Wine Demon (or WineDemon, as they style it, the old spacephobes) is a newish app from the people behind Naked Wines, the online wine retailer. The aim is to become something like the TripAdvisor (fellow spacephobics) of wine, creating a single place where millions of people can find millions of reviews of millions of wines. In doing so, they want to cure “restaurant-wine-list-phobia”, to put an end to “supermarket-special-offer-bafflement” and to banish “what-was-that-lovely-bottle-itus”.

This is how it should work: when you try a wine, you rate it. When you need to find out if a wine is any good, say in an unfamiliar shop with no useful staff, or in a restaurant, you can search for it and read everyone else’s ratings. These may guide you to an unknown gem, which in turn would enormously impress your date, if you have one, or warn you away from a disaster.

Let’s start with rating your own wine. This, I like. It’s very easy to find your wine on their system, and impressive how frequently they already list even my more obscure selections (even if I’m often the first to actually review them). If you can’t be bothered searching their system, or if you’ve got a wine which isn’t there and don’t want the faff of inputting all the information (not such a strenuous task, really – they only want the basics), you can just take a picture of the label and the magic elves at WineDemon HQ will do it for you. You can give it a simple rating out of 10 (it’s out of five really, but you can use half-marks), or you can add a more detailed tasting note. This is all good (though I’d like to be able to input where I bought a wine, whether I’m drinking it at home or at a restaurant).

It’s when it comes to looking at other people’s wine reviews that the first problems crop up. And this is key, because if the searchable database of reviews can’t produce meaningful data, the app is fatally flawed.

I think the major problem is this: people like wine. A lot of people aren’t very fussy about it – they just like a glass of something wet and alcoholic at the end of the day – and like pretty much anything vinous. This is Yellow Tail’s business model. But this means that, however hard some wines try, it’s actually pretty difficult to get a bad average review. However, people who consider themselves wine buffs are a different matter. This hard-to-please bunch are always liable to give even very decent wines a disappointing score if they don’t quite hit the mark. Let’s call these two groups of people Type A’s (love anything) and Type B’s (very fussy). Only Type A’s will drink the likes of Blossom Hill, so the cheaper, lower-end wines will always get pretty good reviews. Only Type B’s will drink Chateau Lafite, so the posh stuff is always liable to be marked down on technicalities. This presents some reliability issues with the ratings. Let’s look at some examples:

• Yellow Tail shiraz: 85% of 157 Demons liked it, average review 3.5/5
• Chateau d’Yquem: 81% of 143 Demons liked it, average review 3.5/5

• Gallo Family cabernet sauvignon: 88% of 43 Demons liked it, average review 3.5/5
• d’Arenberg The Dead Arm shiraz: 54% of 31 Demons liked it, average review 3.5/5

Jacob’s Creek sparkling shiraz: 84% of 100 Demons liked it, average review 3.5/5
Bollinger Grande Annee: 73% of 122 Demons liked it, average review 3.5/5

Berberana Rioja Reserva: 83% of 117 Demons liked it, average review 3.5/5
Rioja Alta Gran Reserva 904: 80% of 137 Demons liked it, average review 3.5/5

As you can see, according to WineDemon’s rating system Yellow Tail shiraz is better than Chateau d’Yquem, while the Dead Arm shiraz, one of Australia’s highest-rated exports, is less popular than Gallo cabernet sauvignon. If you want a sparkler you’re better off with Jacob’s Creek fizzy shiraz than Bollinger Grande Annee, and for Rioja you should choose Berberana’s reserva (“half price” at Tesco’s as I write, at £6.99) over Rioja Alta’s £40+ Gran Reserva 904.

(The first version of WineDemon had a glitch that led to fewer people “liking” top wines than there should have been, but I’m told it has been fixed) 

There’s a chance that they already have a way to solve this problem: it is possible to rate other reviewers, meaning that at some point in the future you could restrict results to just, say, the 10% most trusted reviewers. But you’d be needing the same people who’s ratings skew the system to be more discerning in their selection of reviewers, and I don’t see how you could possibly be confident of that. Or you could see who has reviewed your chosen wine and trust only the people you’ve heard of, though this relies on you having heard of rather a lot of people. It is apparently possible to automatically find users who you follow on Twitter, and to prioritise out their reviews, though I haven’t been able to get this feature to work.

