ponti Grillo Sicily £6.99; Araldica Piemonte Barbera £6.99 Hans Lang Rhengau Riesling Kabinett Trocken £10.99; Juan Gil Monastrell £9.99).

I haven’t tried anything at all from Naked as they don’t seem to have much under 7 quid unless you subscribe as an “Angel” and agree to a regular £20 payment per month. The angel angle is that they “invest in independent winemakers” and the regular payment means you “get better wines for supporting winemakers directly.” Hmmm.

The original mail order merchant, The Wine Society, is a very different kettle of fish.  Founded as a co-operative company in 1874 by a “committee of gentlemen” at the Albert Hall with the purpose of purchasing wines in “unadulterated condition” direct from the producers and offering them to the membership at the lowest possible price, it still does the very same. Another of the `Objects of the Society’ was `To introduce foreign wines hitherto unknown or but little known in this country’ and they were selling Californian Zinfandels and Australian wines 100 years ago, which is rather impressive. Anyone can join but forget the Groucho Marx line about not wanting to join any club that would have him – the quality of the wines is very high. My own Eureka! moment with wine was a Sancerre from the Wine Soc which had – alongside the usual quality of being a reasonably efficient inebriant – the hitherto unknown one of being completely delicious.

The Society’s White Burgundy is a fine thing for £7.50 and tells you everything you need to know about their standards. Down – but not dirty – at the Grogan’s Heroes price-level their Chilean Merlot  (£5.95) is made by Concha y Toro’s charming and dynamic (no, I don’t fancy him – well, not much anyway) Marcelo Papa. He’s one of the most important winemakers on the planet right now – one of a small number of people who are changing everything and I doubt that anybody makes more wine better than he does. It’s a big, fresh, rich, bright, saturated, minerally, fruit-cakey thing but not at all o.t.t. As for his Chilean Chardonnay – from cool-breezy Limarí -  I just hope I don’t get given it to taste blind because I  might get carried away.

Of the new(ish) wave of internet-only merchants, Swig and Slurp stand out (they’re separate entities, as evidenced by the third person plural, and anyway who would  name their business with a tautology?).   I felt a little thrill when I clicked on Swig‘s “Best Sellers” list and the first item on it was A.A. Badenhorst’s “Secateurs” Chenin Blanc from South Africa – sad, or what? – but it was one of the most exciting wines I tasted last year. According to their search criteria prices start at £7.95 so they won’t be troubling Grogan’s Heroes at the moment but they do have some very nice wine.

You can tell an awful lot about a wine by the company it keeps (and vice-versa) and although I don’t know much about Slurp I do know quite a few of their (relative) cheapies from some of our Local Hero merchants –  Ancora, Alpha Zeta and A Mano among them. Blimey, that’s just the ‘A’s! I’d better get on to them sharpish – see you later!

After 19 years of wedded bliss, Valentine’s Day is not what it used to be. Come to think of it, I’m not sure it ever was what it used to be. I’ve missed the last three (there is a God) but this year – for the same reason – I got off a red-eye from Los Angeles mid-afternoon on the 14th. Club Class  (“because I’m worth it”) notwithstanding, a shag was going to be, as they say, out of the question.

Nonetheless, I still had the strength in me to open a bottle or two. For fizz, and with an eye to ameliorating a fraction of the cost of that ticket, I plumped for stylish Pongrácz Rosé from South Africa. The design of the bottle alone is worth the money but the seductive strawberry fruit makes you wonder if it’s worth paying three times the price to have the word “Champagne” on the label.

For even less, it should be noted that Australian sparkler Griffith Park, which won a blind tasting by Which? magazine a couple of years ago against some, er, stiff opposition is still upstanding and setting a bench-mark for bargain fizz.

I wasn’t up to much in the way of dinner so had a couple of puddings instead. I surprised my soulmate (and, believe me, after 19 years you have to work on the surprises) with an English sticky. Yes, an English sticky – from Chapel Down, a delicate, late harvest number by the name of Nectar, made from a mix of unpronounceable German grapes and weighing in at a feather-light 8% abv. It’s the first English sticky I’ve liked and I’d drink it with the usual suspects or on its own but – in either case – with pleasure.

