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After the Pinot Blanc at Launceston Place, over the last couple of nights I’ve enjoyed a Tesco’s Finest Tingleup Riesling. It’s a grape variety I always used to avoid, not being one for big, fruity, off-dry-or-worse whites, but I’ve tried a couple of really enjoyable Australian examples which were certainly dry, but with more complexity to them than your NZ Sauvignons, which to be fair might just be because I’ve drunk quite a very lot of New Zealand’s signature white wine. So my resolution this year, as the sun starts to spread its delicious warmth on our backs for the first time, is not to buy any New Zealand sauvignons at all, and to explore other potentially more surprising and rewarding areas instead. If reports of New Zealand’s washout 2008 vintage are anything to go by, I might be better off giving it a miss…

I’ve had this week off work, most of it spent doing odd jobs here and there or, yesterday, pulling my hair out over a bizarre, confusing and infuriating laptop problem. Today, though, was set aside as my little treat. So before going to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum nearby, I had lunch at Launceston Place. Reviews when it (re)opened a little under a year ago were largely favourable, with some nudging at extremes both good and bad. My opinion, in brief: for £18, it’s astonishing value.

Not everything, though, was perfect. An amuse bouche of cauliflower soup with a creme fraiche foam and truffle oil, which “can be drunk like an espresso”, said the wafer (I don’t drink coffee, but I assumed he meant that I should sip it. My usual definition of “drink like an espresso” would be: throw down the sink when no one’s looking). I ordered “ham, egg and chips” by way of started, smelling an ironic reimagining of a British classic. What I got was a generous portion of wonderful, thinly-sliced ham served with tiny crisps and a bright yellow egg-yolk gel. The ham was great, but egg-yolk-flavoured gel? It was tapdancing dangerously close to unpleasant.

From there, onwards and upwards. My braised veal with risotto and artichoke was excellent and the confit fennel which I ordered as a side delicious (with a glass of Hugel pinot blanc, 2006, which suited my mood perfectly and the food quite well) . The pre-desert of vanilla cooked cream with hazelnut crumble (creme brulee, almost) and a nougatine soldier, served in a hollowed-out egg, was wonderful. But the pudding was the highlight: apple tart with cinnamon ice cream. They were on to a winner: the only thing I like more than a good tarte tatin is a good cinnamon ice cream. The menu said it was to share, between two, but the waiter said the chef would create a single-person version just for me. Would he hell: I got a big one all to myself and, shamefully, I couldn’t finish it. If I’m being ultra-critical, the apple could have had just the slightest bite left to it, but it was pretty much perfect. Lunch took almost two hours, cost £30 and was ruddy great value (all the better for missing out on the liquid petit four of spiced, dense hot chocolate that got the thumbs down from adjoining tables).

Dining on your own means you don’t do much talking, but you notice everything. The bloke who looked like Simon Schama (possibly Simon Schama), wearing tracksuit bottoms which were tucked into his socks. The chef who snuck out of a side door as service wound down for a cigarette: lanky hair, arms covered in tattoos, like a comic-book criminal. The way people in Kensington just look different, more affluent, than people in normal London. I must go there again…

Dinner yesterday at this newish restaurant in Clerkenwell, which got tremendous reviews when it opened from everyone except AA Gill in the Sunday Times, who didn’t like it much at all. I had a really good night, although I was already fairly happy when I got there after a pre-dinner drink at Vinoteca on nearby St John St.

The dining room was a bit drab, with very dark wooden furniture and grey walls, the one bright spot the painting you can see in the picture, a riot of colour which hung right behind my back, so all I could see was the grey. It was clean, but uninspiring – downstairs, in the cafe area, white furniture made all the difference.

The food, though, was excellent. Home-made bread was as good as any I have eaten out – butter was not offered, nor needed. I had a starter of kangaroo with butternut squash, bone marrow and salad leaves which was excellent even if I’m not sure why they needed to import a novely meat rather than using one of our own. A main of venison was cooked extremely rare (I’m not squeemish), but by this time I’m struggling to recall the finer details. My friend’s lamb was strongly flavoured with sesame, a very successful combination to my tastes.

From an interesting wine list we had a 2005 Bierzo tinto from Pittacum, made using the Murcia grape in the Castilla y Leon region just north and east of Portugal. An interesting wine, perhaps a little too tasty for food which challenges your tastebuds quite enough on its own, but what a smell! Very herbal, musty, wood, liqu0rice and leather, it was really intense, one of the best-smelling wines I’ve ever sniffed. I can’t, though, find anyone who sells it except Les Caves du Pyrene (how I wish they were based in Crouch End!) and Everywine, which charges £82 for six but is rarely the cheapest. It cost about £25 in the restaurant, but is definitely worth a tenner for the smell alone!

