The Discovery case is basically intended as a special offer for new customers - a mixture of wines with a significant discount against the list price, plus a couple of freebies thrown in; in this instance, three bottles of a basic Rioja plus a fancy corkscrew. However, there are a couple of more classy and potentially interesting wines - a Chilean Pinot Noir, a Bordeaux Superieur, a Sancerre, a Barossa and a NZ Pinot Noir. Rumours of a sherry revival have been around for a few years, but it has still not really caught on in the way that Pinot Grigio, for example, has. Ironically, Pinotage is a cross that includes perhaps the most chic and generally expensive red wine grape in its parentage, Pinot Noir. Fresh red fruit aromas give way to easy red fruit on the palate with some sweet spice and hints of oak. Reviewer comments: Beautiful wine with lots of red currant and subtle integrated oak on the nose. It proved hugely popular with women in Italy partly because there was a cultural stigma placed on female drinkers of stronger red wine and in part, the added herbs stimulated ones need to eat and it tasted surpringly good considering it was medicine.

As for the wines, in general, they have all been well made and pleasant and there certainly has not been a bad wine so far, but quite a few have been unmemorable and not ones that I would buy again. We finished the reds with a Syrah from Languedoc - I had thought this would prove popular, but perhaps palates were jaded at this point as, despite a wonderful nose of plums and prunes and a good, balanced palate, it was not so well received. This Pinotage, however, was smokey on the nose with black fruit aromas, deep black fruit on the palate, a touch of cabbage, tar and dark bittter chocolate on the finish. I got tobacco and dark fruit. But when I got my third child, I started questioning our food assumptions. Cambridge Food and Wine Society's "Credit Crunch" wines event to pick up some tips from Robert Hammond, a WSET-qualified speaker and director Chateau Laflte-Rothschild of RHWine.

Marguax is unaware of the fact that she is insane (though the Addams are quick to pick up on the fact that she is deranged). A quick trawl through the Laithwaites website for details on the wines I had received showed that both my mystery cases were worth just a few pennies over £90, but that still represents a reasonable saving, given the cost was only £60 plus delivery. I am slowly working my way through the mystery case wines and posting my thoughts on the Laithwaites website as I go - click here to keep up to date. A number also do not quite live up to the billing they receive on the Laithwaites website. Robert outlined a number of strategies for getting good value from wine-buying - this was a much more sophisticated approach than simply going to Aldi rather than Waitrose ! Languedoc has long been one of the better value and most interesting wine regions of France; as a result, prices for AC wines in this area have risen and real bargain hunters will look for a (lower classification) Vin de Pays. To be sure, there are not too many classic regions here, but I suspect that is not what Laithwaites are about - or certainly not their main focus.

Buying direct from the producer somewhere like France, however, is a different proposition entirely and can be excellent value, even after allowing for the fixed cost of getting there (for more details of buying in Alsace, see my earlier blog entry ). Most conversation move to talking about the weather, so let’s see the main weather related words in Italian. The South West of France is up there amongst the most popular regions of France, and when you start to investigate its not hard to see why. List prices for the wines range from around £5 for a Sicilian red to £13 for a Sancerre and most of the wines come from the standard "usual suspect" regions for value wines - southern France, inland Spain, Australia. The first red was an example of a low-cost country, South Africa, and an unfashionable grape, Pinotage. I have always liked red Bordeaux - it was basic-but-good red AC Bordeaux bought from a French supermarket and costing around four Euros that got me properly into drinking wine around a decade ago - and moving the up the scale more recently, I am finding it has a complexity and a texture that few other wines can match; however, this is perhaps not always not immediately obvious on first acquaintance and maybe it takes a few bottles, each with some plain roast meat, to discover this.

Does not equal the alcohol content, which is part of the body, but the overall impression is formed by the combination of the alcohol content and the texture (or density) of the wine. As this was as much a fun event as a serious wine tasting, I had also devised a quiz - asking people to guess the price, year, alcohol, content, age and medal status of the various wines. Do you love Italian food as much as I do? Diversity is the quality of fine wine that is most exciting and, especially as cuisine continues to bend categories, you'll need the arsenal of whites to match up with food. Even at five years old, it was still quite full and tannic, and the style was definitely more subtle than the wine before; whilst most people quite liked it and quite a few (perhaps politely) said it was very well-made, it was perhaps a less obvious crowd-pleaser than the wine before and definitely needed some air and some food to show its best. They can even look a bit old when you use them.