It is the diametric opposite of Harvey’s PX – the other pudding choice – and who would ever guess that they were made from the same basic stuff? This is a treacle-rich toffee-fest and it’s double the abv but deep within in it there’s still a streak of the same limey acidity that they share in their DNA and which makes sense of it all. Who knows – another glass and anything could have happened.

At Lucky Baldwin’s – and just what Baldwin did in another life to get this lucky can only be guessed at – the beers were consulted and cajoled upon, and then served forth, by – embarassing though this may be – what can only be realistically described as some sort of household goddess. And one that I now know and praise as being of an emergent pantheon of craft-brew beeresses that Zappa would have written not just three words but whole albums about. Sarah wouldn’t even have been born, or thought of, when Dylan wrote his hymn to her so there’s another glorious mystery, but now she is here below amongst us.

I don’t remember the names of the beers with which she bathed my sins away (mere trivia, but hops do have an antiseptic quality – *yawn*) so I may have to slink back later on to retrieve a list as mine was sodden to pulp by the time we left. But this I know: Frank was right. The way, the life and the truth – it’s all here – just give the boys “titties and beer”.

It’s an ill wind alright. The demise of the high-street chains in the ‘noughties saw a profoundly encouraging spate of start-ups of small, independent wine merchants devoting themselves to purveying carefully-selected, high-quality wines across (almost) the whole price range. More encouraging still is that a number of them are cautiously expanding. Most deliver nationwide but if you’re fortunate to have one nearby it adds something special if you can walk in and have a nice chat and, often, a nice glass of wine as well – some of them seem to be in permanent tasting mode, with a few bottles open all the time. No names, no pack drill – it’s a hard life for some of these chaps (eh, Marc?).

Some have the Enomatic storage and dispensing systems which allow them to offer customers (and casuals) the chance try before they buy and, better yet, to taste high-end wines in small doses without the wine deteriorating (or breaking the bank). Basically, you put some credit on a card they give which you use to pay for a small (but not necessarily tiny – they come in different measures) glass of a few (or all) of the dozen or so wines they have “on taste” as they say in the States. Others have a corkscrew and some glasses. And maybe a fridge.

(Selfridges pioneered Enomatic in the UK, only to find that silly Westminster Council refused – and persisted in refusing until quite recently – to countenance the sale of wine in “non-standard” measures like 5cl. It shows just the sort of flexibilty and forward-thinking that we’ve come to expect from our dynamic local government people, doesn’t it?)

When I was writing my book, I would have been lucky to find more than a handful of the 3500-odd recommended wine producers in it in my patch of north London. But three excellent places have opened up in Stokie in the past 18 months and I recently did a piece for the (equally excellent) local mag – N16 Magazine – to see how many I could find now.  I stopped counting at 100. None of the new places are solely dedicated to booze, which may be one of the ways forward – Le Parc and MeatN16 also sell food and Homa is a restaurant with a side-line in off-sales.

Elsewhere in London, among my favourite local heroes are (in no particular order) Planet of the Grapes, Vinoteca, Highbury Vintners, The Bottle Apostle and The Sampler. Longer-established Jeroboams, Roberson and Philglass & Swiggot also deserve the same plaudits. Out in the sticks, The Secret Cellar (Tunbridge Wells, Wadhurst and Oxted), The Butler’s Wine Cellar, Quaff, Ten Green Bottles  (all in Brighton), Cooden Cellars (have a guess), South Downs Cellars (Hurstpierpoint and Lindhurst), Fareham Cellars (is “eponymous” correct in this context), Noel Young (Cambridge), Symposium, (Lewes), Wine Therapy (Cowes) and Corks Out (Warrington) deserve particular praise – and there are many more. Let me know if you have one that I should know about. There’s no point in recommending individual wines because all these fine folk only sell good wine, which is rather refreshing. The Association of Direct Wine Merchants brings together some up-and-coming and decidedly individualistic folk too so, with just a minimum of effort you really never need open a dull bottle again.

