It's the question I've always wanted to ask Sue Lawley. What would she take to a desert island as her luxury item? As the presenter of Desert Island Discs, the journalist and broadcaster has been listening to the musings of famous castaways for the last 14 years. 'I've just interviewed Ken Follett who wanted to be washed up together with the ship's wine cellar. Now that's a very good idea.'

Lawley and her television executive husband, Hugh Williams, are enthusiastic wine drinkers. 'He's trained my palate over the years, to his cost. We talk about wine a lot and we go on holiday to French wine regions. The thing I like about wine is that you remember where you were when you drank a particular bottle, whether it was a spicy Vacqueyras in Avignon or a Pomerol in Bordeaux.'

Growing up in the West Midlands, Lawley rarely drank wine. The only alcohol she can remember was Hall's Sanatogen Tonic Wine, purchased by her mother when Lawley's older sister was sick. 'My sister hated the stuff, but I used to sneak little gulps from the bottle. I must have been about eight at the time.' In her late teens, she started going to pubs 'with boyfriends who drove MG Midgets', but she drank gin and orange, not wine.

At Bristol university, Lawley remembers buying the odd bottle of Entre-Deux-Mers to take to parties, but that was about it. As a modern linguist, she spent time in Bonn and Paris, but regrets that neither city is in 'what you'd call a great wine producing area. The whole wine thing was just beginning. It wasn't until the Seventies that it became popular'. In that sense, she adds, wine is a bit like olive oil. 'Olive oil used to be something you bought from the chemist to loosen the wax in your ears, didn't it?'

It was through bridge that she developed an interest in better wines. In the late 1970s, her neighbours had a fantastic wine cellar. 'We used to drink wine before, during and after our games of bridge. That was the first time I tried a Gevrey-Chambertin; it was from Faiveley. And I started to develop a taste for claret that never left me.' Her favourites include Châteaux Talbot, L'Enclos, Chasse-Spleen, Cissac, Cos d'Estournel, La Conseillante and Mazeris. Lawley is unashamedly Francophile in her tastes. 'I'm very traditional,' she says, 'very four square.' Her husband occasionally puts non-French wines in front of her, but has accepted that she is a lost cause. 'I quite like a glass of Tokaji with my Christmas pudding and some Italian wines are delicious, but I'm not keen on New World wines. They meet a taste requirement but they don't vary much from year to year. I just don't like that full-on, fruity style.'

There is a cellar at both of Lawley's houses - in London and in Devon. 'Actually,' she says, '"cellar" is a bit of a grand word. In London it's just a vault under the pavement and you have to bend double to get in there.' The cellars each contain around two dozen cases of red Burgundies, clarets, Champagne, Italian reds and 'a few half bottles that my mother likes'. The wines come from many sources: Majestic, Layton's, Christopher Piper, Lay & Wheeler, Justerini & Brooks, Yapp Brothers and John Armit. Lawley also buys wine at Tesco 'when they've got a Champagne deal on'.

Lawley herself is almost exclusively a red wine drinker. 'I drink red wine with everything, even lobster. It's all in the mind, I think.' The exception is Champagne, especially Louis Roederer Champagne. She says the 1969 Roederer Cristal which she drank on her daughter's twenty-first birthday was wonderful: 'rich, full, nutty and honeyed. I often have a glass of fizz on a Sunday morning when I'm scraping the carrots.' When Desert Island Discs moved from its 12.15 slot, she switched from 'having a glass at the start of the programme to having one at the end. 11.15am is too early, even for me, but I'm still scraping the carrots.'

Lawley likes drinking rosé wines to remind her of holidays in the south of France. One of her current favourites is the 2000 Grande Cassagne, Costières de Nîmes. 'For me this is all about beakers full of the warm south; it's a sunshine drink made for long lunches eating grilled fish on the beach.' Her only regret is that the wine seems to change as it crosses the Channel. 'French rosé always tastes a bit bruised in this country. It never seems as fresh or as well chilled when you drink it in England.'

One of her remaining four choices - all of them red - is from the south of France too. The 1995 Château d'Oupia that they bought from Christopher Piper, the local wine merchant in Ottery St Mary, is a 'great value Minervois that we'll be drinking at Christmas'. The other three wines are considerably more expensive. The 1985 Cos d'Estournel was a gift from her bridge-playing friends last year. ('We'll wait until everyone's gone at Christmas before we pull the cork.'), while the 1986 La Conseillante from Pomerol is a wine she's had in the cellar for over a decade. 'I fell in love with Pomerol when I tasted the 1975 La Conseillante. I was given a case and I eked out the bottles one by one.'

Lawley admits that the 1998 Gevrey-Chambertin from Denis Mortet, a wine they bought en primeur (as a future) recently, is too young to drink at the moment, but says she hopes to keep it for a few years yet. Drinking Gevrey-Chambertin reminds her of 'the first time I went to Burgundy and stood in the middle of the village, amazed at how small the vineyards were. That's what I love about the best French wines: you really can taste the difference between one vineyard and another in the glass'. Which is more than you can say for Hall's Sanatogen Tonic Wine.