As an aside, clearly the WineDemons needed quite a lot of reviews to get their app up and running. To encourage this, they offered free Naked Wine wine to prolific reviewers. When word got out about this offer, hundreds of people logged on and gave random marks to random wines until they’d built up enough credit to go shopping. They didn’t get their wine – it’s bizarre that any of them really expected the offer to be honoured in those circumstances – but they did leave a hell of a mess. I’m told the unreliable reviews have all been removed.

I’m finding WineDemon a great place to put my own wine reviews, allowing me to easily fish them out again at a moment’s notice, along with a picture of the label, to cure my own what-was-that-lovely-bottle-itus. But I fear that anyone relying on the community’s reviews to help them out with an unfathomable wine list would probably be better off just closing their eyes and picking something at random.

I’ll keep using it for to review wine, and I’ll keep checking the average scores optimistically. Perhaps TripAdvisor also went through this phase, and with time, and with lots more reviews, WineDemon will become a more reliable source of recommendations. And perhaps Yellow Tail really is better than Yquem – I don’t believe I’ve ever tried either.

I saw in the new year in the Lake District in the company of my wife’s extended family, fully 15 of them. If I were Bernard Manning or Les Dawson I would make a few jokes about my mother-in-law at this point, but the truth is that she’s no monster and my wife’s family is in general rather of a delight. I write this even though none of them read this blog; indeed, if there’s one really serious family failing it’s a general lack of hoot-giving about wine.

Perhaps they’re aware of this, as I was asked to put on a wine tasting for the assembled crowd on New Year’s Eve. Of course I accepted, and set about compiling a small spread of themed wines. The theme I chose was syrah/shiraz, hoping that the wines would at least be sufficiently warming to see us through a chilly winter’s evening in the north of England. On the plus side, I thought, there aren’t many more popular red grapes out there. On the down side, anyone who didn’t like syrah/shiraz was in for a crap evening.

There were seven wines, three from France, three from Australia and a sparkler from Spain. They weren’t entirely representative, particularly given that some of my favourite syrahs come from New Zealand, but they made for an interesting selection. They were: A 2009 Cave de Tain Crozes-Hermitage, Les 3 Lys, from Sainsbury’s (£7.49); a 2003 Thierry Allemand Cornas from my fridge (worth about £40); La Pamelita, a sparkling shiraz from Spain bought from Theatre of Wine for £15; Jacob’s Creek bog standard shiraz (widely available for around £7.49-£7.99, but often on promotion); Penfold’s Bin 28 Kalimna shiraz 2008 (widely available, about £10-£12) and D’Arenberg Dead Arm shiraz from 1998 (from a friend’s cellar, but also worth about £40). There was also a bottle of Mas Coutelou’s 2010 Vin des Amis (Roberson’s, about £10 by the case when it’s in stock), which has a bit of syrah in it but is mostly grenache.

With all the bottles covered in special bags, I asked everyone to choose which single wine they’d like a proper glass of after the tasting, and which they thought was the grenache-based ringer.

My favourite, and the favourite of my two keenest co-tasters, was the cornas (which, like the d’Arenberg, I had double-decanted a bit earlier, primarily to filter out sediment, of which there was plenty). A super-hot year, 2003 is widely considered one to avoid in much of Europe, and I picked up a case of this from a Justerini & Brooks bin-end sale last year for precisely £20 a bottle. At that price I think it’s a pretty special wine, complex and characterful yet classy in a way that’s not easy to find at this price point. The next keenest family member, though, who I had high hopes for given that he has spent the last couple of years living and working in Italy, asked for a glass of the Jacob’s Creek, which to me stood out as the worst wine by a long distance in an otherwise impressive field (it’s always worth trading up to their reserve range, if you’re going JC).

There was one extra test: everyone got a sheet of paper on which I’d printed tasting notes on the seven wines on show (not mine, a professional’s, sourced from the interweb), as well as two rogue tasting notes, one which described a valrhona chocolate bar and the other a coffee from web-based retailers Has Bean. Given that many of the wines were vaguely similar and no one there was an experienced taster, match the tasting notes to the wines was an impossible task, but I asked them to work out which were the two ringers. One, everyone got. The other slipped through the net. I’ve made this very slightly harder for you by deleting the giveaway mentions of “this wine” or “classic northern Rhone syrah” that I kept in for the family, but regular tasting-note readers probably shouldn’t be too long detained. See which two you think are the odd ones out (without using Google, of course).