Some of the advantages of buying wine by the mixed case are:

that they do all the work of weeding out the dull stuff – their reputations rest on the quality of the wines they choose and as a result, they get more interesting wines, often from small, individual producers who care about what they’re making;

that many sell pre-selected mixed cases at many price-levels so you don’t have to know anything about wine to make a start; that they sell wine at (nearly) all price levels and for mid-range wines they can be cheaper than the supermarkets and multiples;

that there really isn’t much snobbery involved unless you want there to be;

that you don’t have to schlep the stuff about. Having a case on hand gives you the luxury of choice – “Sweetie, do you think this Chilean Merlot or the Lalande de Pomerol would go better with these bangers?”

The objection that you have to shell out for 12 bottles at a time doesn’t hold water since that money was going to be spent on wine sooner or later anyway. The proof of the pudding is that:

nobody who ever started buying by the case from good merchants ever stopped without a good reason (which, basically, means penury, liver disease or death – and only the last of these is good enough).

As confidence increases you can begin to have the fun of scouting their lists – they make mistakes and mistakes are better than discounts and “sales” where there is often a good reason for cutting the price – good for them, that is.

I learned much of whatever I know about wine from bottles bought from the top merchants who comprise the loose alliance called The Bunch, i.e. Tanners of Shrewsbury, Berry Brothers & Rudd, Adnams of Southwold, Yapp Brothers, Corney and Barrow and newbies Lea and Sandeman. They’re all good but – with so much dynamic new competition – none can rest on their laurels: while one has newly established itself as the best of the bunch, one has become rather expensive, another has been rather distracted by other projects, one is a bit stuck in the mud and another is quite uneven quality-wise.

Until as recently as the ’70s wine merchants imported wine in cask and bottled it themselves and the tradition lives on in the form of merchants’ “house” wines, although thankfully they are all bottled at source these days. They’re a big part of their business, their “calling cards” almost, and they usually offer exceptional value. There’s some cachet in having the name of an illustrious wine merchant on the label I suppose but it’s what’s in the bottle that really counts and the wines are often made by leading producers and châteaux. Some of the old guard of merchants like Berry’s and Justerini & Brooks (now Diageo-owned since they bought the J&B whisky brand) have relationships with individual châteaux that go back into the 18th century.

Some ranges runs to as many as 60 bottles – including Ports, sherries and Madeira – and the name of a top merchant on the bottle is about as close as wine gets to coming with a guarantee – it’s the consumer-end version of the handshakes on which, refreshingly, a lot of the wine trade is still run. Some people object in principle to the fact that the “everyday” merchants’ wines are often non-vintage – i.e. a blend of wines from different vintages – but that’s the tradition and, in practice, when they actually taste these fruits of the blenders’ art the objections are seldom sustained.

High Street UK is not a good place to buy wine and it hasn’t been for a long time.  As far as offies are concerned, the tumbleweed proliferated a couple of years ago with the collapse  of First Quench – not surprising, really, with a name like that – the company that owned the 1,200 Threshers, Wine Rack, The Local and Haddows shops. It could be fairly said that they discounted themselves to death. The wines generally weren’t up to much anyway so on the whole it was good riddance.

It hardly seems possible that a whole generation can have graduated with an NVQ in binge-drinking and been rewarded with its first Asbo without ever knowing why old people have such a soft spot for Oddbins. The company went tits-up last year after a brief period in the hands of the son of the man who started it, after having been bought and sold a few times, lastly by French giant Castel, the biggest wine company in Europe (and owners of the useful Nicolas chain). In the ‘eighties Oddbins awakened millions of Brits to the fact that wine could actually taste nice and it’s encouraging that the residual 39 branches (under still newer ownership) show signs of doing what the original company did best. It’s early days but, at the risk of sounding like a dickhead, the fact that they are stocking wines from a decent number of the smaller, quality-conscious producers recommended in my book (like Viu Manent, Henry Fessy, Redfin, Tedeschi, Caves de Hunawihr, San Marzano, Setencostas and McHenry Hohnen) bodes well.

