Fall in love with a local wine

It’s a truism that wine enjoyed on holiday is never quite as good when drunk back home. Of course, a grey afternoon indoors will never equal that improbably gorgeous beachside restaurant with its astonishingly cheap and delicious three courses plus pitcher prix fixe.

If I’ve had my share of letdowns with suitcase-stashed bottles of retsina and rosé over the years, for the most part my experience of holiday wine has had the opposite effect. I’ve discovered some of my favourite producers after popping into winery tasting rooms while on a break and only really, truly fallen for the wines of some regions (Jerez, the Rhone, the Mosel) after trying them in their beautiful, original context.

Increasingly, producers understand the potency of wine-based tourism. Done well, having people trying wines on your terms, in your own place, can turn a punter into a customer, and a customer into an unpaid member of your marketing department, sometimes for life. Merchants often tell me how a not-insignificant part of their business comes from inquiries about sourcing wines enjoyed on holiday, with requests for bottles from South Africa, Portugal and Greece evidence of how producers in those countries have upped their hospitality game.

When I began visiting vineyards as a journalist in the late 1990s, I often had the sense I was securing rare, behind-the-scenes access, with most producers, certainly in Europe, preferring to keep the public out. These days, it’s rare for a winery not to have at least some means of entertaining visitors, even if some of the smaller, smarter names are appointment only. Many will have food options ranging from cheeseboards right up to Michelin-starred fine dining; some will have a guesthouse or even a hotel. Regional wine bodies are also in on the action, with increasingly slick and engaging visitor centres and museums such as Burgundy’s three Cités des Climats et Vins, Bordeaux’s Cité du Vin and Porto’s World of Wine.

Where to go? For glamour, a road trip around California’s well-appointed cellars is hard to beat; for beautiful surroundings, it’s a tie between the vast, lush Cape Dutch estates and Table Mountain background of South Africa’s Stellenbosch, and the vertiginous slopes, sinuous river bends and very different climates of the Mosel and Douro valleys. For a wine-and-walking or bike tour, I’d choose the close-knit, picturesque villages of Alsace’s long-established wine route, while Tuscany has the most alluring mix of food and comfortable lodgings, not to mention a surfeit of fine sangiovese to dream about when you get back home.