1) Totally opaque colour with purple crimson hue. Aroma of liquorice allsorts, spice, blackpepper and vanilla with just a hint of marzipan. Flavours of vanilla, plum and liquorice. Long aftertaste of vanilla, plum and spice.

2) Light, aromatic and spicy, with notes of woodsmoke and grilled meat and crisp acidity.

3) High-pitched, very fresh red and dark berry notes, with complicating accents of licorice, violet, rose and magnolia. Full and lush in the mouth, with almost jammy blackberry, cherry cola and cassis flavors.

4) Rich, full taste of yellow fruits such as plum and cherry plum, with acidic notes.

5) The nose shows ripe plum and spicy fruitcake aromas, with hints of currant, chocolate and well-handled cedary oak. The palate is medium bodied in structure, with ripe plum fruit flavours.

6) Lifted spicy nose with blackberries, mulberries and ripe figs dominating. Underlying hints of wild thyme, musk and cloves. A true one-off and a treat for the tastebuds

7) Buckle your harness, this is going to hurtle you straight through the sound barrier. Its sheer power of all manner of black fruits, integrated dark chocolate and liquorice is beautifully framed.

8) Lovely, stony minerality augmented by a host of flavours that, while still young and primary, are rewarding. Touches of forest fruit coulis, redcurrants, sweet damsons, herbs and a perfumed lift. Utterly delicious, both crunchy and lush.

9) Expect plum and nectarines, mixed with a lovely spiciness of fresh cracked black pepper, a fantastic mouthfeel and finish of cherry

I’ll put the answers in as a comment, so scroll down a bit if you want ‘em.

* I know only Olly Smith can get away with using words like “shirazamatazz”, and I apologise.

At the start of 2011 I resolved to spend my wine budget more freely, rather than getting overexcited in the Waitrose sale, snaffling a couple of cases from the Wine Society somewhere along the line and not really having much time, space or money left for anything else. And I succeeded spectacularly well, placing my first orders with a good half-dozen merchants, and even dipping my toe into the world of auctions. In many ways I succeeded much too well, and much too often, so as a result this year’s resolution is to scale back a bit, and to make sure my wine fridge never overflows. Promisingly, I’ve already let a couple of new year sales pass me by, and for my first wine purchase of the new year I went back to a familiar source.

For some time I’ve seen the Wine Society occasionally offer “mystery” mixed cases of wine without ever being seriously tempted, but this year I had a change of heart. The worst that could possibly happen, I decided, is that I feel ripped off and get myself a furious blogpost with which to start 2012, which wouldn’t be so bad. So I spent £79 on six mysterious “fine wines”, the cheapest of their secret cases (which go up to £220 for six clarets), which was to contain four reds and two whites, comprised of a Claret, a Rhône and a white Burgundy plus either a red Burgundy or a Beaujolais, a white and a premium non-French red. I was promised a saving of £15.

This is what I got:
Bourgogne Les Pince Vin 2005, Alain Burguet (TWS are currently selling the 2006 for £19)
Chateau Bel Air Perponcher 2006 (TWS are selling the 2009 for £8.95)
Barone Ricasoli Brolio Chianti Classico 2006 (winedirect are selling the 2009 for £14.50)
Perrin Rasteau l’Andeol 2007 (AG Wines are selling for £14.29)
Domaine Gauby Vieilles Vignes Cotes Catalanes 2007 (AG Wines are selling for £25.99)
Pouilly-Fuisse “Vers Puilly”, Chateau de Beauregard 2009 (Which I can’t find anywhere else, though James Nicholson have their “Vers Cras” cuvee for £26.99).

Those retail prices add up to £109.72, which makes my saving considerably higher than advertised (almost exactly double the £15 they promised, in fact). Of course, the downside of this kind of case is that you end up with wines you wouldn’t necessarily have chosen yourself, but I find that (subject to certain minimum standards being met) I enjoy wines I probably wouldn’t ordinarily have bought myself (but did anyway) at least as much as those I would. In this case, the Bordeaux and the two Burgundies stand out as the wines least likely to have found their way into my house any other way.

If I have a complaint with my case it’s that they could have thrown in a wine from the new world, or more from places that aren’t France. If you push me for a second, it’s that the Wine Society seem mildly obsessed with flogging me Chianti Classico,  having already sold me six bottles of Brolio’s 2007 (and a couple of others) through a Vintage Cellar Plan (another way for them to decide what wines they sell you) I share with a couple of friends.

