£37.95, Eton Vintners, £42, Berry Bros & Rudd This fabulous Champagne was voted best value of the night at a tasting called Ultimate Champagne that I co-hosted this week. Louis Roederer Cristal 1995 was voted best, irrespective of price (around £300 a bottle), but the sumptuous Charles Heidsieck Brut Réserve (be careful not to confuse it with any of the other Heidsiecks) is a Champagne niche enough to make a perfect present for a connoisseur and approachable enough to be a pe

£9.75, selected Tesco and tesco.com/wine This dry Australian Semillon is an old favourite, not only for its citrus-zest freshness, lemon-curd smoothness and delicate smoky oak but because it’s a vinous flexible friend. It goes well with all sorts of fish and seafood, vegetable and salad dishes, goats’ and other cheeses. You can equally well drink it on its own – and if you have somewhere with a reasonably steady temperature below that of the average kitchen, you can lay it do

£13.95, The Wine Society, thewinesociety.com This wine is a great match for cashew nuts. You might think that anybody worrying about which wine to drink with cashews has too much time on their hands, but think of all the delicious dishes, especially Indian, Chinese and Thai-style, that include cashews. I rest my case, and not least because it also goes very well with chicken, prawns, pork, pumpkin and aubergine (perhaps that should be eggplant as the wine is American). It’s v

£7.99, cellarandkitchen.adnams.co.uk and Adnams stores Hear this: Portuguese wines are some of the most overlooked and underrated and you don’t have to go very far to find them. There are lots of warming, velvety reds around, from Dão, the Douro and Alentejo, but we can’t drink wall-to-wall reds from here until next spring, so here’s a wonderfully zippy white. Light in body but not on flavour, it has a delicately honeyed, citrus and quince taste with a hint of baked apple and

£9.74, Majestic Wine Let's extend a warm welcome to a sophisticated, Burgundy-style Chardonnay at a non-Burgundy price. In fact, this wine was supposed to be a white Burgundy, but the buyer tasked with sourcing it for Majestic's new Definition range (its promising, inaugural foray into own-label) went off-piste. Heading south into Languedoc, he came back with this: a subtly oaked, nutty Chardonnay with almond blossom, beeswax, peach and citrus flavours and a fresh, oystershel

​ It was drinking an Anjou Blanc with English asparagus a couple of months ago – Château de Fesles La Chapelle 2011, since you ask – that reminded me what an underrated grape variety Chenin Blanc is. It’s not that people haven’t heard of it. South African Chenin is out there providing an unchallenging, cheap white wine option in supermarkets, pubs and bars the length and breadth of the UK, maybe partly encouraged by the fact that it's pronounceable, which is more than you can

£4.97, Asda Wine Atlas Bobal A mouthful of juicy, dark cherries with a hint of bakewell tart and peppery, liquoricey chewiness make this a good wine for red meat - a casserole if the barbie has been put into winter storage. Bobal is the grape variety and it's big in acreage in Spain, but for some reason they keep the name largely under wraps. This wine has an impressive pedigree in that the award-winning, ex-Ritz sommelier Bruno Murciano had a big hand in creating it. Wine At

£12.49, Noel Young Wines; £12, WoodWinters A sumptuous but dazzlingly crisp, zesty dry white, with rich tropical and citrus fruit, a hint of ginger and pepper and a sea-spray freshness to finish. While you're trying it with seared scallops, dressed crab, griddled prawns, a flavoursome risotto or herby, lemony chicken, tell someone its story: the Chenin Blanc vines are 70-years-old (the label says 40, but that's another story) and share a rocky slope with rooibos tea plants -

£8.99, Lidl Wine writers get everywhere these days… even to Lidl. This Saint-Bris is from a new collection, headlined The French Session, which comes in on 3 September and stays only as long as stocks last. If you like Sauvignon Blanc, you'll love this - it's brimful of fresh, crunchy, ripe gooseberry flavours. Pair it with Vietnamese and Thai food, white fish with lemon, tomatoes and red peppers or goats' cheese. Anorak fact: Saint-Bris is the only area of Burgundy where Sau