That posh pre-Christmas dinner party you're planning requires a handsome couple. A white and red wine which will taste good, look good and generally do you proud. It may well be that you need no inspiration from this column: the country is liberally peppered with dinner-party hosts well equipped to choose superlative bottles at £25 or more - and the best of luck to them. The rest of us may feel more comfortable in the £10-£15 zone. And why not, when it's easy to find plenty of impressive wines within that price range?
Obviously you'll need to think about your menu, so that you can pick wine styles to suit. In the broadest of generalisations, the wines of the Old World - France, Spain, Italy and so on - go best with the kind of classic dishes typically found in those countries. New World wines - those from Australia, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, California - may be fine with classic dishes, too, but really excel with more exuberant, modern cooking: the sort of food that involves ingredients such as chilli, ginger, coriander, lemongrass. If you're more of a Peter Gordon in the kitchen than an Elizabeth David, these may be the ones to go for.
Personal preference is clearly an important factor, too. A lot of dinner-party hosts don't seem to feel comfortable unless they serve French wine. They have a rather snobbish notion that nothing else is good enough (if not for their guests, then for their image as connoisseurs). While I'm partial to French wine pretty often myself, I think this posh dinner francomania is somewhat blinkered. There's a whole world of superb wine out there, for heaven's sake!