I write this, incidentally, while sipping a classy, creamy zibibbo (that’s a grape), Pietranera from Marco De Bartoli in Sicily, bought from the brilliant Les Caves de Pyrene during my adventurous 2011. If only they only offered cut-price mystery mixed cases…

I made (what I thought was) an interesting statistical discovery while cruising the internet yesterday. Wine-searcher.com is intended primarily as a place where consumers can search for which retailers are offering a specific wine, and how much they are offering it for. It costs a smallish amount ($39) a year to get the full service; I’ve been subscribing for the last couple of years and find it extremely useful. But it does other things as well.

In order to tell you who’s selling a wine, they need to store every retailer’s entire catalogue. At some point recently they’ve started displaying breakdowns of what makes up these catalogues. Clearly a retailer’s spirits are included alongside the wines in these statistics (either that or Scotland makes more wine than I realised), and probably their beers as well (Belgium and Holland crop up on Sainsbury’s list). I found them quite interesting, especially when comparing retailers, so here are a few highlights. (I know the text in the graphics is pretty small – if you click on them they’ll open in their own window and will hopefully be big enough to read)

You might expect, for example, Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s to offer a fairly similar selection, but you’d be wrong. Every standard major English retailer sells more wine from France than from any other country, but at Asda the USA are hot on their heals – French wine makes up 12.64% of their offering, American 12.48% – and at Tesco Australia isn’t far behind (23.79% to 20.7%). The USA’s popularity at Asda isn’t reflected elsewhere – they provide 3.81% of Tesco’s wines, 6.58% at Sainsbury’s and 4.79% at Waitrose. Chile is the fifth biggest producer on Tesco’s list, but seventh at Asda and Waitrose and a miserable 13th at Sainsbury’s. I thought Argentina’s malbecs were big sellers, but in fact they’re an “other” everywhere except Majestic (3.06%) and Tesco (1.44%), which at Sainbury’s means they’re below Belgium, Sweden, Holland and Mexico.

Aldi, the discount supermarket chain, is a curiosity: here France limps in joint fourth, behind South Africa, Chile and Italy, and level with Australia, Germany and Hungary. Spain, with 4.76% of their list, are precisely half as popular. As you might guess by those slightly weird numbers, their list is pitifully small with just 63 things on it.

The higher you go up the qualitative scale, the more France dominates – by the time you hit Berry Brothers the French are responsible for a stonking 76.04%. And there are still some surprises: New Zealand is Majestic’s No2 producer, but No9 at the Wine Society and at BBR it’s just an “other”.

But I guess the most notable thing is the number of different countries whose wines British merchants list. Here, by way of comparison, are a few foreign retailers. Wine.com, apparently America’s largest online wine distributor, does pretty well (though American online wine retailing is a complicated thing, and I couldn’t find any of the major supermarkets, so I don’t know how representative it actually is), but wine lists in Australia and France look very different to ours, and a lot less exciting.

At the start of this year, someone at Aldi offered to send me a selection of their wines. Sure, I said. But when a full dozen arrived, it was clear that if I was to taste them alone a large amount of wine would end up going down the sink – and even if none of them was ever likely to be my wine of the year, this is not a welcome prospect. So I invited round a load of friends and we went through them together. Here is some proof:

We had a lovely evening. With all wines served in similar newspaper-based disguises, and with a couple of non-Aldi ringers thrown in to keep everyone on their toes, everyone tried everything before choosing their top three and bottom three. Consensus was nowhere to be seen, with every single wine featuring among somebody’s favourites and somebody else’s rejects.

It was going to be a brilliant blogpost. One of the best. But then, in an incident which has come to be known as the Great Note-Disappearing Scandal of 2011, everything I had written on the night was lost, and with it, any chance of the blogpost ever being published. It was my lowest hour, a personal humiliation.

Then a couple of weeks ago, someone at Aldi, a new person, offered to send me a selection of their wines. I told the new person about the Great Note-Disappearing Scandal, and they forgave me. Though he may have born it in mind when he decided to send me just five bottles this time. Well, if that’s the case we’ve both learned our lesson, because this is what I thought of (three of) them, opened without friends, and without delay:

Philippe Michel Crémant du Jura Sparkling Chardonnay (£6.99)
This is the bargain of their range, in the shops all year round a hit both times I’ve tried it. A bone dry sparkler that’s lovely on its own and clean and gentle enough to work well as a base for cocktails. The bubbles aren’t enormously persistent, but it’s unlikely to matter that the wine goes flat in five minutes when glasses will be empty in three. Even the half-price Champagne that swills around supermarket aisles at this time of year looks pricey by comparison. I’d be very happy to make this my official house sparkler of the 2011 festive season (had I not already stocked up with this).