In similar vein, the remaining 20 or so Wine Rack shops in and around London, again under new ownership, seem to be far more focussed on quality than in their previous incarnation. With wines from the likes of De Bortoli, Simmonet-Febvre, Keuntz-Bas, Louis Latour, Louis Jadot, Meerlust and Vergelegen – to name a few – you need not fear or shun them.

The steadily burning light in UK town centres – although not often on the high street itself – is Majestic Wine who maintain a consistently high standard while experimenting with the gaps on the street by doing things like reducing their minimum purchase from 12 to six bottles. The range is large and includes many excellent producers – too many to mention here – but some top-class cheapies (under £6 on special offer until Monday 30 Jan) are, among the whites, Wither Hills, Esperanza, and Neblina (all Sauvignon Blanc), Luis Felipe Edwards Chardonnay, Undurraga Brut Rosé and, among the reds, Rioja Reserva Viña Eguia, Ch. Mont Milan Corbières, Flichman “Gestos” Malbec, Neblina Merlot and Luis Felipe Edwards Cabernet Sauvignon. If there is a quibble, it’s a tendency towards discounting that risks being not a million miles from the sort of thing that so confuses consumers in the supermarkets. Remember what happened to First Quench ..?

Private brands are basically the same thing as own brands, only with made-up names so that people who think they’ll look mean for serving a bottle that shows the name of the supermarket where they buy their wine, don’t have to worry. They’re all those Castellos de This and Châteaux de That when, really, there’s no such place.

What happens is that the retailer does their research and then tells the supplier – often a co-operative or a mid-size producer – that they have room for, say, five-thousand cases of an up-front, medium-quality reserva Rioja if they can get it on the shelf for xyz pounds a bottle in X weeks time. The winemaker does their sums, taps into their bit of the world’s ocean of surplus wine, and … Bingo! “Baron de Alava” – or, for all I care, our old chum “Windy Bottom” – is born.

Most of the majors now send their own experts – not just their buyers – out into the world to work with producers to make and market private brands. A few even become mini-brands in their own right and get sold to other supermarkets. It’s all about “positioning” and they’re pitched above the “own labels” at around the same level as the big international brands and attract customers who want to feel they’re getting a wine made by “real” people in a “real” place rather than by a bunch of machines owned by a corporation. As it happens, they often are … it’s just not the people or the place they think it is.

If you’re sad that the grapes in your wine are not being lovingly harvested and vinified in his shed by a friendly, slack-jawed yokel in a beret, skip the rest of this paragraph. The big producers need to be very nimble to sell all their “juice”. An Aussie firm that is a humungous provider of supermarket own-labels also sells its own brands in direct competition with the separate labelling of the same wines as supermarket private brands while – get this – supplying millions of cases of wine made under contract for some of its biggest, household-name, competitor brands. They’re all there, side by side, on the shelf.

M&S, who don’t sell branded products, were the first UK retailers to do private brands when they wanted a separate tier above their own labels and decided that “Chevalier de Hows-Your-Father” had more cachet than “M&S Chablis.” Meanwhile, the Wine Society approached the problem of different quality levels equally successfully with its “Exhibition” range and this seems to have been the model for the “tiered” own-brand offerings elsewhere.

Margins are better on private brands than on “real” brands because there are fewer marketing costs involved and the good ‘uns are among the best-value wines on supermarket shelves. They tend to come and go quite quickly – presumably an algorithm somewhere is doing the math – but a few current favourite bargains are listed below. (It also counts as a crash-course in getting the hang of the dodgy names thing.) As ever, reading our knowledgeable and conscientious (and, not infrequently, irresistibly attractive) newspaper wine writers is the best way to keep up with it all.

