Struggling to serve wine in the right order

The key to working out the best order in which to serve one’s wines is to mix it up a bit discovers Jonathan Ray.

There were five of us to dinner last night at a BYO-friendly club in London and each of us had brought one or two fine bottles to knock back and bang on about. (And five, incidentally, is the perfect number for such a dinner as you get one hearty glass each out of every bottle.) The trouble was that none of us could agree on the best order in which to serve the stuff, not least because we had all ordered something different to eat.

And it had all seemed so obvious at the beginning. I had brought some fine fizz and between them the others had brought a magnum of Provencal rosé, a German Riesling, a claret, a Rhône, a New World Pinot Noir and a Sauternes.