With bags of charcoal bricks cluttering up supermarket aisles and lighter fuel on offer at the garage, the barbecue season is in full swing. Given our ever-erratic summer, it’s a wonder that any of us struggle on with this most anti-social form of cookery, which always blows smoke into everyone’s eyes, rarely cooks food through and usually takes hosts away from guests. All of this means it’s vital to limit the damage by choosing an eminently sociable wine, and by that I don’t mean your finest cru classé claret or sancerre or chablis, as they all wilt in the great outdoors.

There are two possible routes to finding the best barbecue bottles, just as there are with sniffing out the best wines to go with strongly spiced Indian and Asian dishes. The simplest is to choose cheap, easy-glugging, mildly flavoured whites, pinks and reds that take happily to being watered down with a whoosh of soda water and lots of ice or strengthened with a jigger or two of spirits and jazzed up with slices of orange, lemon or lime and a handful of mint. Continental wine drinkers think nothing of spicing up their cheap and cheerful summer wines in this way and the national summer drink in Spain, sangria, deliciously combines red wine, Spanish brandy and Curaçao, slices of lemon and orange plus their juices.

The other route is to focus on the sauce or garnish accompanying the barbecued meat or fish. Simply grilled barbecued prawns with a squirt of lemon juice and a splash of olive oil could work with almost any light white, pink or red, but add its classic partner, a hefty garlicky aïoli, and your options are severely limited. A vibrant, juicy beaujolais is the red wine answer and Sainsbury’s lively, leafy, plummy 2007 Taste the Difference Beaujolais-Villages, £5.39, gets my vote. Or try a gentle white, again Sainsbury’s. Its stylish, floral, softly spicy 2008 Casa Mia Fiano from Settesoli in Sicily, £5.99, is a terrific choice.

Burnt sausages and hamburgers are another barbecue staple and work with a wide range of reds and pinks, but add a chilli-hot piri-piri sauce, or equally taxing caper and mustard-laden devilled sauce and careful red wine choice is essential. Aussie shiraz makes the best marriage here as its bold, beefy, alcoholic style rolls easily over even heftily spiced barbecued food. Tuck into the gorgeous fat, creamy blackberry spice of Haselgrove’s 2007 Cellar 150 Shiraz (Majestic £7.99, or buy two for £4.99 each). Pink wines do not always make perfect matches with barbecue fodder but thoroughly chilled and splashed out in large glasses, they are pretty and thirst-quenching.

Take your pick from the shy, plummy yet still vibrant spice of 2008 La Grille Pinot Noir Rosé from the Loire (Majestic £5.99, buy two for £5.49) or the delicious strong, blackcurrant and rosé- charged fruit of Peter Lehmann’s 2008 Wildcard Rosé from Australia (Asda £4.98). Barbecues just got civilised.

This week's best buys

2008 Extra Special Chardonnay, Vin de Pays d’Oc, J-C Mas, France

Asda, down to £4.86 today only. Last chance to snap up this easy-swigging, juicy, melon and lemon-charged Languedoc chardonnay from the 2008 vintage.

2008 Merlot, Vin de Pays d’Oc, J-C Mas, France

Asda, down to £4.86 today only. While you’re in Asda snap up this bold, plummy, barbecue-friendly merlot from one of Languedoc’s best new-wave producers, Jean-Charles Mas.

2007 Wrattonbully Tempranillo, Yalumba, Australia

Marks & Spencer, £7.99. Wrattonbully produces some tasty wines such as this lush, plump, plummy 2007 made from Spain’s top red grape, tempranillo.

2007 Tasmanian Pinot Noir, Tamar Valley, Australia

Marks & Spencer £7.99. Tasmania has long made gorgeous reds from this grape including the fat, gamey, strawberry spice of this gently fermented 2007.

THE KEEPER

2008 Riesling Trocken, Reichsrat von Buhl, Pfalz, Germany

Harrods (020-7893 8777) £9.50 (down from £10.95 until Friday). This stunning summer white with oodles of tart, tingly, honeysuckle-scented fruit is a dream. Great now as a lean, scarcely 11.5 per cent proof, summer apéritif — or you could put it away for a few years for the lime-juice-scented, paraffin quality to appear.

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