Gin, vermouth and olive oil from makers and vineyards best known for their table wines

Mirabeau Rosé Gin , France ( £27, Waitrose ) Earlier this month the Fladgate Partnership, the family firm behind some of the biggest and best names in port (Taylor’s, Fonseca, Croft), launched their new table wine division in the UK. The new wines, in shops later this year, are rather impressive, but what’s made them such a talking point in the British wine trade is what they represent. Fladgate, after all, was one of the last of the top-flight port producers to resist a move into unfortified wine. The Fladgate table wines are evidence of a global trend for diversification among wine producers. It’s a trend that is responsible for a number of often rather lovely drinks and other products, such as, for example, Provence rosé wine producer Mirabeau’s very pretty-looking and smelling zesty fresh pink gin.

Denbies Orange Vermouth , England ( £25.60, Denbies ) I’m not at all surprised that Provençal rosé producers have been branching out into gin. The likes of Mirabeau and Famille Perrin, the family of winemakers behind Brad Pitt’s Miraval wines, and the actor’s The Gardener Riviera Gin (as well as some terrific and often excellent-value wines in the Rhône Valley), have a way with packaging that shares the gin trade’s willingness to embrace the kind of bottle forms and shapes, and marketing, you might find in the perfume business. It’s not just gin. Another botanical-based spin-off that has become increasingly popular with winemakers is vermouth, with such vinous luminaries as Badenhorst in South Africa, Mathiasson in California, and Germany’s Dr Loosen all having been involved in making a take on the herb-and-root-enriched fortified wine style. English winemakers have been getting in on the act, with Surrey’s Denbies using the pressings from their terrific orange wine, Solaris 2022 (£28.25, denbies.co.uk ; grapebritannia.co.uk ) to make the super-tangy, blood-orangey, gently Campari or Aperol-like bittersweet Orange Vermouth.

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New styles of red rioja offer more fruity, less aggressively oaky notes, while a new breed of floral whites are also hitting the market – but neither comes especially cheaply

It’s always a dilemma writing about a popular wine, not least because most people like it for what it is, rather than what it could be for people who don’t yet buy into it. Rioja is a classic case in point. What’s the problem, you might ask, with an easy-drinking, mellow red at an affordable price? Well, the answer is that there’s just too much of the stuff about, and there aren’t enough people buying it – sales in the UK, one of the region’s best markets, were down just under 12% in 2022. It’s the older generation (of whom I am one), who know what they like and love a bargain, who go for it, not generation Z, many of whom may not drink wine, never mind rioja, at all.

It’s also far from the full picture, as I discovered at a recent tasting with Master of Wine Tim Atkin, who produces an annual report on the region based on three weeks of solid tasting and more than 1,300 wines. There are now winemakers making rioja at higher altitudes, from different grapes and in containers other than the traditional American oak barrels. In many cases, they’re also releasing the wine much earlier than the typical three- to five-year wait for the better examples. Many of the riojas I tried were vibrantly fruity; most of the 2022 vintages are still to make it on to the shelves while retailers work through their stocks, but the much-acclaimed 2021, which Atkin rates very highly, is available.

For more by Fiona Beckett, go to fionabeckett.substack.com

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Some winemakers have long been producing natural wines without shouting it from the rooftops, and they’re even stocked by the big high-street retailers

Can you find natural wine in the supermarket? The answer, as with most things in life, is complicated, and requires 500 words even to begin to explain. When “natural wine” – a loosely defined term referring to wine made without herbicides, pesticides or the use of sulphur – burst into the public consciousness several years ago, it polarised wine drinkers hugely. Those who have drunk the Kool-Aid and become devotees know exactly where to go to procure the stuff, whether that’s by supporting their favourite independent bottle shops or ordering from specialist e-tailers. But what if you’re rushing into Tesco after work and need to pick up something to drink along with your spaghetti hoops and tampons? Or if you don’t live in one of the UK’s main cities (gasp), and have access only to a supermarket for your wines? Is it possible to score a “natty banger” in the wine aisle?

It’s quite difficult to find so-called “zero-zero” wines – natural wine made with absolutely zero additions, such as fining ingredients, commercial yeasts (zero-zero wines use the yeasts already present on the grape), colour-enhancing agents or sulphur (the addition of a little sulphur before bottling helps keep a wine stable as it makes its journey from the winery to the supermarket shelf). Without sulphur, some zero-zero wines can develop faults, but for many that is well worth the risk if the upside is a wine that’s a vibrant, pure expression of terroir. For supermarket buyers, on the other hand, consistency is everything – across regions, across stores, across shelves – so a potentially unstable wine is a big gamble.

