This is a guest post from Jo, a wine enthusiast and a keen attender of wine tastings. She is particularly interested in Burgundy and has been on several trips to the area. She recently passed the Wine and Spirits Educational Trust intermediate exam on wine and spirits.

Wine can be a rather daunting subject and until recently, associated with a particular type of masculine snobbishness – all that talk about vintage charts and Chateau Latour seemed designed to exclude anyone who hadn’t been to Eton. But it doesn’t have to be like that at all. Since the 1980s, wine has become much more democratic, wine making has improved in leaps and bounds, and great wines from all over the globe can now be found on the supermarket shelf at reasonable prices.

So how do you go about choosing a wine? Factors worth considering are:

• * What are you eating with it? In general red wine goes better with red meat, and white wine better with fish, while either is fine with chicken or pork. If you’re cooking a recipe from a particular country or region, it might be worth looking for a wine from the same area. Many Italian reds, for example, have high levels of acidity which complement the tomato-based food typical of the area. Generally, if you’re eating rich, strong-flavoured food, you probably want a powerful wine to stand up to it, whereas if you’re eating something delicate like scallops you would want something light and elegant.

• * Are you looking for something with bold flavours or something more restrained? Caitlin will probably kill me for saying this, but as a very broad generalisation, wines from the Old World (France, Spain, Italy, Germany) tend to be more subtle, and arguably more complex, than their New World (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, USA, Chile, Argentina) counterparts, which have more upfront, easy-drinking appeal. But Old World labels can be baffling to the novice. French wines are classified by region, and within each region there are strict rules about what is allowed – for example, white burgundy has to be 100% chardonnay, but you won’t see the word chardonnay on the label of a bottle of white burgundy. New World labels are more consumer-oriented, easier to read and helpfully tell you what the grape is.

• * Alcohol level. Many wines these days come in at 14% alcohol or even 14.5% or 15%. One small glass contains almost two units of alcohol. I’ve drunk some like this and could feel the hangover kicking in while I was still drinking it. For lighter styles, look to the Old World – champagne is usually just 12.5%. You can drink it and feel fine the next day!

• * Price. Generally you get what you pay for. A bottle of wine has quite high fixed costs, so to take a fictitious example, in a bottle of wine that costs £4 you may be paying £2 for duty, the cost of the bottle etc and £2 for the wine. In a bottle that costs £8 you’d still be paying £2 for duty, bottle etc and £6 for the actual wine – although it costs twice as much, the value of the wine is three times as much, so hopefully the quality should be considerably better.

If you want to extend your knowledge, it’s a good idea to keep a record of what you have drunk, whether you liked it, and whether you considered it good value for money. Describing wine can be difficult but try to think of just a couple of adjectives. Just taking a minute to think about the wine rather than guzzling it without noticing it will improve your knowledge and over time will help you to identify what sort of wines you tend to like and which you don’t.

If you have some like-minded friends, it’s educational and fun to compare some different wines. You could pick a pair which are similar in some respect – for example, same grape variety but from different countries, or two from the same region but at different price levels. The key thing to bear in mind is that there are no right or wrong answers. People are awfully suggestible, so if you say that the wine smells of peaches, then the chances are everyone will agree with you. At one wine-tasting a friend of mine identified the whiff of the Bakerloo Line, and we all immediately detected it too.

Above all, wine should be fun to drink and comes in so many styles that there really is something for everyone. Cheers!