I think the May issue of Wine & Spirit magazine had it about right suggesting that wine buyers in search of a bargain are best to wait for next year's French supermarket Foires aux Vins to buy their Bordeaux 2007s. I didn't attend this year's tasting circus in Bordeaux last month because the weather conditions and subsequent reports made it clear that there was little mileage for consumers to buy en primeur now. Even the normally enthusiastic UK wine trade, which stands to make easy money from sales of the new Bordeaux vintages, has been a little quiet.

For a wine to give out a distinctive flavour or character is normally seen as a plus. Not in the case of wines from the Cape. The talking point in South African wine right now is an unpleasant off-odour and taste in some bottles – described variously as burnt rubber, rhubarb or sun-dried tomato. No one knows what it is, but you know it when you see, or rather, smell and taste, it.

Nothing about Robert Mondavi was small except his physical stature. As one of the major driving forces of the 20th century wine California wine industry, he was a towering figure with an influence that extended well beyond the United States. A burning ambition to excel combined with relentless determination and a nose for business inspired him to success by embracing risk and innovation in the vineyards, in the cellar and in his business practices.

If you blinked last April, you missed summer. If you blinked on April 26 this year, you may just have done the same. With a couple of months still to go till St.Swithin’s Day (15 July) comes round, there’s ample opportunity for the rain gods to deliver yet another rebuke to the idea that global warming means consistently hotter and drier English summers. Yet, the half-glass-full optimist in me is going to have to assume that this year’s average to dreadful April, except for ducks and umbrella salesmen, that is, means business as usual for the English summer.

Last month a Beijing-based billionaire splashed out £250,000 on 27 bottles of wine. A far cry from what the man and woman in the Beijing street spends. At two and half glasses per head, what they drink is largely the cheap, £1-a-bottle home grown brands from big wine companies like Changyu, Great Wall, Dynasty, Huaxia and Vini Suntime, the latter, one of the fastest growing wineries in China, established by the People’s Liberation Army. In China, almost everyone can afford a bottle of putao jiu.

As the wine world’s biggest success story, champagne is rarely off the front pages. Since champagne producers can happily sell every bubble they blow, the latest news is that the region’s growers are aiming to extend their vineyards to make it possible to produce an extra 100 million or so bottles a year on top of the 330 million they already make. With demand outpacing supply, it’s hardly surprising that its famous houses are not shy when it comes to charging.

Earlier this year, Argentina staged a significant coup. When the country’s top reds made from malbec, their signature grape, were tasted by the American magazine, The Wine Advocate, over 100 wines scored 90 points plus. 13 achieved whopping scores of 96 or more. Such ratings are normally reserved for the very finest wines of France. Cue collective Argentinian euphoria. Not surprising then that Wines of Argentina in this country should decide to put on a tasting of its ‘icon’ reds in London too.

One day, your editor says wouldn’t it be fun to hold a wine tasting for The Independent Magazine. Your editor is always right, so you agree that yes, hosting a wine tasting for your editor, the Saturday Magazine editor and the rest of the staff on the Independent Magazine would indeed be fun. Imagine cooking dinner for your boss, her boss and his boss and you start to get the picture.

Thanks to the speeding up of bottling of wine at source, joining the Common Market in 1973 gave supermarkets the necessary boost to start putting their own name on the wine label. If it lent credence to the notion that the supermarket own-label wine was now respectable enough to plonk on the dinner table, some would say that it was no more than plonk. As Simon Loftus wrote in 1985, ‘a good many wine lovers see the supermarket own-label range as offering the dull decency of wines blended for general acceptability’.

‘California is the France of America. It is now becoming apparent that the most valuable of her [California’s] industries in the future will be that of the vineyard and orchard’. Thus spake one Lloyd Tevis, of Wells Fargo Bank, addressing the American Bankers Convention in 1881. Three years later, there were 170,000 acres in California planted to vineyards, but progress came to a standstill as Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, halted the California wine industry’s first gold rush in its tracks.