Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot ascends from demure young lover to patriarchy-defying innovator in this attractive but not quite grand cru biopic

The French will be aghast: with climate change, the English are already encroaching on the sparkling wine trade, and now they’ve got the cheek to make biopics about the wine-makers too. Inadvertently or not, this Joe Wright-produced period drama functions as decorous product placement for champagne house Veuve Clicquot. Portraying Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot (Haley Bennett) in her climb from demure young lover to patriarchy-defying innovator who finally rejects remarriage as a means of securing legal autonomy, it owes a debt to Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film Elizabeth.

It’s 1805, and 27-year-old Barbe-Nicole is under the cosh after her husband François (Tom Sturridge), a genius vintner but an unstable soul, kills himself. Her father-in-law Philippe (Ben Miles) doesn’t think she can run the estate, and her neighbours – including the Moët family – are eyeing up the property. But unafraid of getting her hands dirty, she resolves to continue François’ experiments towards perfecting what became the iconic “comet” vintage . With the Clicquot finances in tatters and the Napoleonic wars hampering trade, she devises a clandestine continental sales network with the help of rakish broker Louis Bohne (Control’s Sam Riley).

For gloriously dry white wines that can handle the heat, look to the hills of the Veneto region

Inama Soave Classico, Veneto, Italy 2023 (£16.99, Majestic ) The Veneto, that part of northeastern Italy that sits just down from the foothills of the Alps and encompasses such glorious historic cities as Venice, Padua, Vicenza and Verona, is a real powerhouse of Italian wine. Each vintage, the region churns out around 11.9m hectolitres of such famous vinous names as prosecco, pinot grigio, valpolicella, and soave – enough wine, as the Italian wine statistics compilers at italianwinecentral.com put it, to make it the seventh-largest wine-producing country in the world were the region ever to secede, as its independence movement would like it to, from the rest of Italy. There is a fair degree of snobbery among wine-lovers about much of this output – not least the Venetian lagoonfuls of very ordinary, bland white wine made from over-cropped vines on the region’s flatlands. But there is so much, soft, easy charm in the good Veneto stuff, such as Inama’s top-notch soave, with its gorgeously mouthfilling mix of peaches, pears, white flowers and almonds.

Ca’ dei Frati I Frati Lugana , Veneto, Italy 2023 (from £21.90, Noble Green Wines , Valvona & Crolla , Hennings Wine ) Inama is one of a bunch of quality-conscious producers who have together raised the reputation of soave in recent years, proving that the volcanic soils in the terraced hillside vineyards around Verona are capable of producing world-beating fine wines when the temptation to push yields in the vineyard to the limit is resisted, and when sensitive winemaking is employed in the cellar. Other names to look out for include Gini and Pieropan, both of whom, like Inama, make some superbly individualistic and expressive single-vineyard bottlings. Something similar has happened in the much smaller, and lesser-known Lugana denominazione which straddles the border of Veneto and Lombardy around the decidedly scenic shores of Lake Garda. Among the producers raising the area’s tone is Ca’ dei Frati, which makes pristine dry white wines from the local turbiana grape variety, with the 2023 I Frati offering a stony coolness along with its fresh, ripe apricot and subtle leafy herbiness.

Pale-pink Provençal rosé is seen as the standard for pink wines, but you’d be daft not to try varieties from elsewhere, too

I’m not sure if this has been observed by any other wine writers in the past few weeks, but rosé season is here. It’s a wine style that even the most fledgling wine drinker can get behind (though there’s also something to be said about excellent marketing here). When most of us think rosé, we think Provence, and of the big brands. Provence, one of the most ancient (and cleverly marketed) French regions, has managed to make itself totally synonymous with rosé itself, and so successfully that, on my recent book tour, many casual wine drinkers were surprised to learn that the stuff is also made outside Provence.

While there’s certainly nothing wrong with Provençal rosé (there’s a reason it’s captured the hearts and minds of the Instagram generation), drinking rosé from only one region is a bit like owning only one towel, or watching only one episode of The Sopranos. Acceptable, sure, but severely limiting to your quality of life.

Hannah Crosbie is a wine writer and broadcaster. Her book Corker: A Deeply Unserious Wine Book, is published by Ebury Press at £16.99. To order a copy for £14.95, go to guardianbookshop.com

The latest grape varieties have eco credentials. Let’s drink to that.

Tesco Finest Floreal, France 2023 (£8, Tesco ) I’m not sure I’d have written about Tesco’s latest wine if it wasn’t for the story behind it. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a perfectly decent light dry white, at a fair price, with gentle melon, greengage and gooseberry flavours – a wine that inhabits a happy halfway house between the liveliness of sauvignon and the fleshier fruitiness of a southern French chardonnay. It’s not the most exciting white of this price around, even in the Tesco range. But what makes it noteworthy is the grape variety, floreal, which is one of a few recently bred hybrid varieties created by crossing European Vitis vinifera grape varieties with wild Asian and American vines. Known as Piwi (short for the German Pilzwiderstandsfähige Traubensorten), they’ve been bred to resist fungal diseases. That means they require far fewer fungicide sprays, which, says Tesco, leads to an ‘80-90% reduction in the need for vine treatments, significantly lowering tractor usage, CO2 emissions, and soil compacting.’