There are several kinds of wine retailer, but I can broadly divide them as follows: those I grudgingly accept (supermarkets, Nicolas), those that make me feel mildly enthusiastic (Oddbins, still, most of the time), and those that totally rock. The Wine Society totally rocks. Somehow they manage to pull off the troublesome trick of selling wine to loads of people while offering quite a personal service. They genuinely come across as wine-loving geeks, rather than corporate twits (viz the BBR episode of BBC4’s current Wine series). Other than going totally over-the-top mad about every en primeur offer, they are dangerously low on faults. Their wines are keenly priced – where they stock the same wine as the supermarkets their price normally comes out lower – and their selection is interesting.

Having complained before about how expensive half-decent Pinot Noir is, here’s the exception that proves the rule: £5.95 should not buy you this kind of flavour explosion. I tend to get one of these with every mixed case, but I really should make sure there’s always a couple of bottles in the house. A pleasure, every time.

Sorry about the lack of complexity to this post, but I had to write it in the time it took my wife to brush her teeth.

I bought this some months ago on a trip to Calais, and I’ve got no idea how much I paid for it. I’m absolutely certain that it wasn’t the £9.99 that Tesco were charging for it over here, and I’m equally certain that if I knew what I was getting I’d have bought a lot more. It’s not a big, thick, dense, muscular wintry wine, which as I look at the blanket of snow which has just been dumped on London and shiver in memory of the sub-zero, wind-affected temperatures I fled home from work in a few hours ago, would perhaps be more fitting. It’s a relatively summery red, but there’s nothing wrong with a taste of summertime at this time of year. So it’s from Graves, a left-bank Bordeaux appelation which usually produces denser, cabernet-dominated blends. This, though, is two-thirds merlot, with a splash of cabernet franc in the blend. It’s soft, almost buttery, “all sorts of tasty, ripe, herby, green pepper-scented fruit”, says Jane MacQuitty in the Times, long finish, really rother lovely. Now out of stock at Tesco’s, and you can’t get it anywhere else. Yum, though.

Of the wines I picked up in the Wine Society’s January clearance, along with a few of the EOS Petite Sirahs I keep wibbling on about, this is the first to get opened. I do like Portuguese reds, as a rule – big, gutsy, honest, meaty, flavourful wines that so far rarely disappoint (I had a wonderful white wine there once, too, a few years ago, and spent a couple of years searching off and on for a British importer before forgetting what it was called).

Anyway, this is largely Tinta Roriz, otherwise known as Tempranillo, with a bit of Touriga Nacional and Alfrocheiro Preto, an obscure varietal used in the Dao to add depth of colour to blends, so I’m told.

The Callabriga website gives quite a lot of detail about how the wine is produced and should be served. It’s aged for a year in 225-litre oak barrels, which is evident upon tasting, as are the red berries which they boast of. It is a big and delicious wine with impressive but not overbearing tannins, but there was something of the dropped-on-the-barbecue about it, which is as obscure a tasting note as I’ve ever come up with. A success, as was the price – Berry Bros are selling it for £9.70 a bottle, Alexander Hadleigh (who I hadn’t previously heard of) are charging £12.30, while the Wine Society were knocking it off for £6.75 (though it looks like it’s sold out). Shame I only got the one bottle, and that I never cook the roast pork that everyone suggests it would match perfectly (though I could always start).

Head to the Callabriga website to discover such gems as how best to open it (“Perforate the cork right in the centre and slowly insert the whole of the spiral screw. Pull the cork out vertically, applying a continuous force”), how to serve it at the table (“use a drop-stop on the neck of the bottle to avoid spilling drops of wine on the tablecloth”), and why they used funny bottles (“sophisticated, elegant and modern, and dignifies the more refined table”).

So here’s a thing. The next night I went back to the Shiraz Mataro, and it was terrible. Horrible. Really nasty. Now, I don’t have any fancy wine-preservation devices, having found that so long as you polish them off in good order wines don’t deteriorate that badly. It was sealed overnight with nothing but its own screw cap, but I hadn’t expected it to go downhill that badly.

So instead of drinking any more than I had to I opened a bottle of Otra Vida Malbec. Now this isn’t a great wine – after a quick look online I can only find it at Corking Wines at £6.69 a bottle, and I’m sure I didn’t pay that much for it – but it was an interestingly contrary experience. When I opened it I was unimpressed – too sweet for me, a bit too much dried fruity pruny stuff going on – but when I came back to that a day later it was transformed, much more serious and infinitely more drinkable.