Marks and Spencer: Perez Burton, Soleado, Valdepomares, Falleras, Secano, Clocktower, Cobborah, Corriente del Bio Réserve de la Saurine. Marquès de Alarcon

Sainsburys: Spanish Steps, Flor de Nelas, Marquès de Montoya, Elegant Frog, Rio de la Vida, L’Esprit de la Cité

Tesco: Gran Tesoro, Viña Mara, Palais des Anciens, Villa Taurini, La Leyenda, La Terre, Fern Bay

Waitrose: Cuvée Chasseur and Cuveé Pêcheur, Whale Caller, Moncaro, La Rectorie, Montgravet, Eva’s Vineyard, Fontaine du Roy

Asda: Gran Vega, Marques del Norte, Pleyades, Mas Miralda, Le Monferrine, Villa Ludy, Château Salmonière

Co-op: Villa Pani, Rocca Vecchia, Les Crouzes

An example of a private brand label

Supermarket own brands used to be the “grey goo” of wine. There has been significant improvement in recent years but they are still to be bought randomly only by the wreckless and the feckless (i.e. those who don’t give a feck). The job of finding what I estimate to be the 15-20% of genuinely good wines has been made somewhat easier by the introduction of premium ranges by most chains – upping the hit rate to maybe 25-33%.

Finding the, what?, maybe 3-5% of real stonkers – regardless of range, and often produced by leading winemakers – is not so easy. BUT, at the tastings that the supermarkets organise for the wine hacks they stick out like … well, like very sticky-outy things indeed and these same few dozen wines feature regularly in the columns of the national press writers. A quick scan of who’s writing about what and, yes, jotting down a few notes, is well worth the little effort required.

The general concensus seems to be that Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference (TTD) is the best of the supermarket own-brand ranges at the moment. In no order at all, these are some the best at the lower end of the price-range: Verdicchio, Brachetto d’Acqui, Douro, Casablanca Sauvignon Blanc, Gavi, Crozes Hermitage, Languedoc White, Curico Merlot, Moscatel, Chilean Rosé, Rosé Côtes-de-Provençe, Trentino Pinot Grigio, Grüner Veltliner, Beaujolais-Villages (made by Duboeuf) and Côtes-du-Rhône Villages (made by Chapoutier. See? I’m not joking about top producers).

Tesco’s large (too large) Finest* range (and what that f**king “*” is for, I’ve never understood) is a mixed bag, but with some very good stuff at the (generally) lower end, like Vinho Verde, Autumn Riesling, Alsace Riesling, Steillage Riesling, Picpoul de Pinet, Gavi, Palomino, Rueda, Fiano, Grüner Veltliner, Grenache-Marsanne, Tapiwey Sauvignon Blanc, Australian Dessert Semillon, Muscadet, Ken Forrester Chenin Blanc, Malbec Rosé, Côtes Catalanes, Dão, Douro, Touriga Nacional, 10 Year-Old Tawny Port, Nero d’Avola and Teroldego. Sounds like a lot, but there are over 100 in the range. Lower down, among the regular stuff, South African Chenin Blanc, Reserve Australian Shiraz, Sicilian Red, Simply Muscadet, Soave Classico, Verdicchio Classico and Reserve Australian Riesling/Gewurztraminer shine.

Morrisons gets plenty of stick from the wine hacks, but there are good things to be had, among them Cotes du Rhone La Calade (a standout cheapie), Moscatel de Valencia, Italian Pinot Grigio, “Italian” Chianti (as if ..!), Australian Chardonnay, Merlot delle Venezie, Corbieres and (on and off) stonking Barolo (from Araldica) for under a tenner.

For real cheapies, Asda have a handful of the (few) really good ones: Marsanne Pays d’Oc is worth going to Asda for, and their Beaujolais, South African Chenin Blanc and Australian Chardonnay are good. Pickings are slim among the own brands at the Co-op, but some of the better own-label stuff is from their large range of Fairtrade wines, especially the Argentinian Malbec and, of the unfair trade offerings, the Argentinian Cuyo Cabernet Franc and the Chablis’ are none too shabby

Marks and Spencer have a quite small range of good own-label stuff (try Fitou, Spanish Garnacha Shiraz, Ardèche Gamay, Minervois, Orvieto, Chilean White, Touraine Sauvignon and Sparkling Rosé Zinfandel – yes, really!).

