If you want a wine holiday, you tend to think of areas such as Burgundy, the Loire or Champagne, but it’s possible to have a wine-focused holiday much nearer home.

Great swaths of the country now have vineyards that you can visit, from East Anglia to Cornwall, but even if you’re not in a prime grape-growing area, there is no reason you can’t use a self-catering break to extend your wine knowledge, rather than relying on a badly stocked offie. You probably won’t pay a lot more.

Exactly that thought struck me the other day when I was in the beautiful Ribble Valley in Lancashire, which is lucky enough to have two cracking wine shops within four miles of each other.