Stumped for a dirt-cheap red to take to the beach that will have to fight with salt, sand and fish and chips? Read on and you’ll find it.

Still looking for a decent, dry sub-£5 pink to serve at that barbecue party, or a good, ordinary, yet delicious champagne to serve at a wedding? As always The Times Top 100 Wines of Summer, starting this week, does all the hard work for you. There is a time for drinking good wine and a time for drinking great wine.

The bottles you are happy to crack open at the beach are very different from the fancy wines that you might want to bring to an opera interval picnic, or a fancy dinner party. There is a big difference, too, in finding the best wines for the great blustery outdoors, which dilutes bouquets and removes flavours. Burnt barbecued sausages and kebabs have the same effect and make mincemeat of all bar the burliest reds. Summer classics such as coronation chicken and vitello tonnato are fiendishly difficult dishes to find the right wine for.

And then there is that knotty business of matching the right wine to the right palate. There is no point at all in serving a beautiful, bone-dry chablis with your favourite salmon recipe if half your guests’ taste buds just cannot cope with its steely, streamlined style. What you need instead is a salmon-suitable white burgundy from farther south in the Mâconnais or, if you can afford it, the Côte d’Or. Luckily all three are Summer 2009 Top 100 wines.

The Great British public’s palate is still evolving. At one end of the wine spectrum, conservative palates hate venturing away from obvious, costly names such as sancerre and chablis, claret and rioja. At the bottom end, liebfraumilch and Mateus Rosé may be yesterday’s wines, but sticky pink dross from California sold here by the likes of Blossom Hill, Gallo and Echo Falls remains our favourite swig.

The good news, though, is that sales of these grim pinks are waning as drier and more flavoursome rosés from elsewhere are becoming more popular. Let’s hope the shift from sweet to dry, from grim to delicious, continues in the white, red and sparkling wine arenas too.

This week it’s the turn of the easy-swigging under-£6 and under-£8 selections. Next week we’ll have the under-£12 and under-£25 collections, special-edition wines on sale mostly at the best British wine merchants.

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