Drinking a couple of glasses of red wine every day isn’t just enjoyable, it’s also good for you. Red wine is rich in chemicals called polyphenols. Research has shown that these compounds expand your blood vessels, making it easier for blood to flow. They also fight hardening of your arteries, the major contributor to heart disease.

Picnic blankets and cool boxes are being dusted off now the long-awaited (slight) rise in temperature has arrived. About time to. So find yourself some lightly flavoured whites to match the subtle flavour of picnic quiches and cucumber sandwiches and more robustly-flavoured reds to help wash down the heartier flavours of sausage rolls and Ginsters Cornish pasties. But with all that nosh packed away the picnic basket is going to be quite heavy enough, so it helps if the accompanying wine comes in light-weight packaging.

Supermarket wine aisles can be lonely places. And pretty intimidating too when you’re the only person there, which seems so often the case. So when you need some wine and food matching advice who you gonna call? Not Dan Ackroyd in a 1980s film with a catch phrase that won’t leave the head, but Tesco’s free wine app on your mobile phone.

There's no wine in the house and with only ten minutes to go before the food is ready what can you do? Buying the meal-matching wine from the local village shop or corner convenience store is the best strategy when time is limited.

Shear your sheep, they say in Devon, when the elder blossoms peep. With buds appearing during the middle of June, the clotted-cream coloured heads of the elder bush are ready for picking right through until the middle of July.

If you want to turn elderflowers into a delicious wine, now’s the time to get picking. Look along the edge of any footpath, or corner of a field, and you’ll find the gangly many-stemmed Sambucus nigra bearing hundreds of tiny elderflower blossoms arranged in heads the size of an outstretched hand.

Choosing a gift for next Sunday's Father's Day is never that easy for sons and daughters, of whatever age. I'm sure you'll not complain when you receive the usual power tool or tankard, but it would be nice to get something rather more personalised wouldn't it? So why not help your children along by dropping subtle, or not, hints that a bottle or two of your favourite wine would be much appreciated.

Should the feeble warmth of spring finally give way to summer, then legs and mid-riffs will be bared and that excess will have to go. So that means reducing the daily intake of calories. But how do you best do that - and still enjoy the occasional tipple? Wine expert Paula Goddard has some clever suggestions!