APRIL WINE CLUB

How do you choose a wine these days when there are literally tens of thousands of different bottles on offer, and where even a modest corner-store supermarket might offer a choice of a hundred? What is likely to be nicer, a Corbières or a Madiran? Which will be drier, a California Chardonnay or a New Zealand Sauvignon? Some people experiment until they find a red and a white they like and buy it remorselessly, like Hilaire Belloc’s Jim, keeping ahold of, say, Gewurtz, for fear of finding something worse. A lot of wine is bought for entertaining; people want to seem generous, and often wind up buying inferior wines because they have familiar names: Chablis, Sancerre, Bordeaux, for example. While these can and do produce great wines, you are unlikely to find anything drinkable for less than a tenner a bottle.

One helpful alternative — well, I would say this, wouldn’t I? — is to buy from the Spectator wine club, for which I have tested the wines so that you don’t have to.