It may seem strange to start this look at the best of contemporary wine by harking back, but sometimes a little perspective can be helpful. It is also comforting to see quite how far we have come as a nation, at least as far as our drinking habits are concerned.

In the recent past wine was viewed a little differently. In the decades of the Beatles, flower power, the first men on the moon, and the Goodies on telly, Britain’s pubs discovered that they weren’t simply ‘boozers’, you could sell food too. If you were a posh establishment this probably involved something to do with avocado and prawns. If not then anything “in-a-basket” would do.

They were also the decades which preceded a discovery. After 2000 years of national existence we would soon find out that we were really a nation of wine lovers all along. But that was to come. Did we like wine at the time? Well…. No. Not much.

It was hardly surprising. Most of the wine that we drank at the time came from northern Europe. Our neighbours in northern Europe have a history of wine making which goes back thousands of years so there was no lack of skill but there were a couple of problems. The first was style. The wine styles had developed as an accompaniment to food. A lot of the whites were tart and sharp, the reds had high levels of tannin, both of which are just what you need at the dinner table. The trouble is they are not very good as a drink on their own. Quite simply, they didn’t taste very nice.

Another problem is weather. Grapes need sun to ripen, but not every summer is brilliantly sunny in northern Europe.

This means maybe one year in four is not a good ‘vintage’… which means that the canny drinker will avoid those particular years… which means in turn that you have to know which are the good and bad years. If you are the sort of person that has a head for obscure bits of information, spend your weekends collecting the numbers on the front of trains or were an avid collector of ‘Top Trumps’ cards in your youth this is no problem.

Most of us couldn’t be bothered though and simply avoided the stuff like the plague.This led to the third problem. Some people did take the time to pick just the right vintage, but then they said things like “…ah yes the ’68. Brilliant wine but, of course, don’t touch the ’69...” There was only one reasonable conclusion. Wine was for nerds or really posh people with big cellars.
The last problem was the label. European winemakers traditionally call their wine after where it comes from. There is nothing unreasonable about this at all, if it wasn’t for the fact that we are the custodians of one of the world’s great languages, English. Since so many other people speak our language, we don’t tend to learn theirs. So a bottle of “Schloss Johanisberg Riesling Trokenbeerenauslese” from Germany maybe absolutely delicious if it’s from the right vintage…. But if you’re not fluent in German how on earth do you order it?

There were a couple of wines that we did drink though. Liebfraumilch sounded quite exotic but wasn’t that hard to pronounce once you had heard it a couple of times. It was also sweet, fruity and cheap. Beaujolais from France is a fruity red made from a grape which is very low in tannin. We liked that. Finally there was that other populist wine, Portuguese rosé (Mateus), which wasn’t just fruity and sweet but also came in a bottle which, when empty, just cried out to have shells stuck to the outside and a lamp shade stuck on top. Not just a drink. It was a whole style statement.

Basically, just a few decades ago a lot of us had the feeling that wine didn’t taste too good, you had to know lots about it, you couldn’t pronounce it so you couldn’t order it, none of which mattered because it was for posh people anyway.