The secret behind the so-called ‘rules’ of wine

What should you do if your dinner party host swaps your nice bottle of merlot for an inferior grape? Should you ever put ice in your prosecco? What kind of glassware should you drink from? Wine expert Rosamund Hall explains why sometimes the best way to approach wine is to just relax and enjoy it

The more time I’ve spent working with wine, the more I believe that wine etiquette is pretty much bunkum (Istock)

I loved sauvignon blanc when I first started getting into wine (it’s not my favourite grape now, but tastes change). When I plucked up the courage to go into a very austere-looking wine shop in London and boldly asked for a delicious, crisp “cabernet sauvignon”, the (male) sales assistant looked at me, and said, are you sure? I said, yes, ideally chilled please, and, no jokes, he laughed right at me. I felt utterly humiliated.

I had got it wrong. This was just the start of my many “errors” in wine connoisseurship: I muddled up grape varieties and regions, I always saved wine for “special occasions”, I kept wine because I thought it got better with age, and I believed that small French wine goblets were great (actually, I still do, despite any smug wine bore who tells me otherwise).

I had little understanding of the etiquette of wine, and was shocked at how many unspoken rules there were. Thankfully I now know that most of these “rules” are total nonsense – but they still manage to act as a barrier to people discovering the joy of elixir of the grape, and I can’t stand it.