So what’s going on here then? Surely you can’t judge a wine on how it tastes a day after you open it, in other words when it’s not at its best. But do good wines go off slower than bad ones? I know wines often improve with a bit of oxygenisation, but can half a bottle of wine really get better if left overnight? I’ve got another bottle of the Malbec lurking in the cellar – should I open it a day before I want to drink it? Should I decant it? Or should I just carry on in a cloud of vaguely confused ignorance? Who’s to know?

I mentioned this wine in passing a few weeks ago when mourning the lack of the durif/petite sirah varietal in my local winemongers, and within days I found it again in Wine Rack. A few days ago its moment came when a couple of friends popped over for a drink, he very much a wannabe wine snob, and after he claimed to be a fan of “big” wines I opened it up.

What a fabulous beast of a wine this is. Firstly, it is an absolute bargain, and not only because it only costs a mere £8.66 if you buy three in Wine Rack’s perpetual three-for-two sale (£12.99 on its own). If you give someone who has drunk quite a lot of wine something they’re quite familiar with – a Cabernet Sauvignon, a Sauvignon Blanc, an Aussie Shiraz – they’ve got a vague understanding of what it should be like. They’ve probably had worse ones, better ones and quite similar ones. They can, in short, work out for themselves if it’s up to much. But give them something like this, which is clearly a well-made wine but is also (sadly) so unusual, it just blows their critical faculties away. It could be a £15 wine, or £20, or £40, because hardly anyone knows what a wine like this should cost. So they get their socks blown clean off by a meaty, tannic wilderbeast of a wine, you get to share it with them and as they gasp in gratitude you can chuckle silently at the £1.34 change from a tenner still rattling around your pocket.

You do need to be happy with a big wine to be able to sip this on the sofa, and it would probably be best saved to partner a similarly beastly dinner – the makers suggest lamb chops in cherry sauce, but I won’t because that sounds disgusting. “A classic pairing for our Petite Sirah,” they add, “is Peking Duck.” Now that I wouldn’t mind trying, but I don’t know why they’re so hung up on there being some fruit on your plate – I think it would be great with any kind of cow or deer.

I’m just amazed that you can get an American wine of this quality at this price. A complex blend – the Durif topped up with 2.5% Cabernet Sauvignon, 0.5% Zinfandel, 0.5% Merlot, 0.5% Cabernet Franc – 14 months in new French oak, and a dense, berry-packed flavour that lingers on the palate for upwards of a fortnight all adds up to incredibly good value. Perhaps it’s just as well that it’s such an unfashionable grape – for £8.66 you can just about sniff the underpants of a trendy Oregon Pinot Noir. Not that I’m complaining, you understand.

So, Christmas time. Or Channukah. Whatever. So I need to get a present for my Dad. He’s a wine-lover, a lot more knowledgeable then me, but I’m not a total idiot and it’s impossible to find anything to buy him so he ended up with a couple of bottles of Chilean wine. Not bad ones, either: Matetic EQ Syrah and Maycas del Limari Sauvignon Blanc, both from Oddbins. I’m quietly confident that when he opens them, he’ll enjoy them. The thing is, when we head to the dinner table he opens a Remoissenet Pere et Fils 1995 Beaune Marconnets. Now, apparently they’re better known for their white wines than their reds but it was a damn fine thing, the kind of bottle you buy at auction, not at Oddbins. The reserve bottle, in case we drank our way through that one and still wanted more (didn’t happen, sadly) was even more ridiculous. I’d like to think my father will still enjoy his wines when he drinks them, but is there any point buying wine at all for someone who’s got a cellar stocked with stuff like that? I guess the answer’s probably not, but I’ll keep doing it because I enjoy shopping for them and can’t think of anything better to get him. Though if anyone out there has any better ideas of gifts for wine lovers that aren’t actually wines, I’d love to hear them.

I’m trying to teach myself a bit more about Pinot Noir. It’s not always that easy, because it’s hard to try any decent ones at budget (by which I mean, sub-£5) prices. Most wines I buy cost between £4 and £7. Only rarely do I drink wine that normally retails at £10 or above. But that’s where you’ll find the vast majority of decent Burgundy, or PNs from New Zealand or Oregon. Only from Chile can you buy PNs at £5-£6, but on their own they don’t tell you much.

It’s become one of New Zealand’s signature grapes. The other one’s Sauvignon Blanc. Now, I’ve drunk a lot of that. I can normally tell the difference between one from New Zealand and one from France, and tell you why I’ve made my decision. Not so with Pinot Noir.

Anyway, here’s one from the Wairapa region of New Zealand, available at Oddbins for £9.99. What I can tell you is that it’s got all the advertised cherry aromas, a light body but with lovely, high acidity and a long finish for what isn’t a total blockbuster of a wine. Would be excellent with Moroccan food, I’d have thought. A very nice wine, which is probably quite well priced – it’s better than my average purchase, certainly very pleasant, but it’s not mindblowing.