Spanish wine sales are up, we are told, thanks to Spain’s new flamboyant image. Marks & Spencer recently reported a 200% increase on last year and Spanish sales at Waitrose are 40% up. Various reasons have been suggested, from sangria nostalgia to the heroics of Rafa and the brilliance of Spain’s peerless world cup squad. What better example of Spanish excellence is there after all? Well, Cruz, Bardem and Almodovar apart, food and wine of course. El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià and the UK’s tapas bar and sherry revolution have done much to shine a new light on the huge strides made in Vino Español.

It’s ironic to think that you have to despoil the countryside to be green. As the high-speed AVE train scythes a path through between Madrid and Zaragoza, Don Quixote’s windmills of yesteryear have been substituted by today's vast farms of wind turbines. They’re not as beautiful, of course, but they’re not ugly either and it’s hard to begrudge their presence when they’re such a valuable source of much-needed alternative energy. Here, in these undulating rural plains surrounding Zaragoza, lie three of Spain’s least-known wine regions.

Is selling wine a business or a passion? I ask because judging this year’s Decanter Retailer Awards laid bare the yawning chasm between wine merchants for whom wine is a labour of love and those going through the motions to keep the shareholders happy. Broadly speaking, convenience and price are the driving forces behind the 8 in 10 bottles of wine sold by the supermarkets, while the two in 10 coming from independent wine merchants are defined by a passion to deliver quality and character.

Eton’s headmaster, Tony Little, recently complained that ‘we live in a strange society where it is possible to talk with impunity about elitism in football, but not in medicine or plumbing’. Coincidentally, the editor of Decanter Magazine, Guy Woodward, was accused of wine snobbery by Asda for saying that there’s a ‘huge amount of difference’ in quality between a bottle of wine that sells for £4.99 and one that sells for £6.99.

In Shanghai for the China Wine Challenge last month, I was amazed to discover a shimmering array of bronze wine drinking vessels from over 2000 years BC and older on display at the Shanghai Museum. I had never really thought of China as a wine culture before, but the evidence of my own eyes clearly showed that the Chinese, albeit at the highest social levels and most likley for ceremonial purposes, had indeed been drinking wine long before the first Anglo-Saxon downed his first goblet of Roman-inspired plonk.

‘I hear you make wine in England now, what’s it like?’ You get used to the sardonic nudge and wink from curious foreigners as the question is lobbed like a hand grenade. How to respond without waving the flag like a demented chauvinist on the one hand or being churlishly dismissive on the other? Easy actually. Just mention our burgeoning sparkling wine industry and how, because of England’s cool maritime climate and chalky soils, our green and pleasant land actually is the new Jerusalem for wines whose raison d’être is to be transformed into fizz.

They say that 87.46 per cent of all statistics are made up on the spot, but I doubt that Adelaide University’s Kym Anderson and Signe Nelgen fabricated theirs. I’m indebted to the wine journalist Andrew Jefford for pointing me in the direction of the ninth edition of their statistical compendium of global wine markets, 1961 to 2009 (www.adelaide.edu.au/press/titles/global-wine).

In the dead of a German winter, three English wine writers sat round an Italian restaurant discussing French wine. The start of a joke? Actually it was the end of a joke, the punchline being the refusal by the French authorities to allow its more humble wines to use the name of the grape variety. A new French wine category, Vin de France, was born last year and we were being asked to road-test it with a group of German colleagues in order to make a selection for June’s Vinexpo, the giant wine fair in Bordeaux.

After the calm, the storm in a wine glass. Between the tasting of the new 2010 Bordeaux vintage before Easter and a second showing of the wines at Vinexpo a couple of weeks back, three things happened. The majority of critics came out with their scores and tasting notes. Bordeaux responded by setting prices for the wines. And the wine trade is now offering those wines for sale en primeur (i.e. before bottling and delivery in 2013) to consumers.

Occasionally, a wine has an impact that takes it into the realm of legend. The 1977 Cavas de Weinert Malbec is such a wine. Three years after Juan Domingo Péron's death, the volume of cheap wine drunk in Argentina rivalled that of France and the notion of quality was as alien a concept as political stability. Made from old malbec vines, in large new oak barrels, this wine was impressively powerful. It was the creation of Raúl de la Mota, then in the twilight of an illustrious career.