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 . Delivery charges may apply

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Inequality between regions, competition with cheaper imports, producers going into administration – just some of the problems affecting the production of wine on the Continent

Tesco Finest Saint-Chinian, Languedoc, France 2020 (£9, Tesco ) Convoys of protesting farmers have been one of the features of the year so far across Europe, with scenes of tractors blockading cities and motorways, and angry protestors setting fire to hay bales and battling with police from Brussels to Barcelona. Among other things, the Continent’s agricultural sector is in revolt over rising production costs, shrinking margins, cheap imports and a set of new EU rules aimed at helping the bloc meet its environmental targets, plus a range of country-specific issues, all of which, they say, are making farming unviable. That French winegrowers have been among the protestors might try the sympathy of some, given that, according to French Ministry of Agriculture statistics, their average annual income is €78,590 – one of the highest in French farming, and a good deal higher than the circa-€40,000 average French annual salary. As ever, the average doesn’t tell the full story, however, with great inequalities within and between regions, and with many growers in, for example, the Languedoc – home to Tesco’s hearty spicy Saint-Chinian red – earning considerably less than that.

Château Pey La Tour, Bordeaux, France 2021 (£8.99, Waitrose ) Southern French winegrowers have been at the forefront of sometimes violent protests since way before the current wave of demonstrations, with a militant group known as CRAV (Comité Regional d’Action Viticole) and its local branches (CAV), behind a string of direct actions over the past 40 years, which have ranged from stopping and sabotaging trucks bringing in cheaper wine from Spain (a particular bugbear) to destroying offices and tanks of wine at a wine importers to, in January, setting off an explosion at the offices of the regional government’s environment, development and housing department. But the desperation that has fuelled CRAV can be found all over la France viticole. That includes Bordeaux, where the presence of a top 10% of luxury goods (single bottles change hands for four-figure prices) sometimes obscures the reality that most of the region’s producers trade in much more everyday fare, such as the suave, ripe cassis-scented Chateau Pey La Tour. In recent years, some producers have struggled to compete with cheaper or better marketed rivals from around the world.

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Do wine professionals get high on their own supply, or do they plump for plonk after a palate-shrivelling day at the office?

A wine writer, a buyer and a sommelier walk into a bar … Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they traipse home with palate fatigue and aching feet, pour a glass of whatever’s in the fridge door and melt on the sofa like a collapsed gazebo after a particularly disappointing village fete.

There’s an assumption that people who work in wine have home cellars overflowing with expensive, unicorn bottles (or, at the very least, a fancy wine cooler that munches away at our electricity bill but keeps our grand crus cold). But, while the domestic setting certainly offers the giddying pleasure of enjoying wine from work while watching Gladiators in our knickers, we’re definitely not cracking open first-growth claret every night. Wine is an infamously underpaid industry, and we need affordable bottles as much as everyone else.

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

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The big meal requires a wine with a big punch – these heavy-hitters will add all you need to your festive feast

Waitrose Blueprint White Burgundy, Mâconnais, France 2022 (£10.99, Waitrose ) Even if you are the sort of endlessly curious food-lover whose day-to-day eating habits are a non-stop whirl of new cuisines and ingredients, Christmas dinner is the one meal that, give or take a few insignificant tweaks and additions, barely changes from one year to the next. For many people, that goes for the wine on the table as well as the food: classics (by which people generally mean a select handful of big French and other Old World names) are the order of the day. White burgundy certainly counts in that company, with Waitrose’s own-label chardonnay from the south of the region being stylish good value, and Louis Jadot Domaine Ferret Pouilly-Fuissé 2020 (£34.99, Whole Foods; thesurreywinecellar.co.uk ) a rounded, tingling, complex treat. For reds, Bordeaux’s claret is the trad choice, whether the ripe and ready Château Le Peyrat Côtes de Castillon 2018 (£9.96, justerinis.com ) or the wonderfully refined, fine-grained Château Beauregard Ducasse, Graves 2019 (£15.65, or £13.95 as part of a case, hhanc.co.uk ).

