This is my last bottle of a half-dozen I bought from Tesco’s about a year ago, half-price at around £4, and I don’t know if it’s a fruit day or what but it’s really great tonight. I’m certainly enjoying it more than on previous occasions. I originally thought it was a bit wood-dominated, but now the balance seems spot on. Good, but not overpowering, tannins and great acidity – it’s really mouthwatering. It doesn’t smell of much, which I guess knocks it down a few points, but it’s got wood, liquorice and plums oozing everywhere. Delicious, and absolutely kicking a lot of butt at this price. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d probably have another half-dozen downstairs still.

Bought from Wine Rack a while back. Everywhere else this goes by the name Churton. Why it’s called Tummil Flat over here I don’t know. Anyway, it’s quite good. Not good enough, though. If I’m going to spend over a tenner on a bottle of wine, I want it to be a bit better. On the nose, it’s a winner: dark fruits, but extremely pleasant foresty earthiness. In the mouth, it doesn’t deliver enough. Those fruits again, but not a whole lot else. Soft tannins, not too intrusive. It’s a £6 wine that costs double that because of where it’s from and what grape it’s made from.

From Concha Y Toro, via Oddbins who were knocking it off at three for £20 a few weeks ago, encouraging me to snap up half a dozen. People talk about rubber flavours in Chilean wines, and for me this is extremely obvious here. But it’s not unpleasant – a deep, dark ruby colour, dense velvety texture and lots of spicy, blackberry flavours. It’s a good wine, definitely pleasurable to drink, but I don’t find it wildly exciting. It’s a good second wine to open up when you’ve got friends around one evening, but it’s not the brilliant opening gambit which will convince them you’re tremendously stylish and tasteful. Worth what I paid, but not the £9.99 standard price. Others though have been more enthusiastic, so maybe it’s just a root day.

So here’s a reason, albeit a base and cheap one, to love the Wine Society: it’s really good value. Here’s a wine I got in their January clearance for £5.75, down from their usual £7.50. You can’t get it there any more (what with it being in the clearance and everything, it’s been cleared), but you can still get it at Tanners for £9.50. £9.50! That, for me, is quite a posh bottle. £5.75 is everyday drinking. £7.50 is something in between.

So what’s it worth? I like it, but I’m not about to start gushing. A mixture of Syrah (“une bonne moitié pour le fruit”), Grenache and Mourvedre (“pour un assemblage bien languedocien”), it is “un assemblage bien languedocien” – I think you’d probably guess where it’s from pretty quickly. This is country wine, and even if it’s a good example – flavours of dark berries and herbs, length on the good side of medium – it’s not brilliantly refined. The Wine Society priced it about right at the £7ish level.

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”).