New year, new cellar

Italian prosecco is quite trendy and a relatively inexpensive bubbly from the Glera grape

If you were to sample just one new wine each week, you would go through nearly 50 variants (allowing time off to rest) by the end of 2019. That sounds a lot, until you realise that that there are roughly some 10,000 wine grapes worldwide, and that wine is made in at least 63 countries — including unlikely candidates like the eastern Europe ’stans (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan).

And that does not even take into account the categories of wine (still, sparkling, and specialities like port, vermouth and sherry), blends, vintages of the same label, or different types of wines