Here we are celebrating hand-me-down meals and recipes, embracing all those cosy culinary make-do-and-mend moments of yesteryear. Yet the last thing I would want to do is apply the same wisdom to what is in my glass. The 1950s were still the Dark Ages of wine.

My mother said that, as a new bride, whenever she wanted to buy wine for a special dinner she had to make a tedious trip into the centre of London to Berry Bros. & Rudd, where she would timidly inquire of the cellarman what red would be best for beef or lamb, and get a few bottles thrust at her for an answer.

Men ruled the world of wine. Smart mail-order wine merchants such as Berry Bros, with their posh pocketbook of a wine list, confined their main purchases to claret, burgundy, hock and mosel, with a page or two for stickies such as sherry, port and madeira.

Italy and Spain scarcely featured and New World upstarts were unheard of. Mind you, given the rounds of palate-numbing cocktails that this generation of wine drinkers sank before they sat down to eat, good wine must have been a bit of a waste. Fakery was rife, with doctored grand cru burgundy and cru classé claret passed off as the real thing by both British merchants and French producers.

British palates still craved sweet things, probably due to sugar rationing. Germany’s answer was to invent liebfraumilch specially for the British. Blue Nun was the big name, with Lutomer Laski Rizling from what was Yugoslavia, now Slovenia, another popular drop.

Sticky, bland, pink-lemonade Mateus Rosé appeared and was deemed the height of sophistication. By the time the Seventies rolled round, in addition to this lacklustre trio, big brands like Austria’s Hirondelle, Spain’s Don Cortez and Hungary’s Bull’s Blood, all with a dollop of sugar, dominated off-licence and wine-shop shelves. Only a minority of drinkers sought out good wine.

Britain’s drinkers finally grew up in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Foreign travel, greater disposable income and a desire, which every generation of drinkers has, to drink differently from their parents, all had their effect. Supermarkets spotted this and expanded their range of wines.

And the first New World wines from Australia and California arrived in the high street, followed by exciting new wines from South Africa, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina. White and pink wines no longer dominated, red became modish and Britain at last drank more wine than beer. More great wine was available to more people, at prices they could afford.

My own journey in wine took a different route. My Francophile parents drank wine and we three children drank wine cut with water, as French children do. My father, a film producer with the Rank Organisation, had bought the entire cellar at Pinewood for a song and I grew up drinking first-growth claret and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti burgundy, thinking that this was what every family did. Starting at the top of the wine road and going downhill ever since has been an extraordinarily pleasurable pursuit. Almost all my early memories concern wine and scent in some way — no surprise, perhaps, because the olfactory bulb, smell’s GHQ, lies next door to the memory section of the brain.

One of wine’s greatest attributes, obvious even with the roughest, farmyard-redolent Rhône red, is to transport you to another place, another time. In my case this scent takes me straight back to one of those many childhood trips to southern France, rattling about on the big, back sofa-seat of my parents’ Citroën DS with my brother and sister, followed by the fight to be the first to wind down the window south of Lyon to wallow in the heady, herby scents of the hillsides. For me this bouquet is still a marker for all Rhône reds.

And then there is that distinctive, unmistakeable white-pepper scent of Austria’s grüner veltliner grape, that swiftly summons up a cheerless, unhappy time there learning to ski, before later, jollier memories of drinking too much of it in Vienna’s heurigen wine taverns.

Smell continues to be the Cinderella of the senses, but building up a wine memory-bank, where favourite wines and emotions mingle, can be every bit as rewarding as inheriting your mother’s and grandmother’s recipes.

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