Of all the terrors offered by any half-decent restaurant, none can rival the full-scale panic attack of ordering the wine. Everything about the process is designed for maximum humiliation and minimum comfort. And of course the humiliation and discomfort increase exponentially with each extra person for whom you are ordering, so that selecting the wine for a group of 10 becomes a truly bowel-troubling experience. Select a pudding wine for the hors d'oeuvres course, and you may well have to change your name and move to Carlisle.

Clearly the sensible thing to do is never accept the wine list. Always pass it on to someone - anyone - else. Nevertheless, there are occasions when this is simply impractical - dining alone, let's say, or a romantic date on which you hope to impress your companion, or when some spiteful bastard recommends that you should do the honours. In such cases there are certain rules to abide by if you wish to limit the excruciating embarrassments that lie in wait for you.

First of all, avoid anything not written in English. Unfortunately, this is often not possible, especially in French restaurants, and most particularly in France. The rule here is not to try anything fancy, which translates as do not try anything red. If Burgundy means to you the colour of a sofa and claret another name for blood, then stick with 'blanc'. The big advantage with white wine is that it doesn't get life-damagingly expensive. But which white wine? Your gut instinct is 'House' but even you know that that sounds cheap. You could try asking the waiter for his recommendation but if he knows his stuff, he'll want to show up how little you know yours. That's where so-called New World wines come in.

Now you could put their success down to what wine writers call 'fruity candour', but it's really about their idiot-proof labelling of 'Sauvignon' and 'Chardonnay'. So choose a mid-price range Sauvignon and look as if it isn't the first time you've ever laid eyes on its name. But don't get carried away and start acting imperious with the waiter - no dismissive gestures, no contemptuous snarl as you hand back the list. He knows you're a fraud, so don't provoke him.

That's the easy bit over. Now comes the tasting. First of all the waiter will show you the bottle you've just ordered. As you can't remember what you've ordered, he might as well be handing you a bottle of Tizer, but just nod approvingly, and let him decant a sample. But not into your glass. Point him towards the spiteful bastard who volunteered you for the ordeal in the first place and let him suffer.

If that should prove impossible (because the bastard refuses), then you are going to have to act out the charade yourself. Remember: do not taste the wine! It's not there to drink, you oaf, but to sniff. Roll the liquid round the glass and stick your snout near the edge. Can you smell it? What? It. What? It. It's corked. What? Corked! It has been estimated that one in eight bottles of wine is corked, which is to say the cork has deteriorated and allowed air to affect the quality of the wine. Do you send back one in every eight bottles you order? Of course not, because you wouldn't know a corked bottle if the cork was floating in your glass. The scent you're looking out for is that of smelly socks, but it's quite likely the prolonged exposure to that very smell down the years has inured your olfactory sense to its presence. To pass the wine drinkable only to have someone - that spiteful bastard, for instance - then spit it out in disgust is a Carlisle-relocation experience. That is why you have a cold and why you should always ask for a second opinion. 'I'm sorry,' you say, 'I have a slight head cold, do you think you could try this.'

You could ask the waiter, your partner or indeed the spiteful bastard. None is in a position to say no. Naturally, there are only so many colds you can have with the same person, but as long as you spread the tactic among different dinner companions you could maintain, so to speak, a state of ill-health worthy of hospitalisation. But far better to pretend to be bunged up than not know you're corked. Cheers.