Many of the wine producers we have met in this region prefer to drink their sunny red wines "on the fruit" finding that sometimes what you gain from ageing in terms of smoothness and melted tannins, you lose in fruit and flowers and liquorice. Of course this is purely a matter of personal taste and there are those who insist that a couple of years storage in the right conditions will bring out the best in a wine. The most important factor in a cellar is a stable temperature, ideally about 15 degrees and it should be dark with some humidity to protect the cork.

There is a standard wine-tasting glass here in France. It is a stemmed glass and the bowl tapers to the top to allow the wine to be swirled for aeration without slopping over the side. The top is narrow enough to concentrate the aromas, but wide enough to get your nose in for a good sniff. Clearly any glass that is not too full will do the trick!

The 'dégustation' - sight

You cannot tell much just from looking at wine. A wine with a high alcohol content will leave thick 'legs' running down the side of the glass. A young white wine will have a greenish tinge, an acidic white is bright and shiny.

Young red wines have a bluish tinge, while older reds become increasingly rust-coloured. The easiest way to see these colours is to hold the glass against a white background and look through the meniscus - the part of the surface of the liquid that curves slightly up the side of the glass. Yet none of this tells you whether you will enjoy the wine.

Smell

This is where a wine gets interesting. Most people are aware that most of what we consider to be our sense of taste, actually comes from our sense of smell. Take a first sniff of the wine, then try again after having swirled the liquid to incorporate air and release more aromatic molecules. You will need to give your nose a chance to recover between sniffs.

Think about the categories of smells there can be in a wine and see if they are present in your glass. The list of aromas found in wine is seemingly endless: fruits, flowers, spices, vegetation, animal, minerals, toast, wood, confectionery and milk products. These aromas may be primary, from the grape itself, secondary, from the fermentation of the grape, or tertiary, as a result of the maturing process of the wine.