Vieux Remparts Chateauneuf-du-Pape 2010 (£9.99)
This would make a decent gift, because it comes in a nice bottle with some embossed bits and was crafted in one of France’s most famous winegrowing areas. But the bottle and the label are costing a good few pounds here – this is a nice, soft, gluggable grenache, low in acid and tannin, of the sort that you can pick up in most good retailers (from a less sought-after region) for around £6.99. It’s only distantly related to the famous Chateauneuf domaines, just as cut-price supermarket champers is a very distant cousin of Pol Roger. Still, when Tesco’s Chateauneuf is over £15 and Sainsbury’s a penny less – and both those bottles, in the Finest and Taste the Difference range respectively, come covered in supermarket branding and are thus considerably less appropriate as gifts – I guess this must be seen as something of a bargain. This went on sale on Monday, and is out there while stocks last.

Maynards Late Bottled Vintage Port, 2007 (£8.99)
Proper vintage port is still scarily expensive, but every other variation on the theme is puzzlingly cheap. This is good stuff, with a pronounced pong of leather and tar and chocolate and blackberry and kirsch – my little glass made an entire room smell of festive celebration – and deep, rich, warming flavours of cooked berries and plums and chocolate and spice.  It’s lovely, and (while pretty much the going rate for LBV) a great bargain, and I can absolutely see it trotting off down the aisle with a truckle of Stilton at the earliest opportunity (like most wines with a bit of sweetness to them, I find it’s better with salty food than sweet). Highly enjoyable, this also went on sale on Monday and is there while stocks last.

The bottle Cono Sur use for their 20 Barrels pinot noir reminded me of one wine I tried while I was in Rioja. The world of wine is all about indulgence and frequently creeps over into excess, but here was the most indulgent, excessive thing I have ever encountered.

The wine is created by Bodegas Valdelana, using fruit from a pre-phylloxera vineyard. The vines are proper old, and produce so incredibly amazing they decided that the only way to treat them with due deference would be to vinify them and package them in the most incredibly amazing way they could think of. If they could only have aged it in barrels made from the tree of knowledge, bottled it in vessels hand-blown by genuine leprechauns and labelled it with signage individually crafted by angels, before finally distributing it to their grateful consumers on unicorn-drawn chariots, they surely would have done. Instead they bought the heaviest bottle known to man – 3kg when empty, our guide proudly told us – designed a metal label, packaged it with a pot of genuine gold leaf (you’re supposed to sprinkle it in your wine for extra health-giving anti-oxidants) and slapped on a $250-a-bottle price tag.

The resulting wine, apparently best drunk within two years, is sold in luxury establishments such as the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, and in exclusive American retailers at $250 a pop. The wine is OK, and would represent decent value if sold gold-free at 10% of that price. As it stands, it’s the perfect gift for the man who has everything (except taste), or Olympic weightlifters in search of a fresh challenge.

Valdelana’s little old bodega is a funny old place to visit, by the way, complete as it is with lots of fake grass and a subterranean mirrored “vineyard”. The best thing about it is the view from the door down the road to Marqués de Riscal, the brilliant Frank Gehry-designed hotel-on-top-of-a-winery, about which more, another time.

Question: Above are two Cono Sur wines, the standard pinot noir – commonly known, for obvious reasons, as “bicycle”, and the triple-the-price 20 Barrels pinot noir. What’s the main difference between them?

Answer: Nearly half a kilogram.

The 20 Barrels isn’t even Cono Sur’s premium pinot, that honour going to the presumably heavier still Ocio. I must say I’m puzzled that wineries feel the need to waste money and energy on buying and shipping hefty bottles to denote higher quality contents, when the price tag attached to the wine will do the same job just as well (and would be a bit smaller without them). The difference on this occasion was, to be precise, 444g – a full bottle of the Bicycle pinot weighs in at 1.192kg, its big brother at 1.636kg. Cono Sur is otherwise pretty eco-friendly as absolutely massive winemaking behemoths go, so much so that some of their vineyards are kept weed- and pest-free through the winter by flocks of marauding geese. The choice of emblem for their basic pinot, the bicycle, “symbolises our spirit of innovation, passion, commitment and respect for the environment,” they say. They could do a little bit better.

