What I want on a wine label and what producers want I suspect are two different things. Top of my list are bottles with clear, concise details of country, region, producer, estate, vineyard, grape variety, vintage and alcohol content, plus appellation and reserve status, if applicable. Not too much to ask is it? Being hopelessly longsighted, I do not want to squint to decipher this vital information. So out go bottles with irritating gold lettering on black backgrounds and those with daft dinky, gothic, or swirly typefaces. Nuls points as well to bottles with buried essentials, especially the growing trend among cheaper wines of relegating vintage details to minute digits on the reverse of foil capsules. Above all, superior single-vineyard and reserve bottlings need to look the part, so drinkers do not get diddled. Worst offenders here include top-drawer California and Australian wine estates, which often use identical labels for standard and reserve-level wines, despite big differences in price.

Back-label information including a tasting note, serving suggestions, vegetarian or vegan status, sweetness level, the body or weight of red wines, alcoholic units, and calories for those who care about that sort of thing can all be useful, so bravo Tesco and the Co-op's own-label wines.

Achingly cool or wacky design is best avoided. Far better to opt for bottles where money has been spent on the contents not the cover. Circular, zig-zag or torn labels and the like do not do it for me, and mostly nor do specially commissioned artists' labels, with one glorious exception: the first-growth Bordeaux estate Mouton Rothschild, whose labels, ever since the artist Jacques Carlu was commissioned to illustrate the first château-bottled vintage in 1924, have often been things of beauty, particularly the Henry Moore 1964 label.

Putting precise ingredients on the back label is a tricky one. The Co-op is alone in doing this on its own-label range, but I fear this worries drinkers more than it educates. Only trace quantities of chemicals end up in finished wines, but anyone digesting the Co-op's 2004 Adelaide Hills Chardonnay Reserve, with its long list, including the alarming sounding potassium metabisulphite, diammonium phosphate, thiamin hydrochloride and polyvinylpolpyrrolidone, is not to know that.

What I do not want on wine labels is silly, so-called health advice. The US government's mandatory warning from the Surgeon General urging pregnant women and those operating heavy machinery to avoid drinking is ridiculous.

And now the same folk have allowed an Oregon winery to cite the high level of the health-enhancing antioxidant resveratrol on its labels. Dear, oh dear.

Labels continue to be the best guide to a wine bottle's contents, but there is still lots of work to be done.

jane.macquitty@thetimes.co.uk

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