To chill or not? It's generally understood that you drink whites cold and reds warm, and broadly speaking that's true. Still, you can enjoy your wines much more if you take a closer look. It's essentially true that the colder you drink a wine the less of its flavours will be apparent.

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Every now and then it's fun to try something unusual. I try to bear in mind Arnold Bax's maxim that 'you should try everything in life at least once, with the possible exeption of incest and Morris dancing', but when it comes to wines it's good every now and then to step outside the grape varieties and commercial standards that are becoming depressingly similar. By now anyone who's remotely interested in wine will have tried a Cabernet, a Merlot, a Sauvignon and a Chardonnay and many of these varieties, even when they come from different parts of the world, will often taste disconcertingly alike.

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It's suddenly struck me as odd that after some years of writing about food, I haven't addressed digestion. For an Italian that demonstrates remarkable restraint. Whereas in Ireland digestion and bowel movements in general are conversations we have with doctors, in Italy these are daily topics of discourse with friends and family.

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Wine has a very long history, reaching right back to the Golden Age of Sumer and Babylon some 6,000 years ago. It's tempting to think that the wine that we drink is much the same drink that the ancients enjoyed, but the truth is that it's very different.

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If you were to drive into Italy from its North-west border with France, you come into the French-speaking Val d'Aosta. The valley is long, and nowhere is it wider than a few kilometres. It's sides are precipitous and for much of the year the mountains are capped with snow.

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Wine and wine-making has a long history and for me, one of the attractions of the industry is that you can find the old and the new, and just about any combination of the two that you like. I have friends and relatives in my Italian village who make their wines in exactly the same way that it's been made for millennia and I have a cousin who makes his wine in a state-of-the-art winery that has more in common with a chemist's laboratory than it does with a traditional cantina.

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I make it a rule to be in my little Italian village of Gallinaro every year for the second week of August. There are two reasons for this: first there's the festa of San Gerardo our patron saint on the 11th and then two days later on the 13th there's the annual wine festa.

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In theory the idea of a national body applying rules and regulations to the making of wine means that the consumer will be better protected. The rules of Appellation across Europe and elsewhere are designed to ensure that when the consumer sees 'appellation controlee' or its equivalent, certain things are guaranteed.

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Once a year, on the 13th of August, my little village in Italy hosts the annual 'Festa del Cabernet', which is Italian for a three-day festa of drinking huge amounts of our local wine. There's a long wine-making tradition that stretches right back to pre-Roman times. My village, Gallinaro, sits right in the middle of a large valley called the Comino Valley.

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The Riesling is one of the great white grapes. Today's fashions may have pushed it a little to one side in favour of the Chardonnay, but its inherent nobility is unquestioned. When you think about it, all the very greatest German wines are made from the Riesling and the very finest wines from Alsace are as well. So much for the Old World, but the Riesling found pastures new in the Antipodes as well. It's hard to believe looking through the Australian section of an off-license today where Chardonnay rules that before 1970 Australia's white wine production was based on the Riesling, which arrived in Australia with the large influx of German settlers in the 1840s.

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