But when it comes to the contents of the bottles, what is the difference? Let’s look at the back labels for a clue.  Hmmm, the Bicycle has “flavours of cherry, plum and strawberry”, and the 20 Barrels offers “notes of fresh cherry, strawberry and plum”.  Er…

I like Cono Sur’s pinot noir, probably the only sub-£6 pinot I’ve ever bought more than once, and generally a pretty reliable supermarket buy. It’s currently reduced from £7.49 to £5.99 at Tesco (until January 3), or £6.79 at Sainsbury’s, where it’s not on promotion. It’s not enormously complex, but offers loads of fresh, yes, cherry and strawberry fruit and a great deal of pleasure for the money. For £5.99, frankly, I wouldn’t hesitate.*

The 20 Barrels, at £19.99 from Morrisons or Waitrose, is obviously in a totally different price bracket. Where much of the Bicycle’s fruit is machine harvested and just a fraction – 35% to be precise – spends six months in oak (the rest hanging out in stainless steel tanks), all of the 20 Barrels wine relaxes in barrels for an entire year. The result is more spiciness, with cinnamon and smoke coming through, and riper, darker fruit. Though the 2008 I tried wasn’t terribly old – just a year older than the Bicycle, and bottled a mere five months earlier – it looked a lot older than I’d have expected, browning at the rim. This was a bit surprising in what’s still a pretty young wine, but gave it quite attractive maturity that’s rare in an off-the-shelf wine and makes it without reservation ready to drink right now. It beats the Bicycle on every measure other than value: it’s good stuff, but in the £20 a bottle range it does have a lot of other good stuff to compete with.

* On the subject of wines I wouldn’t hestitate to buy, Tesco’s online wine-selling arm are currently knocking off Penfolds Bin 28 Kalimna Shiraz for £6.64 a bottle here. If you’re quick, you can use the code XXHHN4 to bring that price down to £5.85 a bottle, after delivery charges. It’s a big, bold, ripe Australian belter, based on Barossa fruit, and the 2008 – which should be what you get – is reckoned to be one of the best vintages in yonks. To illustrate how good a price that is, it’s also on offer at Majestic, where the offer price is £10.99, down from a standard £13.99. Wine Rack and Avery’s both list it at £13.99. Buy it and drink it over the next 30 years – it’s got a reputation for standing the test of time.

I’ve had the very great pleasure and privilege of attending a few interesting dinners in recent weeks, one of which even tiptoed towards greatness, while another edged uncomfortably towards the other end of the qualitative scale before rescuing itself heroically.

The former was at Coq d’Argent, a fairly fancy restaurant which caters for city types, situated as it is close to the Bank of England on Poultry, among the best-named streets in London and inspiration for the first half of the restaurant’s name. So far as I can see, the only possible complaint about this place is the prices – mains start at £19 and trundle gently upwards towards an offputting £34, though there’s a seven-course menu dégustation (which counts sorbet and pre-dessert as courses in their own right, and thus is really a five-course tasting menu with bonuses) which looks like something of a bargain at £48. Some of the food we ate was exceptional – a fillet of beef with sauteed wild mushrooms, truffle and pan fried foie gras was possibly the best dish I’ve been served this year – and some of the wine stonkingly delicious.

Venison tartare on celeriac and hazelnut remoulade with pickled apple compote. Don't you know

We’d been brought there to investigate the restaurant’s enomatic machine, which allows them to serve some seriously fine wine by the glass. It doesn’t make these wines cheap – from their current selections a 175ml glass of wine, which the pub chain Wetherspoon’s would define as “small”, costs between £19.50 and £45.50 – but it does make them vaguely achievable. I’d love to try Chateau d’Yquem, but given that Le Coq sells bottles for anything between £215 (for the 2003) and £7,000 – that’s seven thousand pounds – (for the 1921), and the cheapest I can find it anywhere else is £94.95 for half a bottle, I’m not about to do it any time soon. If it were in the enomatic machine I’d probably still blanche at the price of a full glass, but I would be able to try a 25ml sip for less than a tenner.

Machine aside the wine list, compiled by Olivier Marie, their head somelier of 10 years’ standing, is good enough to have been named the best in the country earlier this year. It’s quite long, and I’m sure it would absolutely terrify a novice, but there are some interesting wine facts scattered among the pages, some low mark-ups on the top-end wines, and even if you know your wine you’re probably best off just asking Olivier what you should get anyway.

