I was chatting with a mate the other day and he asked what I'd been drinking lately. The weather had turned decidedly hot in the space of a few days, which meant I'd switched from red wine to white, so I mentioned the name of a pleasant little riesling that didn't cost a lot of dollars and then asked what he was drinking. He said that he opened a red wine on the day it reached 33 c (91 f) and that he didn't enjoy it at all, eventually drinking a beer instead.

I don't know about you, but in the hotter weather, red wine doesn't seem enjoyable at all to me. In the tropics, for those who have to have red wine, they have developed a ploy of dropping an ice cube or two in the glass and of course the same effect can be had by chilling the bottle for a few hours, there is even the option of a wine spritzer. But why would you bother? White wines are perfect for the warmer months of the year and are excellent chilled, unlike reds which suffer a loss of flavour. Unless of course, you don't like white wine - like my mate.

One time he called me on the phone to ask a question about a well regarded chardonnay that he'd opened and was having trouble coming to terms with. The wine in question had been cellared by him for a few years and should have been drinking at or near its peak, but my friend didn't like it. Thinking it may be corked, I asked him to put the cork back in and bring it to me the next time he was over my way, which he did. When I tasted it, I went into raptures, it was a wonderful example of chardonnay, absolutely perfect in every way.

But to my mate, it wasn't red.

A while ago, David Lebovitz wrote this about white chocolate. Upon reading, I immediately felt a bit prejudiced, for I have never been too fond of white chocolate, but David went on to say the only difference between white and dark chocolate is that white contains none of the cacao mass. Apart from this one thing, white and dark chocolate are essentially the same thing. It is nearly exactly the same with wine. All wine starts out clear or white, what happens next determines the colour of the finished wine. When the juice is pressed from the grapes, regardless of the grapes skin colour, it is clear juice. What happens next for red wine is that the crushed, red grape skins are added back to this clear juice, colouring it and adding a little bit of tannin.

So what do we make of people that can only enjoy red wine? Don't worry about the tannins, for some white wines have a lot of tannins as well. What these people are saying is that they like coloured wine, for that is pretty much all the skins add. There's no extra flavour added, which has been demonstrated at tastings where the tasters are blindfolded and have been unable to pick between red and white wines, amazing as that seems.

What it means for my friend, unable to like white wines and not really enjoying reds in the warmer months, is the start of the wine drought.