Ironically (or annoyingly, depending on how you look at it) Waitrose – by a country mile the best of the supermarkets as far as wine, or for that matter, food is concerned – have one of the smallest ranges of own brands (but, usefully, they often name the – usually top-class – producers and they’re pretty good across the board). But, like M&S, they concentrate their best efforts on the artful (if somewhat crafty) business of “private brands” and we’ll look at those next time.

A little bit of history. The Champagne marques were the earliest wine brands, and they’re still the biggest. Luxury goods group LVMH have taken things to a new level, buying up Moët et Chandon, Dom Pérignon, Krug, Veuve-Clicquot and Ruinart. How big are they? They’re very big – big enough to make chairman Bernard Arnault the richest man in the European village.

Some of the earliest still wine brands were hot stuff – now and then my dad used to buy Mouton Cadet when it really was the “second wine” of Bordeaux’s first-growth Château Mouton-Rothschild. It ain’t any more. If there was a twentieth growth, Mouton wouldn’t make the cut. The rest of the time – in the `seventies - we were weaned on the likes of Mateus Rosé, Blue Nun and Stowells of Chelsea. Those dinosaur brands are still with us and plenty of people are surprised to know that, even though trends in wine consumption have changed out of all recognition, they’re bigger than ever – Mateus sells around 20m bottles annually. Needless to say, the wines are somewhat better these days – everybody has to compete, after all.

Wine doesn’t fit corporate plans for global branding in the way that beer and spirits (where the real money is) do. It’s small fry next to the Bacardis and the Smirnoffs (go into virtually any bar in world and you’ll find them…). The frustration of Fosters, who bought up great swathes of Australia’s wine business in the ‘nineties, was palpable. The facts are that wine is variable; the better stuff is, by its very nature, limited; it’s not possible to respond swiftly to demand; and the whole weather thing? Well, it’s a nightmare …

But these chaps are smart as hell and they don’t give up. Currently the top ten brands in the UK account for a little under 30% of the total market, which at around £5bn, means that each single per cent that they scrabble for translates into sales of a million pounds a week. Pernod Ricard have taken the route of simplification and consolidation and their Jacob’s Creek comes closer to being a global wine brand than most (while being, a) not bad; and b) with multiple levels of irony, the biggest “French” wine brand). Pernod Ricard also appear to be experimenting with the possibilities of making a region – Rioja – interchangeable (or at least confusable with) a brand with their phenomenally successful Campo Viejo. Another new approach is the nomadic or supra-national brand – some Blossom Hill wines, the number-one seller in the UK, are from the USA, some are from Italy and some from Chile  … and does anyone mind?

So what’s out there now? Well, of the other top UK sellers like Hardy’s, Gallo, Jacob’s Creek, Lindemans, Echo Falls, First Cape, Kumala, Stowells – yes, really!- and Wolf Blass, the southern hemisphere ones are better than the Californian-based ones and – if push comes to shove – I would drink any of them (but only if cider was the only alternative).

At the next level (down in terms of scale, but up in terms of quality) there are both reliably ubiquitous stand-bys (and anybody who thinks Yellow Tail or Banrock Station are crap isn’t just arguing with me – they’ll have to take on Hugh Johnson as well) and some proper stuff. Again, the best are from South of the equator: St. Hallett, Penfolds and McGuigan from Australia: Oyster Bay, Villa Maria and Brancott (formerly Montana) from NZ: Concha Y Toro (including Casillero del Diablo), Errazuriz, Cono Sur and Yali from Chile: Argento, Alamos, Viñalba, Norton and Zuccardi from Argentina; Kanonkop, Fairhills (fairtrade), Nederburg and Zalze from South Africa are some of the names to go for.

