A really unusual red wine: Fonte del Re Lacrima di Morro d'Alba

Are you stuck in a wine drinking rut? Sick of drinking stuff that tastes just a bit, well, winey? A bit dull? Here's a weird one to get you thinking while you're drinking. I suspect it might divide people into the "wow, that's really interesting" camp and the "wow, that's really weird" camp, so choose the right time to open it.

Twirl your glass around a bit, stick your nose in and it smells amazing. Very orangey; also peaches; blossom of some kind; lavender, maybe. Floral and perfumed like a hippy's patchouli-scented boudoir, in my mouth sensing a squirt of honey and lemon, a slice of orange peel.

In fact - thinking about this wine from memory now (I had it a couple of days ago) - I suspect if tasted blind you could be forgiven for thinking it a white rather than a red wine, what with all those citrussy and floral flavours, maybe a viognier or something like that.

Did I enjoy it? I loved the experience: the reminder you can get all these different scents and flavours inside one glass of wine, like an Aladdin's cave discovering new things as you work your way through it. With the debate about novelty wine in mind, it was drinkable too.

Fonte del Re Lacrima di Morro d'Alba, £11.99 from M&S

Handmade Pasta and Italian Wine Night with Yorkshire Wine School

I really enjoyed this event, which I attended as a guest of Yorkshire Wine School. A cookery demonstration from chef Tom Guise and a tasting of six Italian wines with Laura Kent – a welcome glass of Prosecco, three more whites and two reds.

The pasta was absolutely superb. If I'm honest I'm a huge fan of plain old dried pasta dressed in a good sauce – I love pasta – and sometimes find the fresh stuff to be a slight disappointment, but this was just brilliant. Linguine with clams was excellent; later, a small bowl of spiced squash ravioli in sage butter was an absolute beauty - really supremely good, top-notch stuff. Very impressive.

On to the wines. Of the whites, the slightly off-dry Roero Arneis Malvira 2010 (£10.99, Waitrose) from Piedmont was my favourite, evoking warmer climes as it swished around with the clams like a leisurely breaking tide.

My stand-out red - and favourite wine of the night - was the Langhe Nebbiolo Renato Ratti 2010 (M&S, £13.99), again from Piedmont. I love this kind of thing: big, earthy, savoury aromas mellowing and melding together, just calling out for a fireside swirl in a nice big glass and, I imagine, it'd be great alongside a deep meaty stew or a joint of meat falling from the bone.

The other wines we tasted on the night all went down well: the softly textured Greco Sannio 2011 (£6.95, The Wine Society) white wine from Campania represents very good value; the Primitivo A Mano 2008 (Latitude Wines & Spirits, £8.99) a touch on the sweeter and jammier side of things for me but went down very easily; and the Prosecco Collezione NV Brut (£7.99, Waitrose) simply did what Prosecco does and nicely relaxed the tasting muscles for the main event.

As well as the food and wine tasting, an interesting feature of the night was a talk about the 'flavour wheel' and the principles of food and wine matching. Laura said that, while different people will have their own tastes in terms of the kinds of drinks they like to match with different foods, there are certain effects that always tend to take place when you combine different things. For example, eating salty food can make a wine taste less bitter, it can play down the acid and can make the wine feel smoother or "bigger" in the mouth - certainly the clam linguine eaten along with a slurp of Soave Classico Pieropan 2011 (Latitude Wines & Spirits, £12.99) appeared to give the wine a bit more richness, a bit more body than when I tasted it on its own.

It's all really interesting stuff – a good reminder of the fact that, yes foods and drinks objectively have flavour properties, but how we taste or experience those flavours will vary depending on when we taste them. As well as the chemistry that comes into play as in this example of salty foods, there are also psychological factors that sway how we experience flavours. Think of the "holiday effect" when you bring back a case of wine that seemed delicious at the time, but then you taste it when you get back home…

Oh, and one final point, this was also the first time I'd had the chance to taste monosodium glutamate (MSG) in its naked state. A strange experience! Converting flavour experiences into words is notoriously tricky anyway, but with the umami, savoury type thing that MSG is all about, it's almost impossible to put into words. It doesn't taste of a whole lot on its own - although it does taste of something - it's more like a bass note that delivers a bit of oomph to everything else; enhances other flavours as opposed to adding something immediately definable in itself. Parmesan cheese and soy sauce are packed full of it.

Freddie King's Ain't No Sunshine and some nice Italian red wine

How good is this; the epitome of cool. Freddie King doing a version of Ain't No Sunshine.

Freddie King tragically died at 42. I love the story on his Wikipedia page saying he would drink bloody marys "in lieu of solid food so as not to waste time when setting up shows".

Copertino 2008

I think this video calls for a bittersweet, dusky, honest Italian red wine. Something that tastes real.

Really enjoyed this Copertino 2008 Masseria Monaci the other night, which I bought for a bargain £6.39 a bottle (when buying two Italian wines) at Majestic. Was perfect with a mushroom, lemon and thyme risotto topped with a bit of creamy, earthy cheese.

