Fickle, a seductive mistress, a minx, or, as the late, great California winemaker André Tchelistcheff declared: ‘God made cabernet sauvignon whereas the devil made pinot noir’. Yes, pinot noir has been called many things in its time and not always complimentary. As the mainstay of red burgundy, pinot noir’s apogee, the wines of the fabled Domaine de la Romanée Conti are as rare, precious and costly as the garnet whose colour they emulate.

The Marmite ad doesn’t pretend that everyone has to like the sticky brown stuff. It’s ok that those of us like me love it while others find it loathsome. Wine tends not to divide opinions but achieve a common consensus based on reliability and quality. Indeed products like non-vintage champagne flaunt their consistency of style to reach a broad common denominator of taste. As with Marmite, there are some wines that divide opinion down the middle though, wines you either loathe or cherish.

The 7.1 earthquake that struck Christchurch on Saturday 4 September was merciful in sparing lives. The hammer blow was as much to the psyche of this charming rural city on New Zealand’s South Island as the substantial physical damage caused to roads and buildings. Yet while earthquakes and hobbits (The Hobbit is to be filmed there) are still hot news, the parlous state of New Zealand’s wine industry was the first topic my taxi driver mentioned, unprompted, when I arrived this month as a guest of the Great Wine Capitals Global Network.

Under a Tenner

2009 Asda Marsanne, Vin De Pays D’Oc, France

Attractively floral scented, this consistently affordable southern French dry white from the Languedoc shows lots of juicy, ripe stonefruit characters and a palate-pleasing freshness at a price that makes it an unbeatable Christmas party dry white. £3.47, reduced from £3.98, Asda.

2009 Tasmanian Sauvignon Blanc, Australia

From a small but highly competitive shortlist comprising Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose, the winner of this year’s Decanter Supermarket of the Year was Waitrose. No surprises there. Waitrose won the gong last year and it’s actually shifted into overdrive since then with a stronger selection from Australia and New Zealand. Forgive me then if I sound like an ad for a moment but from today until this coming Wednesday only, Waitrose will be offering 25 per cent off when you buy six bottles of any wine, mixed or unmixed, including fortified and sparkling wines, and delivery is free.

Do you think of wine as a natural product? It is after all the fermented juice of fresh grapes and what could be more natural? Quite a lot actually according to the natural wine movement. Natural wine is the latest addition to the green well-spring of organic, biodynamic and sustainable wines. Natural winemakers are the naturists of the wine world. They may not prance naked under a full moon, but they think of themselves as stewards for wines that taste of their location and vintage with no make-up and no clothes beyond the bottle they stand up in.

If you happened to have the odd £50k going spare, you could have snapped up the sixty bottle collection of every vintage from 1945 to 2003 (1948 apart) of Château Mouton Rothschild at Sotheby’s recent 40th anniversary auction. The significance of the collection lies in the artists’ labels, commissioned for each new vintage by Baron Philippe de Rothschild, and painted by, among others, Miró (1969), Chagall (1970), Picasso (1973), Andy Warhol (1975) and Francis Bacon (1990).

Was it coincidence that the autumn wine ranges of the UK’s Big Two wine clubs, Laithwaites and The Wine Society, were paraded on consecutive days? Theale-based Laithwaites (laithwaites.com) with its aggressive advertising couldn’t be more different in ethos than the genteel, non-profit-making Wine Society in Stevenage. Differences apart, both are dynamic, modern operations with first-rate wine buying teams. And both have clearly spent time improving on the quality and ambit of their wine ranges.

Set up in 1993 by Graham Chidgey, the only wine merchant I know to have scored a century in first class cricket, The Bunch (www.bunchwines.co.uk) is a like-minded coming together of six of Britain’s top independent wine merchants. If you like wine but find the term wine merchant off-putting because you only ever buy your wine in a supermarket, The Bunch make it worth a re-think.

Is Byron’s claret light and Madeira strong ‘bottled poetry’ as Robert Louis Stevenson described wine? Not perhaps if you scan the deathless prose of your average wine tasting note (my own among them). Auberon Waugh was idiosyncratic, once describing a Languedoc red as ‘hairy and longbottomed’, Kingsley Amis curmudgeonly: ‘when I hear someone talking about an austere unforgiving wine, I turn a bit austere and unforgiving myself’.