The site is having a bit of changing rooms style makeover at the moment – so I hope I haven’t broken too much!

You’ll notice a new layout straightaway and over the next few weeks I’m aiming to introduce a few new features …all related to wine deals of course!

One other feature I hope you’ll find interesting are alerts when the supermarkets run their Dine In deals. You know the kind of thing …two mains, side order and a bottle of wine for £10. M&S started them but now most of the supermarkets offer similar Dine In deals every now and again. I’ll only mention the good ones, so I won’t plaster the site with news of half-price turnips

I’ll hopefully get some good wine offers for you too in the run up to the Easter break so stay tuned and thanks for reading !

You’ll no doubt have heard of food miles …the distance an item of food has travelled before it ends up on a supermarket shelf. Well wine can travel from afar too of course. If you consider that it’s typically stored in glass bottles that’s a lot of heavy packaging to be transporting around the globe.

In fairness to the supermarkets, they sometimes try and adopt better ways of transporting produce. Tesco Wine for example, ship wine by canal and now Waitrose Wine are importing large flexi-tankers of wine and bottling it here in the UK (more info).

You’d perhaps think that cardboard wine boxes would be more popular in eco-conscious homes? I’m not a fan myself …nothing beats a bottle.

Many thanks to Frazer who runs both Red Wine and White Wine for sending me a bottle of each colour to try.  I took this photo (below) on Saturday evening and you can see we tried the bottle of Merlot. I’m no wine critic by any means so I’m not about to tell you that I detected the delicate hints of this, that and the other! Suffice it to say the Merlot was really rather nice and it went down a treat along with my favourite pasta meal (a Jamie Oliver recipe using ingredients such as savoy cabbage, Mozzerella, bacon and roasted pine nuts).

I don’t actually like white wine so my wife has had the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc all to herself and she says that it fitted the bill ..nice and chilled during last weeks heat wave.

As I mentioned last week, you can win a case of wine in the easy to enter competition on either the white or red sites. Why not join in even and submit a red wine review of your own

How would you like to win a mixed case of lovely wine?

Of course you would and with a new, easy-to-enter competition I’ve come across you’ll be in with with a chance!

All you have to do is visit either the informative Red Wine or White Wine sites and follow the very simple competition links and instructions. You’ll need to live in the UK and be 18 or over of course. Oh, if you’re lucky enough to win please do get in touch and let me know!

You can read these articles just about every week stating that red wine is either good for you or bad for you. Probably everything in moderation is the key though, and personally I believe that moderate drinking of red wine is on the whole good for you.

The latest item I read suggests that red wine contains a key antioxidant called resveratrol. A professor from the University of Queensland said:

The breadth of benefits is remarkable: cancer prevention, protection of the heart and brain from damage,reducing age-related diseases such as inflammation, reversing diabetes and obesity and many more.

Wow, sounds amazing …think I’ll have a small glass tonight!

As I mentioned last Thursday the Tesco wine store was having a revamp this weekend. The new site is now open and ready for business and there are some decent deals on the homepage.

They’ve now included wine tasting notes from their panel of experts and there’s also a range of online exclusives – these wines are not offered at the same price in store. Also added is a new section detailing award winning wines and the wine search facility has also been improved.

Free delivery on orders over £99 is now made by courier and orders over £140 get delivered free to a 2hour time slot. One convenient idea for internet orders generally is to have your order delivered to your place of work – someone will always be in !

Just so you know, we’ve been informed that Tesco Wine are launching a new and improved website early on Monday 27th April 2009. The new site launch will mean the current website will be unavailable from late evening on Friday 24th April and return early on Monday 27th April 2009. 

The new look site will continue to feature the Spring Wine Festival with up to 50% off cases of Wine. The delicious trio of Ogio wines from Italy, with 50% off, and Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc, with 27% off, are selling particularly well, Tesco report.

While the site is unavailable, there will be a web page informing customers that the site is unavailable for planned maintenance with a link to the Tesco Grocery site – for those of you that wish to buy wine by the bottle.

How much should you spend on a bottle of wine to take to a friends place for dinner?

A group of leading wine connoisseurs has agreed that a £6.99 (or thereabouts) bottle of wine should be enough to buy what they would consider a decent wine in a UK shop. The judges, taking part in Decanter magazine’s World Wine Awards came up with this 7 quid amount amid fears that consumers regularly paid over the odds in an attempt to impress their hosts.

So what are these six wines then and where can you get them from? I’m glad you asked….

White

• Tesco Finest Denman Vineyard Reserve Semillon – available at Tesco
• Hardys Nottage Hill Riesling – available at Waitrose

Red

• St Hallett, Gamekeeper’s Reserve – available at Waitrose
• Domaine Vistalba, Vinalba Reserva Malbec – available at Robersons, London.

Rose

• Marques De Caceres, Rosado – available at Majestic
• Vina Concha y Toro, Casillero del Diablo Shiraz Rose – available at Oddbins

I wouldn’t fancy ordering some of them over the phone!

So, next time you’re invited to friends for dinner you now know what wine take. As for chocolates, the jury is still out over Ferrero Rocher

Many wine drinkers find it more than a little daunting when it comes to choosing a new wine to drink. Recognising this, French company WineSide has come up with the novel idea of offering mini sample bottles of wine.

WineSide offers sweet and classic wines in patented, flat-base glass tubes with screw tops carefully engineered to protect the wines’ flavour. The sweet wines—which include Sauternes and Muscat, for example—are available in 6cl tubes, while the Pomerol, Chateau Neuf du Pape and other classic wines can be purchased in tiny 6cl or 10cl sizes. WineSide’s collection represents a range of appellations and producers; tubes are available individually or by the box, which can be chosen to provide an introduction to a variety, year or region.

Source

In the Budget today, Chancellor Alistair Darling has increased the duty on a bottle of wine by 14p – to be applied by this coming Suunday.

Beer is alsoup – by 4p a pint, spirits up 55p a bottle and cider is up 3p a litre.

Do you think an additional 14 pence on a bottle of wine will make you consume less wine?