I find it's the amazing savoury aromas draw you in with many good Italian reds, an earthiness; olives, herbs. I think I once saw these kinds of wines described as walking through an olive grove in and out of dusky shadows.

On first opening, this wine smelt of history, of old antique furniture, which seemed to mellow and give way to other things.

Moncaro Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico 2010, £4.99 (Waitrose)

You'll see the glass is empty in the photo, which is all you need to know with this one - this bottle won't last long. An ideal easy drinking midweek white for spring/summer time, especially in terms of value for money. I bought it this evening as a cheap bottle off the cuff, without expecting too much, when I called into Waitrose in Leeds for some pizza on the way home from work.

Fresh, pure, dry, pretty uncomplicated and with an almost olive oil-like texture. In fact both the flavour and texture bring to mind a little olive oil with a dash of fresh lemon juice stirred in - so it's a very good food wine.

I've just referred back to the 'Top 5 Italian White Wines from Waitrose Spring Collection' on Vinissima, and I'm not surprised to see this one on there.

It is a bargain - and in fact I've just noticed the 2009 is only £4.74 per bottle on the Waitrose website.

Moncaro Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico 2010, Italy
Waitrose
£4.99

Italian Craft Beer Evening, The Lounge, Leeds

I recently attended a beer and food evening at the Lounge Bar & Grill in Leeds. The Lounge hosts these nights regularly, with the focus on a different set of beers each month, the chef creating a menu designed to complement the beers. This time it was a selection of Italian beers. I was impressed by the quality of both the food and the drink.

Incidentally, as well as the great flavours, what's noticeable about these beers is that they're nicely designed. Not just the striking labels, but the occasional use of swing-top closures, which emphasise the craft brewing credentials, and the 75cl bottles - an apparently growing trend in craft beer. What's significant about 75cl? It's wine bottle size. It's a visual cue that this is a drink to be savoured, and to be enjoyed with food - in other words, to be treated like wine. Craft beer companies must be thinking, if people pay £15 for a bottle of house wine with their meal, then they might be willing to pay around that for a bottle of house beer instead.

Anyway, on to the meal. First up some canapes (bruschetta, crisp chicken livers, fish fritters) were paired with a bottle of La Gradisca (4.7% alcohol). A good solid start, the nibbles washed down nicely by the Gradisca. It's an uncomplicated, refreshing and easy-drinking lager, which is no criticism, with lower carbonation and a touch more flavour than the average mainstream lager. It'd go down very nicely as a thirst quencher at a summer barbecue, or with a pizza.

On to the starter, which was a terrine of local rabbit, crisp pancetta and fig chutney, paired with Isaac (5% alcohol), a wheat beer. The Isaac was served in a wine glass, which suited it. Isaac has an almost sparkling wine type character to it, with its lightly fruity, apricoty aroma. It has virtually no carbonation - it looked like apple juice in the glass - and worked well with the starter, much as a crisp white wine probably would have done. I'd imagine it'd also go well with a seafood starter, something like prawns or scallops.

It was a duo of mains: chargrilled halibut steak with aubergine and crispy onion rings; and spiced fillet of mackerel with crab and potato salad, creme fraiche and lemon. The two beers that arrived with the mains were Open (7.5% alcohol) and ReAle Extra (6.4% alcohol). Open again brought to mind a good white wine and it worked very nicely with the halibut, the aromatic US hops lifting the flavours in the dish, the moreish, hoppy bitterness of each sip compelling another soon after. It's a good example of a hoppy beer that remains balanced: it's not hitting you over the head; it's drinkable as well as interesting.

The ReAle Extra is lighter in alcohol but there's even more bitterness. The story goes that the brewers forgot to add the necessary hops to the brew and were faced with a 30-second window of what to do - so they attempted to save it by whacking in three times the usual amount of hops but just in the last ten minutes of brewing. "From a mistake, the ReAle is now a masterpiece," our guide Giulio tells us as we take a sip. You hear these kinds of stories from time to time in the alcohol world, where the line between marketing myth and historical fact is hazy. But it's a nice story and you like to think it really happened. And mistake or not, this fresh, hoppy beer is another impressive brew.

But the dessert course was perhaps most impressive of all... or was I bound to think that after four fairly strong beers? The Keto Reporter (5.2% alcohol) was paired with a dark chocolate tart and hazelnut praline ice cream - both the drink and the food were superb; not only that but they worked a treat together. This porter is a really interesting one, not least because a handful of Kentucky tobacco leaves are thrown in during the brewing process (five leaves per 2,500l, I think), meaning that those dark chocolate, treacley, rounded aromas you'd expect are encircled by a whiff of smoke. It's a drink to treat as a rare luxury: the smokiness might become too much if you drank a lot or often, but in this context, as a little snifter of a nightcap alongside the lovely dark chocolate tart, it was superb. As Giulio put it: "It's the last drink of the night, you have a cigar, a tiramisu, a lovely lady..."