Firstly and most importantly, you should match the wine to the meal you have chosen. Everyone has different opinions of which wine will taste good with different foods, but there are a few basic guidelines that you can follow if you’re not sure. The easiest way is to simply match the colour of the wine to the food, you can't go wrong. So 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 but still has a rich flavour. Chicken and fish dishes can often be overpowered by reds so it’s best to go for a crisp white instead, such as 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 know what kind of wine you are looking for, look at where it has come from. Wines from different regions will vary hugely in quality, so it pays to do a bit of research into the best regions. If you’re not sure, France is always a safe choice and has been producing good quality wines for hundreds of years. Italy is another one, and Chilean wines are also very popular at the moment, particularly the reds.

Another thing it’s worth checking is the vintage of the wines you're choosing from, or the year they were 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 at least be on the right track. A common misconception is that the older a wine is, the better it will taste. It’s true that most red wines improve with a little aging, but most wineries won’t distribute these wines for a couple of years after bottling to give them time to mature. This means by the time they appear on the shelves they are ready to drink and will taste good. Most white or sparkling wines don’t need any aging, and are good to drink straight away.

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How to choose wine

It’s like the theory that crystal wine glasses make wine taste better than regular glasses. It’s true that it is nicer to drink out of a crystal glass, they 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.

A true wine buff would tell you they can guess the vintage of a good wine and where it was bottled purely from tasting it. But 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 the party guessed at somewhere around the 1980s, with the exception of one French expert who claimed 1928. It turned out to be 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 a wine's quality? If even the world’s most knowledgeable experts can’t tell the difference then it would seem that the answer is no, probably not. Older wines are likely to be rarer, 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 times of the credit crunch do people really want to be paying over the odds for fancy wines when it’s possible they could get one just as good – or maybe even nicer – in Threshers for under a tenner?

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Are expensive wines really worth it?