Breaky Bottom Seyval Blanc Cuvée Grace Nichols, East Sussex, England 2017 (£35.99, Waitrose ) It’s still early days for the Piwis, with Tesco’s the first to make it into a major UK retailer. But they are being taken increasingly seriously in a wine business that is becoming more conscious of its own contributions to a climate crisis that threatens its very existence. Wines made from varieties such as cabernet blanc, solaris, souvignier gris, muscaris and regent will become much more familiar in the coming years. We’re also seeing a reappraisal of hybrids such as the white seyval blanc, which was widely planted by English growers in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to its cold-hardiness. Long dismissed as second rate, winemakers such as Blackbook and Breaky Bottom have proved seyval can make some distinctive and genuinely fine sparkling wines.

The classic Italian dessert gets a cocktail makeover

This turns the classic Italian dessert into a cooling, lemony cocktail that’s ideal for summertime drinking.

Rich Woods, AKA The Cocktail Guy , for Sotto Bar , London W1

Wine is designed to be drunk, shared, enjoyed, so the less time we spend squabbling over tasting notes, the better

One of the weirdest things about wine is that we spend a lot of time talking about all the other things it tastes like: leather, tomato leaf, jam … We don’t really do this with anything else. You don’t eat a crisp, say, and go, “Wow, I’m really getting the salt and vinegar in this!” Of course you do: it’s got salt and vinegar on it. But wine isn’t like that. There is no tomato in that glass, just grapes and yeast.

“Summer fruit” is one of the first things fledgling wine enthusiasts can identify in a wine (at least it was for me), but because it’s such a common jump-off point, and because wine writing is prone to rather esoteric descriptors, it’s often seen as a bit basic – it’s Baby’s First Tasting Note by Fisher Price. But there is, as there nearly always is with wine, an opportunity to dig far deeper.

Hannah Crosbie is a wine writer and broadcaster. Her book Corker: A Deeply Unserious Wine Book, is published by Ebury Press at £16.99. To order a copy for £14.95, go to guardianbookshop.com

Though tiny compared with rivals, English wine trade is thriving as climate crisis fuels flood of new capital from investors

The largest English vineyards increased their revenues by 15% last year, as wine investors respond to the climate crisis by planting more vines.

While the UK still languishes well down the list of the largest wine-producing nations, below countries such as Uzbekistan and Tunisia, the industry’s output has soared in recent years, rising by 77% last year to 161,960 hectolitres, equivalent to 21.6m bottles.

Just like us, there are some wines that really do thrive by the sea

Southern Right Sauvignon Blanc, Walker Bay, South Africa 2023 (from £11.45, ndjohn.co.uk ; ampswinemerchants.co.uk ; noblegreenwines.co.uk ) Grape vines, like holidaying humans, love to be by the seaside, and an inordinate number of the world’s best wines are produced in vineyards that are near or in some cases directly overlooking the sea. The thing the vines love most about the coast is ultimately the same as what leads us to the beach when the mercury rises: the sea regulates the temperature, taking the edge off extremes of heat and cold. That helps ensure a slower, more even ripening of the grapes, preserving acidity and ultimately producing more balanced, lively wines. It’s an effect that has become all the more precious as the climate crisis has worsened, with growers all over the world seeking out coastal sites, such as Walker Bay, on South Africa’s south coast, the source of such luminous, vibrant, pristine sauvignon blancs as Southern Right from one of South Africa’s deftest producers of cooler-climate wines, Hamilton-Russell.

Domaine St André Maritime Rouge, IGP Pays d’Oc, France 2022 (£12.49, houseoftownend.co.uk ) The most famous maritime winegrowing region in the world is arguably the world’s most famous wine region full-stop: Bordeaux, where the black-fruited depth and power of the wines is leavened and given focus by a certain Atlantic coolness. No wonder, then, that so many of the better examples of wines made from Bordeaux’s grape varieties (principally cabernet sauvignon and merlot, but also cabernet franc, petit verdot and others) are from coastal sites such as Bolgheri in southern Tuscany, Margaret River in Western Australia, and Hawke’s Bay in New Zealand. The proximity of the vineyards to the Étang de Thau lagoon by the Mediterranean in southern France also seems to have brought plenty of lift and life to Domaine St André’s very drinkable, plummy aptly named Maritime rouge, which is primarily made from merlot, a grape variety that doesn’t always show it’s best elsewhere in the heat of the Languedoc, but here works very well indeed.

Often dismissed as sickly and fusty, it’s a versatile, underrated drink you should get to know

If you already love sherry, disregard the next 500 or so words of zealous waffle and get straight to uncorking the bottle in your fridge door. You are, however, a rare breed. To the likes of us, sherry remains one of the most intriguing, culturally ancient, varied and criminally underpriced styles of wine on the planet. To many others, however, particularly younger consumers, it’s seen as, well, a bit meh. It’s a wine with a bit of baggage, and lack of interest and education has typified the entire output as a sticky-sweet, treacly wine, enjoyed by grandmothers and mostly at Christmas.

So how to give sherry a sexy makeover for the modern age? Understanding how and when we might enjoy sherry is always the key to unlocking the fascination. For me, the salinity and freshness of fino and manzanilla lend themselves to start-of-a-meal drinking, in much the same way that you’d use a more complex, nutty sparkling wine. Sherry can be just as surprisingly versatile a pairing as a rich champagne, particularly with nuts and cured meats (especially Spanish ones, obviously), while the yeasty notes gained from time spent ageing under a layer of “ flor ” pair especially well with pizzas.

Hannah Crosbie is a wine writer and broadcaster. Her book Corker: A Deeply Unserious Wine Book, is published by Ebury Press at £16.99. To order a copy for £14.95, go to guardianbookshop.com