History has a lot to answer for. While the 1970s gave us cheese and pineapple on a stick, an unabashed love of the prawn cocktail and a penchant for Harveys Bristol Cream, the 1980s retorted with the shameless slamming of the chardonnay grape, shell suits and the advent of love-her-or-hate-her (love her) British wine critic Ms Jilly Goolden. But who’s laughing now? We look to the vintage wine styles that are back in vogue.

In the 1980s and 1990s the ABC phenomenon swept across the world. Women wearing power suits could be overheard at bars and dinner parties exclaiming, “Dahling, anything but chardonnay!” ABC did to chardonnay what the movie Sideways did to merlot in the 2000s. It sent sales spiralling and tastes changing. But as one of the world’s most widely grown and stylistically diverse grape varieties, chardonnay, my friends, is going nowhere. Saunter down to Levan in Peckham, southeast London, to sample a bottle of chardonnay-like-you-don’t-know-it from its Jura-inspired wine list. The Alpine region in France is fast becoming the darling of the wine world. If chardonnay from Ganevat, Les Dolomies and Tissot can’t persuade you, you may well be a hopeless case. Alternatively, head to Newcomer Wines in Dalston, east London, to see how the Austrians do it and keep an eye out for glorious examples from Messrs Markus Altenburger and Ewald Tscheppe.

Beaujolais, or bojo as it’s now fondly known, is a region in France that makes fun, quaffable wines from the gamay grape that joyously disappear down the hatch before you can say “nouveau”. Once lambasted for its listless flavour and mass production, over the past few years beaujolais nouveau has had a hipster face lift, complete with shaggy beard, spearheaded by a new generation of naturally minded winemakers. Beaujolais nouveau even has a day — the last Thursday of November each year – when these youthful wines are first sampled and celebrated at wine parties from Beaujolais to London to New York. You’d be hard pushed to have more fun than drinking beaujolais nouveau from one of wine importer Le Grappin’s bagnums (a magnum in a bag) or, for a more serious beaujolais from one of the 10 crus, try the Morgon Côte du Py from Mr Jean Foillard, one of the producers who set the region on a better path. You can sample this delight at The Remedy, one of the best and, in my opinion, most underrated wine bars in London.

Contrary to popular belief, Lambrini (tagline “Lambrini girls just wanna have fun”) is not a wine, but a perry (pear cider) flavoured with all sorts of sinful things we need not note. Now we’ve cleared that up, we can move on to lambrusco, a fizzy, pinky-red wine that during the 1980s bore the hallmarks of effervescent Ribena and was mainly designed for people who hated the taste of wine. This fizz from the northern Emilia-Romagna region of Italy has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years and is something of a chameleon to boot. The best examples of lambrusco are often dry, refreshing and rustic in nature. Mr Roberto Maestri makes some of the best in the region from his family’s vineyards in Montecchio Emilia, under his label Quarticello. The clever team at Thai restaurant Kiln in Soho have even made their own lambrusco, Arkestra II, in collaboration with natural wine importer Ancestrel Wines. For the full Italian experience, wander down to Passione Vino, a wine shop and bar in Shoreditch, east London, where larger-than-life-proprietor Mr Luca Dusi and his trusty team will introduce you to the charms of this undervalued wine and probably a whole lot of other Italian marvels, too.

ancestrelwines.com