The man knows his stuff. Before the dinner I was told that I’d be trying some very big names – Yquem, for a start. They never came, but then anyone can say that Yquem is likely to be a decent wine; Marie thought a 1989 Philippe Foreau Vouvray moelleux would be better with our dessert, and it was utterly splendid. With that beef fillet Marie proposed a 1995 Chateau Troplong Mondot (available online for £81 a bottle; on the wine list for £179); Tom Harrow, aka the Wine Chap, who was co-hosting the dinner, quite fancied a 1996 Chateau Montrose (available online for £133 a bottle; on the wine list for £185) instead. In the end we got both, but the St Emilion was by far the better match (I didn’t get on that well with the Montrose, which had an overwhelming and one-dimensional aroma of pencil-shavings). The vouvray was probably my wine of the night, though a 2005 pinot gris Cuvee Laurence from Domaine Weinbach (available by the case online for £29 a bottle; on the wine list for £83 a bottle) was another stunner, and with its zingy acidity and raisined but gentle sweetness made a brilliant match for foie gras terrine.

Le Coq d’Argent is in the city, and is always likely to have lots of suited bankers filling its tables. It comes at a price which only the extravagantly bonused might consider inexpensive, but they offer some of the best non-Michelin-starred cookery in the land, and a great wine list. In addition to the enomatic machine they have a small selection of themed two-glass wine flights – it’s that kind of stuff which makes drinking wine in restaurants, for all their often galling mark-ups, worth doing. I recommend it heartily, if you’re in the area and feel a bit flush. You can read my fellow diner Tara Devon O’Leary more forensic account of the meal here, if you wish.

On, then, to a very different meal at Clerkenwell’s Argentinian restaurant A La Cruz. Among the worst possible destinations for a first date with a vegetarian, this place is all about its asador, a charcoal pit over which meat slowly roasts. They take this so seriously they ship the wood over from Argentina, because nothing we’ve got does the job quite so well. The side dishes we got with our meat – a few sad potatoes; a couple of lettuce leaves and a large pile of red onion – suggests that protein is the priority here. We got lots of it; first we shared an entire beef fillet and a rib-eye, the latter by the chef’s own admission rather undercooked. What’s more, the chef’s portioning was so out of kilter that several people still hadn’t been served by the time the fillet was finished, and had to hang around for a while until someone seared them a steak. On the plus side, this meant that everyone got a very generous portion of meat. And then, when we had finished that, we shared an entire lamb. This little beast had been cooked long and slow on the asador, in the manner any visitor to Patagonia might have witnessed, and the results were sweet and tender. Anyone with a love of the dramatic and enough like-minded friends to stage a large-scale meat blow-out could do a lot worse than pre-order their cordero entero.

They make a very good chimichurri, which is something we don’t see often enough, and the meat is obviously of a very high standard (though to my mind it could have been a bit more liberally seasoned). A La Cruz has impeccable heritage, sharing an owner with Broadway Market’s excellent Buen Ayre, and makes a very good place for a meaty blow-out, though still a rung or two below Hawksmoor standards. I used to work a couple of minutes’ walk from here, and saw a couple of restaurants open on this site only to close soon afterwards. It’s a difficult location, very close to trendy Exmouth Market but far enough away for nobody to actually walk past very often. Let’s hope this one, which was pretty full on the weeknight I visited, bucks the site’s unhappy trend.

We drank, incidentally (and everything but the meat was incidental), a couple of wines from Luigi Bosca. His Gala 2, a Bordeaux blend of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and merlot, was big, smooth and ripe-fruited to an almost unpleasant degree, although some people will love it. Gala 1, a blend of malbec, petit verdot and tannat, was considerably superior, for the same price.

Anyway, enough about posh stuff. My next post, comin’ atcha later this week, is about Cono Sur pinot noir.

North London is a bit of a vinous backwater. I moved out of Archway within months of the Theatre of Wine arriving to bring the area its first really good wine shop, and my new neighbourhood, East Finchley, has nothing to rival it, not even close. There’s a branch of Majestic halfway to Muswell Hill, and after that, nothing. Even the posh parts of north London don’t have much to shout about – a branch of Jeroboams in Hampstead; a shop called Bottle & Basket in Highgate village which remains defiantly unwebsited, while Kentish Town, Belsize Park, Golders Green and Hampstead Garden Suburb boast nothing more than the occasional branch of Nicolas or Threshers. It’s more or less a dead zone.

