Firstly and most importantly, you need to match the wine to the meal you have chosen. Everyone has different opinions of which wines will taste good with different foods, but there are a few basic rules that you can follow if you’re not sure. The easiest way is to match the colour of the wine to the meat, you can’t go wrong. If you’re eating red meat choose a dark red like Cabernet or Syrah. For lamb or pork dishes a medium bodied red like a Merlot will be less heavy whilst still supplying a rich flavour. Chicken and fish dishes are often overpowered by reds so it’s best to go for a white instead, like a Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc. If it’s a special occasion or celebration, you might be better off with a sparkling wine, served in fancy Champagne flutes.

Once you’ve worked out what kind of wine you want, check where it has come from. Wines from different regions are hugely different in quality, so it pays to do a bit of research into the best regions. If you’re not sure, France is always a good choice and has been producing good quality fine wines for hundreds of years. Italy is another good choice, and Chilean wines are also very popular at the moment, particularly the reds.

Another thingit’s a good idea to check is the vintage of the wine, or the year it was bottled. A real wine buff will already know which were the good years for each region, and will buy only vintages which they know came from a particularly good crop. For the rest of us non-experts, it can seem like a lot of guesswork, but if you know a few of the basics you’ll be on the right track at least. That all wines get better the older they are is a common misconception. It’s true that most red wines do improve with a little aging, but most wineries don’t distribute these reds for a couple of years after bottling, which gives them time to mature. This means from the minute they appear in stores they are ready to drink and will taste good. Most white and sparkling wines don’t need aging, and taste good if drunk straight away.

It’s like the theory that drinking from crystal glass makes wine taste better than regular glasses. It’s true that it is definitely nicer to drink out of a crystal glass, they do feel nice to hold and they make that lovely sound when you tap them, but I’ve yet to see any evidence that it has any effect on the flavour of the drink. A nasty wine will taste nasty whatever you drink it from just think of the familiar grimace on people’s faces when they take a sip from their posh celebratory Champagne flutes, only to be reminded that they’ve always hated Champagne and are only drinking it because it’s what you’re supposed to do. So maybe think about presenting it in posh decanters and wine glasses.

A real wine buff would tell you they can tell the vintage of a good wine and the region where it was bottled purely from tasting it. However in the opening episode of BBC4′s recent mini documentary series entitled simply (and rather inventively, I thought!) Wine, an interesting, and quite amusing, scenario occured. A group of professional wine experts were offered a taste from a mystery bottle and asked to guess the vintage. Most of them guessed at somewhere around the 1980s, with the exception of one French expert who said 1928. It turned out it was from 1870, proving that none of them really had a clue.

So do factors like the age and vintage of a wine really make any difference in terms of the quality of wine? If even the world’s most knowledgeable experts can’t tell the difference then it would seem that no, probably not. Older wines are likely to be more rare, which might go some way to explaining why they cost more, but I bet those experts could have got a whole crate of good 1980s wines for the same price as that one bottle from the 1800s would have cost. And in these credit crunch times do people really want to be paying over the odds for fancy wines when it’s entirely possible they could get one just as good or maybe even nicer in Threshers for under a tenner?