One of my most enjoyable jobs is teaching wine in schools and the first question I like to ask students is what wines they like to drink. The almost automatic answer is pinot grigio. When you take your first steps in wine, there are fewer easier or blander wines to drink, so the response is hardly surprising. Most of them still add sugar to their tea and coffee. The next step up the ladder is chardonnay. Chardonnay is one of the great crowd-pleasers and its relative neutral aromas and affinity with oak allow it to adapt well to many different dishes.

After a summer abnormally dry even by Andalucian standards, the hardy Payoyo goats of the Sierra de Grazalema Natural Park were foraging for food. Dark storm clouds gathered over the mountain peaks as the driver took the winding road down to Jerez de la Frontera.

Bordeaux, Burgundy, Beaujolais, remember them? Ah yes, those were the days, as Kate Bush sang, the glory days of the holy trinity of French wine before which I used to genuflect in the days when I first started writing for The Independent.

Indeed at my very first job interview, the editor said he assumed that those were the wines I’d be mostly writing about. I of course nodded sagely in agreement.

Sunshine brings a little happiness into our lives or so the theory goes. Right now though, two products requiring the sun for their existence are threatening to cause widescale misery: wine and solar panels.

Reacting to a possible probe by the EU regarding China’s solar panel exports, the China Alcoholic Drinks Association has asked the Ministry of Commerce to launch an investigation into wine imports from the EU.

Father’s Day is of course the perfect occasion for lavishing affection and gifts of wine on deserving dads. But it’s more than that, much more. It’s a day for thinking of fathers who have inspired generations of their children and children’s children in the wine world. I was strongly reminded of the importance of such family ties this year when I attended a lunch at The Square in London organized by a group called the Primum Familiae Vini (www.pfv.org).

I was chatting over dinner at the Bottega del Vino in Verona with Italian wine producers from six different regions when a call came through from London. My editor at The Independent said ‘I want you to head straight to Bergerac in France to cover a scandal brewing about contaminated wine’. I returned to the table and apologised to the assembled Italians, saying I had to leave as my newspaper wanted me to cover a wine scandal that had just broken. “Do you mean the one in my region?” each one asked.

MANY factors determine the price of wine, but it is possible to find wonderful vintages offering value that approximate the world's most expensive wines. All it takes is an open mind and a willingness to avoid following the crowd. Anthony Rose raises a glass.

Famous for his rapier-sharp wit,
the 19th century Irish author
Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is “a
person who knows the price of everything
and the value of nothing.” Do I
hear Oscar Wilde turning in his grave?

wine prices do not always equate to value...

MANY factors determine the price of wine, but it is possible to find wonderful vintages offering value that approximate the world's most expensive wines. All it takes is an open mind and a willingness to avoid following the crowd. Anthony Rose raises a glass.