So in the circumstances I was delighted to find signs of life in the Old White Lion, a humble pub next to East Finchley tube station who have taken to putting on wine tastings at absolutely no cost for regular customers and interested others. Each session has a theme – this Thursday’s, the last one before Christmas, is focused on fizz, but the one I went to was all about the “classics”.

What this amounted to was six wines from classic old world regions – a Sancerre, a Chablis, a Bourgogne rouge, a Chianti, a Bordeaux and a Rioja – all of which were on the pub’s list. The tasting was led by a bloke from Liberty, importers of some very excellent wine, who did his job pretty well, knowledgeable enough to inform but still very much open to beginners’ opinions. The wines weren’t enormously exciting, but they were by and large decent representatives of their areas (though if I came from Burgundy I might have been a bit upset). The result was some interesting discussion on each of the two tables, and some people more engaged with wine and its variety of styles than they were before.

I’ve been privileged to go to some pretty memorable wine tastings in recent months, but in many ways this was the best of all. Because if the Old White Lion can enthuse my fellow East Finchleyites about the pleasures of the fermented grape, maybe one day we’ll finally get a decent wine shop of our own.

And if you’re in the Old White Lion sometime and you fancy some wine, I’d recommend the Chianti. Soft, round, fruity and uncomplicated, it’ll go down well in any social occasion and at £18 a bottle it’s decently priced too.

I’m just back from a three-day trip to Rioja, another eye-opening experience. It’s interesting how miserable everyone there is about the Spanish wine market – I’m afraid I’m going to have to use quite a lot of numbers to tell you about it. Although Rioja utterly dominates the Spanish wine scene, producing near enough 39% of every drop drunk in the country (their closest challenger, Ribero del Duero, musters a mere 8.9%), everyone seems very worried about their future. A decade ago their statistical dominance was even more impressive: back then Rioja produced 70% of all the wine sold in bars, cafes and restaurants; last year that was down to 52.2% “Nobody drinks wine any more,” one producer told me, and though this isn’t entirely true the numbers are certainly heading down – in the first seven months of this year the Spanish wine market dropped by 5.1% by volume, and 4.7% by value (and 2010 was hardly a classic year, having seen drops of 0.9% and a ghastly 7.7% by volume and value respectively, year on year).

In particular, sales of white and rose wines from the area are collapsing. Muga’s rosado, the wine whose massive popularity within Spain put the family on the viticultural map, according to the current winemaker Jorge Muga, is now totally shunned, and 90% of it is exported. Particularly bizarre as it’s bright, crisp and very cheap – around €5 over there, and about £8 here (find it at Waitrose, The Wine Society and independents). Rioja Riservas are so untrendy that many winemakers only label them as such for the export market, and try to disguise them as more fashionable crianzas within Spain.

In the circumstances it might seem sensible to put a bit of money into trying to change public opinion in Spain. Instead, with the local economy in crisis and the unemployment rate hitting 21.5%, they have given up on the Spaniards and will concentrate on convincing the rest of the world to buy all the stuff that’s now failing to sell to the locals. This has worked of late – in 2010, for example, while Spaniards turned their noses up at Rioja Reservas, their sales in the UK rocketed by 56%. But the US has been identified as “the market with the greatest growth potential”, having grown by 30% last year to leap from No5 to No3 in the list of the world’s top Rioja importers (now behind just league-leading Britain and Germany), and 36% of the region’s publicity budget will be spent there this year.

For all the misery, global sales of Rioja were up 13% in 2010, an increase of 31 million litres. They sold, in total, 267,117,831 litres of the stuff. That’s a lot of wine, and more than 100,000,000 litres more than they sold a decade earlier, which in turn was nearly 60,000,000 litres more than they sold in 1990. That kind of growth can’t continue forever.

I’ll post more about my trip in due course. The picture at the top shows the view from the winery at La Emperatriz, interesting mostly because it shows the colour variation between the leaves of the region’s key grape varieties in the autumn. The rusty brown-red that dominates the scene and makes the area so dramatic at this time of year is tempranillo (more of which above), the patches of light green top left and far right are viura, Rioja’s key white grape, and the darker green bit is garnacha. I’m actually not entirely sure what the darker red bit is, but by process of elimination I suppose it can only be graciano (they don’t grow any mazuelo, or any other white grapes).