For retail buyers Christmas starts in early January. Proposals are made in March and contracts signed, sealed and delivered by June. Job done!! The only thing left is to get the product to the stores and hope that the customers enjoy what you offer them.

To state the obvious, alcoholic drinks form a very important part of any retailers Christmas offer and Aldi is no different. My colleagues and I are under pressure from the business to deliver exciting and interesting new products which deliver reasonable profits. With all the promotional activity that takes place at Christmas time this can be a real challenge.

As I write this, we are putting the finishing touches to our wine, beers and spirits leaflet, the showcase for our seasonal ranges. This year I am focusing on my Christmas specials which will all be put on sale on the same day, Thursday 22nd November. We do have some great wines from Bordeaux; a Pauillac, a Margaux and a St Emillion, all at £8.99, which are fit for any Christmas dinner. I recommend that you try them all, decide which you like best, and buy a case of that for Christmas. (Did you notice the cunning sales pitch!). We also have a cru classe Sauternes. I know £8.99 is a lot to pay for a dessert wine but believe me it is worth it. Try it with fois gras, pate or even blue cheese if you don’t fancy it with puddings. It is delicious.

Wines that we are listing for the first time include the 10 year old Tawny Port that I discovered on my visit to Portugal (see A Room with a View). To make the product even more seasonal we have put it in a gift box, another first for an Aldi wine.

I lived in Italy for a year, many years ago and since then have had a soft spot for Italian wines. I managed to convince everybody that a Vino Nobile de Montepulciano was a great idea for Christmas. From just outside Sienna this is mainly made from Sangiovese grapes, like its near neighbour Chianti, and it is a fantastic food wine. It will go with any meat from Turkey to Lamb, so it is worth trying, especially if you are a Chianti fan.

Christmas time allows me the opportunity to list more expensive wines than I could normally put in to the stores but I do feel that they are equally good value. So trade up this Christmas and give some or all of them a try!

After visiting Hungary last week I flew directly to Hahn airport, £16 including all taxes and privileged boarding, to visit my supplier of Liebfraumilch. Now stop turning your lip up in disgust. I know that Liebfraumilch has become a symbol of all that is bad in the world of wine but is this view really merited?

Let’s think about it for a minute. The sector responsible for most of the growth in the UK wine market over the last 3 years has been Californian Rosé. It is fruity, has medium sweetness (25-30g of residual sugar) and is pink. Liebfraumilch is fruity, has medium sweetness and is white. There isn’t a whole lot of difference except that one is trendy and one isn’t. Generally the Liebfraumilch found in the UK is well made and ridiculously cheap whilst Californian Rosé can be very variable in quality and is over priced.

A bigger tragedy than the disrespect dished out to Liebfraumilch is the knock on effect it has on the rest of German wine. Because of the low prices and low esteem that Liebfraumilch is held in, this image spills over into the general public’s view of German wine as a whole. One of the results is that some very good vineyards along the river Mosel have been left dormant and form a patchwork of overgrown weeds amongst the obsessively tidy vineyards growing on the steep slopes that rise up from the river. These vineyards grow Riesling, a prince among grapes, but because it is no longer economically viable to tend the vines they have been abandoned to nature.

Now I can’t change the UK markets view on my own but please give German wines a chance. If you can’t bear the social stigma of buying Liebfraumilch then try our Bereich Nierstein Spätlese or wait until November and buy St Amandus Beerenauslese or Eiswein. Yes I know that they are a little bit sweet, more than a little in the case of Eiswein, but have you ever put sugar in your coffee or had a can of Coca-Cola? The sweetness is necessary to counteract the natural acidity found in grapes grown at this latitude, but make extremely enjoyable wines.

In the meantime I will try and find space in the range for a dryish Riesling and you will have to promise me to give it a try.

What do GYONGOS and BONYHAD have in common apart from being incredibly bad hands in Scrabble? The answer? They are the villages where the wineries that supply our Hungarian wines are located. I visited them for the first time this week to coincide with the bottling of the newest addition to our Budavar range, Budavar Hungarian Pinot Bianco.

Bonyhad is about two hours drive south of Budapest and the winery crushes and makes both red and white wines. The whites are predominantly Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc but I tasted the Pinot Blanc earlier this year and thought that the fresh melon/apple style of the wine would be very appealing to customers. I am delighted with the quality after bottling and I am sure it will take its place alongside the Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio in the range and perform well. Bonyhad also produces red wines, some Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot but mainly Kekfrankos, another challenge for Scrabble fans, and an indigenous grape that is present in the famous “Bulls Blood”. I was fortunate to be on the site when the first of this years red grapes were being brought in and I can say that they were very healthy, ripe and bursting with flavour. Normally Hungarian reds have a problem with too much acidity and not enough fruit, but that will not be a problem this year.

Gyongos is one hours drive North of Budapest and produces only white wines. Our Budavar Pinot Grigio comes from here and this wine has sold very well since its launch nearly two years ago. It is a very fruity example of Pinot Grigio with bright pineapple notes and a touch more acidity than you find in Italian Pinot Grigio which makes it very refreshing.

All of our Budavar wines are bottled at Gyongos and for logistical reasons my supplier has decided to bottle the Gluhwein, which he also supplies to Aldi, at this site. As this was filled the day before I arrived it was a great chance to quality check the product and it passed with flying colours. Gluhwein is always a very popular addition to the Aldi range at Christmas and it will arrive in our stores at the end of October. Enjoy it slightly warmed with a mince pie. Gorgeous!

Last week I visited Bordeaux in order to taste the year’s different bottlings of our Claret and Bordeaux Blanc with my supplier. This is a useful exercise as we can pick up any variances in the different bottlings as well as ensuring that wine bottled earlier in the year is holding up well. The tasting went well and we certainly achieved the consistency that we were looking for.

I also took the opportunity to visit Chateau Deyrem Valentin whose second wine Chateau Soussans is to be one of the “Fine Clarets” that we sell this Christmas. It was interesting to discuss this years growing season with the Winemaker Christelle Sorge who is the daughter of the Chateau owner, and taste the grapes in the vineyard. These were rich and deliciously sweet but she told me we were still 2 to 3 weeks away from being ready to harvest. Bordeaux has benefited from glorious autumn weather this year and 2007 promises to be another good year for claret which was in doubt as they have had a very ordinary summer.

We tasted all the vintages of both of the Chateau’s wines from 2002-2005 and I had a sneak preview of the 2006 straight from the barrel. This is a fantastic way to assess the impact of the weather on a wine as all other factors, grape selection, location, winemaking equipment etc are constants. We are taking the 2004 and it stood up well alongside the other years. Our customers in Ireland were lucky enough to have Deyrem Valentin as a special earlier this year and all stores will stock Soussans in late November. It is a classic Margaux and I am sure it will be enjoyed by everyone who buys it.

There is a new oenological attraction in town called La Winery. A private enterprise on a grand scale, it is attempting to combine wine education and wine retailing on a greenfield site on the outskirts of Bordeaux. One of the programmes they have developed is a method to discover your individual oenological horoscope. You sample a carefully selected range of six wines and rate how much you liked each one of them on a scale of 1-5. The scores are processed by a computer and you are assigned one of 6 “signs”. I am apparently “muscular with explorer rising” which fits the Indiana Jones image I would like to project. In my dreams! The concept is an interesting one and I wonder if I can apply something similar to my wines.