The guide was a sweet girl. We could stay at the wine shop for one and a half hours, she informed us. What? Ninety minutes to taste wine? Did she supply wheelbarrows to get us back to the coach? We would surely need them.

“There’s always the spittoon,” said our muscadet-producing host, M Drouet, his face split into a genial smile. He knew we wouldn’t use it, and I don’t think I’m betraying the confidence of any of my fellow tasters by revealing that he was right.

We were in the Loire, and this was our third winetasting session in as many days. It was getting to be a habit, and a very pleasant one, too. Imagine a luxurious cruise ship that sets off from the South Coast of Britain and is small enough to navigate rivers and berth in towns such as Nantes and Bordeaux.

This enables you to hop off, visit a vineyard and work your way through a few glasses of the produce, then hop back on the ship, trough through several spectacular meals (and a glass or three) en route to another wine-producing region, where you do it all over again.

Rioja: the perfect weekend drive

Spain’s classic wine region isn’t half as stuffy as you’d think. We plot a fruity three-day drive with enough time for tasting

• Into Rioja and the home of Campo Viejo

BACKGROUND

• A gastro river cruise in France

• The best wine holidays worldwide

• All aboard for a wine-tasting cruise

• Fine wines in Languedoc

Related Links

• A walking tour of Burgundy vineyards

• A tour of the best vineyards in Provence

• Visiting wineries in the Barosssa Valley

That is what the rivers and wines cruise on board the Spirit of Adventure offers.

A booze cruise? My friends snorted when they heard of the trip, and it is true that our collective attitude to wine is not what you would call sophisticated. It is several decades since we were students, but somehow we still regard wine as a relaxant rather than a source of stimulation.

Before this cruise my standard tipple was New Zealand sauvignon blanc, and I was reluctant to experiment with anything else because I had memories of unpleasant consequences if I did.

It is doubtless because I come from such a limited viticultural base that I learnt so much on the Spirit of Adventure — many of the passengers were infinitely more knowledgeable than me.

But we shared, shall I say, an enthusiasm for the stuff, and while there were those who showed off (one man told me that the only white wines he would contemplate were champagne and Pouilly-Fumé), there were others who admitted that they knew what they liked and that was about it.

I joined a group who had paid for a wine-appreciation programme hosted by Claire Blackler, who runs a wine school in Edinburgh. It was unfortunate that her initial tasting coincided with a day at sea privately described by the captain as moderate; those of us unaccustomed to swilling Haut-Médoc on a bucking bronco would have put it a few notches higher.

Naturally we rallied and were soon dropping words such as gooseberry, pomegranate and, I have to admit, Spangles, as though they came naturally in this context. The Château Majureau Sercillan, a Bordeaux Supérieur, was, we agreed, a tad thin.

What fun it was. At a cider farm in Normandy we drank Cidre Dupont Réserve, aged for six months in a barrel that had previously held Calvados, and served with a dairy load of fabulous cheeses.

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