Asda Extra Special North Canterbury Pinot Noir, New Zealand 2020 (£10.25, Asda ) Other big European guns for the traditional Christmas table could include a spicy-herby, robust châteauneuf-du-pape (Tesco Finest Châteauneuf-du-Pape NV, £21, is one of the best-value examples of this never-cheap appellation); a mellow oaky rioja (such as The Society’s Crianza 2019, £8.50, thewinesociety.com ); a tough-yet-tender barolo (such as the fragrant GD Vajra Albe Barolo 2018, £37.40, fromvineyardsdirect.com ); or a racy, filigree off-dry white Mosel riesling (such as the delightful Merkelbach Ürziger Würzgarten Riesling Kabinett 2021 (£24, stannarywine.com ). For some non-European riffs on similar themes that are every bit as good as their inspiration, but with their own local stamp, there are countless high-quality chardonnays being made in a burgundian way across the globe, including the creamy yet incisive Creation Chardonnay 2022 (£15.99, or £12.99 as part of a mix six, majestic.co.uk ). The same is true for Burgundy’s red grape pinot noir, and Asda’s succulent take on the grape from North Canterbury in New Zealand is a perfect turkey-and-trimmings partner.

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Trends come and go, but there’s always room for a rich and robust red from Australia

Robert Oatley Semaphore Series Shiraz, McLaren Vale, Australia 2021 (£10.50, The Co-op ) Like all businesses, the wine trade tends to obsess about novelty. There’s a habit, exacerbated by press and influencers, of always looking for the next big (or, for the fashion-conscious, small) thing, which in wine generally translates into talking up bottles made from lesser-known grape varieties or from smaller, or less-established wine regions. I do plenty of that myself, not least when it comes to the UK’s biggest source of wine, Australia, where it’s easy to be dazzled by the emergence and increased mastery of what the Australians themselves call “alternative” varieties, from the Greek assyrtiko and southern Italian fiano to Iberians such as tourgia nacional and tempranillo. The fact is, though, that, more often than not, my favourite Australian red wines are made from the big-name grapes with which the country first rose to prominence, with shiraz – of which The Co-op’s recent addition is a particularly succulent and savoury example – still first among equals.

Tesco Finest McLaren Vale Grenache, McLaren Vale, Australia 2021 (£11, Tesco ) Other shiraz bottles I’ve enjoyed recently range from the deep and richly satisfying but fresh and floral-edged blackberry of The Lodge Shiraz 2021 (£15.99, or £9.99 as part of a mixed case of six, majestic.co.uk) from the ever-reliable firm Jim Barry in the Clare Valley in South Australia, to the supremely elegant and complex Luke Lambert Syrah 2021 (from £37.50, thesourcingtable.com ; philglas-swiggot.com ) from the relative cool of Victoria’s Yarra Valley, which, as the name suggests (syrah is the French name for shiraz) has a certain kinship with the great syrah wines of France’s northern Rhône region. Increasingly, however, shiraz is being upstaged by another long-established Australian import from southern France with which it is often blended but which has sometimes struggled for attention: grenache, which is the base for both the bountiful herb-and-white-pepper inflected soft berry fruitedness of Tesco’s bottling and the exquisite, ethereal Yangarra Old Vine Grenache 2021 (£33.95, thevinorium.co.uk ).

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Discovery of intact bottles on 1852 shipwreck sparks development of underwater ageing process

You might think that 1,500 years after the first bottle was drunk there wasn’t much more innovation left to be had in the rarefied world of champagne. You would be wrong. The next big thing in the £6bn-a-year industry is: undersea ageing.

Like so many of the world’s best innovations, it began by accident. In 2010, a group of divers in Finland’s Åland archipelago came across the wreck of a ship that sank in 1852 and were surprised to find 145 bottles of champagne 160ft below the surface . Even more surprisingly, the bottles were still full and tasted – in the words of a professor of food biochemistry – “incredible – I have never tasted such a wine in my life”.

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Think beyond the usual Christmas plonk this year and let yourself be seduced by styles from farther afield … a drop of Georgian saperavi with that mince pie, vicar?

There’s something about this time of year that makes us go all retro and buy food and wine we never normally eat or drink. When it comes to wine, that tends to mean French classics such as chablis, Saint-Émilion and châteauneuf-du-pape, all of which are usually heavily promoted over the festive period. Arguably, they’re all good with traditional Christmas fare, but their prices generally reflect that: sancerre, for example, routinely costs between £18 and £25 these days.

I’m also betting that a significant number of readers will not be celebrating Christmas with turkey, and may well be having something from an entirely different culinary tradition. So why not branch out on the wine, too? This year, I’ve been drinking Greek, Georgian and even Brazilian wine. More about those in the new year, though I do quite like the idea of being disruptive and serving a Georgian saperavi such as the exotic Tbilvino from Kakheti ( £13.99 Majestic , 13%) with Christmas lunch, particularly at the current mix-six deal price of £9.33. That would be great with a Middle Eastern-style feast or anything aubergine-related.

For more by Fiona Beckett, go to fionabeckett.substack.com

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