It's OK to be pretentious

There are behavioural tics that make the Person Who Knows About Wine easy to ridicule: the compulsive swirling of the glass, the theatrical sniffing, the noisy sluicing between teeth, gums and tongue, the stream of flowery jargon. It might look pretentious, but it has a point. The swirl-sniff-slurp stuff is about releasing as much flavour and aroma, and therefore information and pleasure, as possible. Describing the wine with a mental, verbal or written note, is simply a way of pinning down the things you liked – it doesn't really matter what words you use, the idea is to secure a stash of memories.

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Bellingham The Bernard Series Grenache Blanc Viognier, Paarl, South Africa 2011 (£10.99, Tesco)
Sumptuous Cape white that really shows the value of swirling and sniffing: you could lose yourself in the gorgeous nose of honeysuckle and ripe tropical and peach fruit.

Find a name you can trust

Like anything else we buy, the producer's name is the most reliable indication of quality. A wine made by a good producer in a less well-regarded region will be better (and often cheaper) than one made by a bad producer in a region with a big reputation. Similarly, a wine made by a good producer in a difficult vintage will often be better than a wine made by a poor producer in the same region in a good vintage. When you like a wine, then, it's worth noting down the people who made it (you might have to scan the back-label if it's a supermarket own-label) and trying their other wines. It's not an infallible method – like a great local bistro spoiled by striving too hard for a Michelin star, some producers of excellent simple wines gild the lily when they try to make something smarter (Chile and Argentina have some prime offenders). More often than not, however, if you like one thing a producer has made, there's a good chance you'll like the rest of their wine.

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Laurent Miquel L'Artisan Faugères, France, 2010 (£7.99, or £6.99 when you buy two bottles, Majestic)
A consistently good producer whose wines from the Languedoc, such as this succulent, savoury blend of syrah and grenache, are good alternatives to the more fashionable Rhône.

Go back to the land

For the serious wine nut, a sense of place – the effects of climate, soil and local tradition that the French call terroir – is what makes a wine special. It's the reason that, say, a peppery, sinewy syrah from the relatively cool northern parts of France's Rhône Valley is very different from the butch, inky styles made from the same grape in the heat of the Barossa Valley in Australia. Today, even the best producers in the new world, who pioneered the focus on grape varieties, are making wines that emphasise regional difference. Exploring this bottled geography by comparing and contrasting the same grape variety grown in different places – ideally with the help of Hugh Johnson's classic World Atlas of Wine – is where the fun really starts.

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Viña Mayu Selected Vineyards Syrah, Elqui Valley, Chile 2008/9 (£9.99, Waitrose)
Until recently, Chilean wines were rarely marked by regional diversity, but this powerful but elegant red is a great expression of the distinctive terroir of the northern Elqui Valley.

Get to know your merchant

Most merchants are run by people in it for love as much as the money and, with their emphasis on personal service, offer a better place for a beginner to learn about wine than a supermarket with its impersonal wall of wine. Once you've found one to try (Decanter magazine's website has a useful interactive map of reputable UK wine merchants here), test them out by telling them what you like, giving them a modest budget and seeing what recommendations they come up with. You don't have to do this in person: you could do it over the phone or via the web, although most online retailers prefer you to buy by the case. However you go about it, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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Le Mas des Masques Les Silex Chardonnay, Vin de Pays des Bouches du Rhône, France (£14.50, Swig)
Online merchant Swig has a talent for finding great wines in unusual places, such as this nutty, complex chardonnay from a region not usually associated with the variety.

Find the sweet spot

The very best wines are seldom what you'd call cheap, but then many expensive wines can be terrible, and some cheap wines can be very tasty indeed. But there are a couple of rules of thumb for best value. There's a sweet spot between £8 and £15 where the proportion of the bottle price that you're actually spending on wine – as opposed to tax, retailer margin and, over £15, reputation – is at its optimum. The other tip is to avoid the more extravagant deals offered by supermarkets. A couple of quid off is not to be sniffed at, but with very few exceptions, if a wine is on a half-price deal in a supermarket its original price will have been inflated far beyond the wine's real worth, in order to make the offer more tempting.

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The Society's Exhibition Chardonnay, Auckland, New Zealand 2010 (£12.50, The Wine Society)
This scintillating oaked chardonnay, made for the Wine Society's excellent own-label range by Kumeu River, one of New Zealand's best producers, falls right in the middle of the all important quality/value sweet spot.