Over the next four weeks, South African footie fans will be blowing their vuvuzelas loud and proud in a joyful release of pent-up emotion. Bafana Bafana may not be quite the finished article the Springbok rugby team was in 1995. So wishful thinking on a grand scale is required to expect Nelson Mandela to be presenting the World Cup to the home-grown heroes of 2010. Or Jacob Zuma, the republic’s president, who played for the political prisoners’ soccer team on Robben Island. Yet soccer, unlike rugby, as journalist Celia Dugger says, ‘is the fanatically followed sport of the black majority’.

Just as the tasting the of the Bordeaux 2009 vintage switched to sales mode a couple of weeks back, Tesco was announcing the launch of a new Fine Wine range on tesco.com. This has nothing to do with Tesco’s Finest range which. despite the name, is simply a clever way of marketing everyday wines. According to Tesco itself, it was to do with the return of consumer confidence, although it was notable that it coincided with Waitrose and Majestic’s Bordeaux 2009 opening offers.

2009 Villa Maria Cellar Selection Sauvignon Blanc Marlborough, New Zealand

A notch up from Villa Maria’s Private Bin Sauvignon, the Cellar Selection is more pungently aromatic and richer in classic Marlborough passion fruit flavour underscored by green pepper, with a grapefruity tang on the aftertaste making this a mouthwatering prospect at a bargain price. Try with warm goat’s cheese on toast and a drizzle of olive oil. £7.99 at Majestic, reduced from £9.99.

2008 Chablis Cuvée Amandine, France

When the headline beamed out at me, ‘Rose attracts male following’, I was naturally flattered, albeit puzzled as to who my new friends were. What a difference an accent makes. The word was of course rosé and the story in question confirmed that real men are drinking rosé when once it wouldn’t have been sniffed at. Why? According to Master of Wine, Pierpolo Petrassi, wine buyer for Waitrose, ‘the cliché of rosé being a female drink’ is still prevalent, but less than it was, thanks to the growing popularity of drier styles of rosé and their suitability with food.

Election night looms, so time to vote for a party, any party frankly as long as it involves drinks of celebration and consolation. I couldn’t condone getting tanked up for the polling station, however much you might need it, but a Passion Fruit Margarita might help improve on the poor turnout of the last two general elections. Take a 50 ml shot of tequila, an extra dash of triple sec optional, and a pouch of a passion fruit flavour cocktail mixer like Funkin. Shake and strain over fresh ice, stir rapidly, add ice cubes, a lime wedge and two small straws.

Hyperbole is such a natural accomplice to each new Bordeaux vintage that the vintage of the century cliché is now routinely trotted out at the slightest sign that the new claret might at least be drinkable. The problem with the flip side of crying wolf is that when a once in a lifetime vintage comes along, how do you sort hype from reality and recognize its quality?

Its reputation may be founded on it classic reds, but Italy is fast gaining ground for appetising dry whites is and I’m not talking pinot grigio. Halfway between the devilishly good wines of Italy’s North and those from the deep blue Mediterranean sea, Le Marche, or what we English call The Marches, is in the forefront of turning rosso into bianco. The fact that it’s in the shadow of neighbouring Tuscany and Umbria makes it all the more intriguing a destination.

Odious as comparisons may be, when two of the wine world’s giants go head to head with their major annual wine showcases on consecutive March days, it’s inevitable that both will be examined in the witness box of wine. With a catalogue of 105 pages France looked a weighty proposition, but it paled into insignificance next to Spain’s David Haye-like 206. Quantity schmantity, but French amour-propre had just been dealt a double blow by news that South Africa had pushed its supermarket wine sales into fifth place and exports had plunged by almost a fifth last year.

Having neither a blogger nor a twitterer been, it was only last year that I succumbed to the wine twitterverse and blogosphere. Howard Jacobson rails against the twitterati because the participants are ‘too angry, often too incoherent and inarticulate’. Twitter does have its fair share of social misfits and bores tweeting ad nauseam in the ‘need more cake’ vein. Or the ones who end up saying more than intended, like the wine PR who recently blathered she’d sent 10 times as many personal as work emails that day (she left soon after).

It was billed as World Class Chardonnay. At this year’s annual Australian wine tasting shindig, the organizers put on a tasting of 50 ‘World Class’ chardonnays, blind, only telling us only that not all of them were Australian, so that we could make our own judgment as to how Australian chardonnay showed against the rest of the world. Why? For one thing, Australian chardonnay is big business. Of the top 10 top selling chardonnays in the UK, the top four are Australian, Hardy's VR Chardonnay, Private Label Chardonnay? Jacobs Creek Chardonnay, Lindemans Sydney Cove Chardonnay.