Wines to get you in the party spirit

Every year, my wife has a birthday party. Not my favourite evening of the year. For me, to paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre very loosely: “Hell is a crowded room with lots of people.”

My job is to organise and pour the wines, and buying always poses the same question: What is good enough to (A) make the guests feel well treated and (B) be pleasant to drink if there’s any left over, but also (C) reasonably priced and (D) sold by someone who will also deliver rented wine glasses?

Questions A through C (and many others) are addressed in Helen McGinn’s The Knackered Mother’s Wine Club (Macmillan, £12.99). The book, arising from Ms McGinn’s blog, gives a lot of the wine basics (production techniques, grape varieties etc.) in plain, chatty style without making you feel you’re taking a wine course.

What I like best about it, however, is that it addresses questions ordinary wine books do not address. Such as: what wines should you serve at a book club? And: what should you serve to the parents whose children have come over for your child’s birthday party? Call it a wine book if you will. It’s also a book about contemporary parenthood. I heartily recommend it.