If you seek an entrée into the appreciation of Champagne, I can’t recommend a better exercise than a tasting with a grower.

We’re all grateful for having a variety of excellent wines available to us at very reasonable prices, much of it from Chile – but the price we pay for a bottle of wine determines, to a large degree, how much we talk about it. (Photo: Andres Caballero by Jacqui Skeete)

If you ask me what my favourite wine is I will want to give you the name of some old world red, to demonstrate my appreciation for well-structured, complex, age-worthy and, well, let’s be honest, expensive wines. But eventually I will admit that it is Viognier.

Celebrities and wine are in the news recently, but is it a new thing? Is it even a thing, for that matter? In my first wine review I chat a bit about the non-issue and write a non-review of Brangelina’s new rosé, opting instead to put a Californian red blend on deck for a spin.