Up North, it’s probably best to forget the USA, for now, and the picture in Europe is patchy. France has always struggled with brands – the French themselves, in fact, abhor Le Piat d’Or. But things are changing and merchant-owned brands like French Connection and La Différence are gradually raising the bar. Some ambitious, quality-conscious, large-scale producers – be they private (like Paul Mas, Gérard Bertrand, Laurent Miquel and Skalli) or co-operative (like Mont Tauch, Plaimont and Blason de Bourgogne) – are coming close to breaking the mould and are worth looking out for.

Spain’s not great – I’m not much taken with the big-selling Riojas – although Torres (especially Viña Sol) deserve a special mention while the best brands are to be found in fortified wines (the same applies in Portugal) and, increasingly, in fizz. From Italy, Canaletto is worth a mention and Germany’s Dr Loosen and Johannes Leitz have great plans based on excellent QPR (quality/price ratio). The old world isn’t really brand land but a lot of great bargains are to be had from the supermarkets’ own brands and “private brands” and we’ll be looking at those in the next two parts.

Haven’t done diddly about Christmas yet, apart from a tree, so no time for chat (or, for that matter, prettifying/editing), just some decent stuff from the majors – some are discounted, some are old friends and some are for pushing the boat out (a bit).

Asda – (where discounted, prices are good until 26 Dec): All “Extra Special”: Crozes-Hermitage £8.17, Barolo £11.98, Fiano £7.98, Gavi £7.98.

Under £6: Extra Special Beaujolais Villages, Viña Albali Reserva, Mayu, Woodbridge Chardonnay, Chateau de Jau, Paul Mas Marsanne.

Co-Op – (discounted prices apply until 3 January)
Ch. Roumieu Sauternes £7.99, Wither Hills Sauvignon Blanc £6.49, The Ned Sauvignon Blanc £6.99, Rully Nicolas Potel £9.99, Wynn’s Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon £6.99, Côtes du Rhône Reserve La Grange St Martin £9.99

Under £6: La Grange St Martin rosé, Lime Tree chardonnay, Marquès de Valido Reserva Rioja

Morrison’s – (discounted prices apply until 1 January)
Nicolas Feuillatte Champagne £14.49, Yalumba Y Series Viognier £6.99, Montes Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay £9.99, Barolo Castiglione £8.99

Under £6: Chilean pinot noir, Rioja Reserva, Lagunilla, Côtes du Rhone Villages,

Oddbins – (their www is a work-in-progress, so info is a bit sketchy) – Langhe Nebbiolo “Serralunga” Germano £13, Plantagenet Chardonnay and Riesling, Santos Lima Bons Ventos, Lisboa £6, Condamine de L’Evêque Côtes de Thongue, Max Ferdinand Richter Riesling Kabinett, Viu Manent from Chile, Henry Fessy Beaujolais Villages £8.50, Redfin, Tedeschi, Setencostas.

Sainsburys – (discounted prices apply until 3 January): bit thin on discounts, but Taste the Difference is still a very good range: Priorat £7.49, Barolo £16.29, Barbaresco £7.49

Under £6 (usually): Taste the Difference Brachetto d@Acqui, Spanish Steps, Flor de Nelas, Marquès de Montoya, Elegant Frog, Rio de la Vida, L’Esprit de la Cité

Tesco (discounted prices apply until 3 January): Whole bunch of “Finest” at two for twelve quid – maybe the best overall Xmas offee?
Reds: Côtes Catalanes, Douro, Touriga Nacional, Old Vines Garnacha, Nero d’Avola
Whites: Tapiwey Sauv Blanc, Fiano, Ken Forrester Chenin Blanc, Vinho Verde, Grüner Veltliner, Palomino, Rueda Palestra. Premier Cru Champagne £14.99

Don’t seem to have Waitrose’s offer details to hand, but it’s usually quite hard to go wrong there, isn’t it?

Anyway, have a good one! (And don’t forget some own-brand 10- or 20-year-old tawny port – maybe the best bargain of all.)