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At a wine tasting hen party I hosted last week one of the lovely hens was encouraging me to make my own wine. She got her home kit from Wilkos and worked out that a bottle can cost less than £1.50 to make. Wow. I couldn’t hide my admiration for her dedication to having affordable wine literally on tap in her home. This I must try.

In the same week one enterprising duo on Dragon’s Den got funding to grow their home-brew cider kits targeting the uni student market.  Ready in tens days all you have to do is add water and voila, 20 pints of cider for £24.99. That’s £1.25 a pint! While Duncan Bannatyne snatched up a serious measure of Victor’s Drinks for a bargain Deborah Meaden made her feelings clear and distanced herself entirely from the sensitive subject of large volumes of extremely cheap alcohol being made widely available…. Could home-brew kits be next on the anti-alcohol lobby hit list? ………

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The kids maybe on holiday but the learning never stops. Here are five wine related things that we’ve learnt at Miss Bouquet HQ this week:
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A non-wine-trade friend of mine is taking her WSET certificate for fun and asked me why she ‘s being taught wine country-by-country instead of grape-by-grape. “People I know are just as likely to select a wine by grape as they are by region” she said. Good point.

Although arranging wines in this way in supermarkets hasn’t been successful I love the fact that her freedom from the trade has allowed her to think outside of the wine norm and she’s definitely onto something. Could thinking of wine in this way help broaden our wine drinking horizons so that Argentina becomes known for more than just Malbec and Spain for more than Tempranillo? ………

On a balmy day in London like today wines like these don’t seem like such a silly idea after all…..

Thirsty:
Launched 3 years ago Moët & Chandon’s Ice Imperial is back and now it’s in Selfridges. A blend created for a new champagne experience it’s designed to be served with ice to encourage consumers to be more casual with Champagne “… to create a different mood”. It’s a more concentrated blend that shouldn’t be drunk straight up.

Serving suggestion: Take 3 cubes of ice in a bowl shaped wine glass, a few mint leaves, fresh raspberries and some orange rind. Sit back and think of St Tropez. Selfridges, £54.99

Thrifty:
They say imitation is the highest form of flattery and JP Chenet’s Ice Edition is as good a copycat as any with the exception of the liquid in the bottle, of course. But the price is undeniably chilled, so what would you expect? Available at Asda for £9.99, I just found it online reduced to a cool £6.00. If you’re going to water wine down wine in any way, may as well make it the price!