Alcohol-free beers look like beer and smell like beer, but far too often they just don't taste like beer. Which is a shame, because there’s a large and growing market for ales without the alcohol. Motorists and muslims are prime targets, as are people on certain sorts of medication which don’t mix well with alcoholic drinks.

My new weekly wine column Paula's Wines of the Week for Mature Times website maturetimes.co.uk is now live. Each week I’ll be finding and recommending tasty wines. And if these have been marked down by a couple of pounds a bottle, even better. Because good wine needn't be an expensive business, but working your way through the bland and disappointing can be. That's where I come in.

Despite the recent duty increase on wine there are still some good bottles to be found that cost the same as a couple of National Lottery tickets. The £3.99 and under price range is dominated by German wines and 3-litre boxes, where you pay more upfront but the equivalent bottle price is always less than you'd pay for a separate 75cl glass bottle.

Paddington bear is celebrating his fiftieth birthday. Yes it's been five decades since the Peruvian immigrant with a love for marmalade sandwiches arrived at a certain railway terminus and took up residence with the Brown family. Their housekeeper, Mrs Bird, instinctively knew that bears need plentiful supplies of that bitter-sweet breakfast jam if they're to maintain the shine on their fur. And so a message was sent to the local grocer for top up supplies. How times have changed. Now finding and purchasing a decent pot of marmalade suitable for south American bears and Wiltshire-born writers with a penchant for chunky, dark and sour marmalade is virtually impossible.

Despite having a diverse culinary heritage inspired through invasion, it seems we British are more interested in mastering Italian cuisine than our own traditional dishes. A new European-wide survey by Apetina cheese found that 61% of the Brits that responded would prefer to cook as Pietro and Paola rather than Peter and Paulas. But I've got news for those pasta throwing wanna-bes – ravioli and macaroni have been part of British culture for centuries.

Shear your sheep, they say in Devon, when the elder blossoms peep. With buds appearing at the end of May, the clotted-cream coloured heads of the elder bush are ready for picking by the first week of June. If you want to turn elderflowers into a delicious wine, now’s the time to get picking. Look along the edge of any footpath, or corner of a field, and you’ll find the gangly many-stemmed Sambucus nigra bearing hundreds of tiny elderflower blossoms arranged in heads the size of an outstretched hand.

It's English Wine Week, so of course it must be raining. That pretty much captures the essence of what it's like to be an English winemaker - great when the sun shines but for the other 300 days of the year it's just plain hard work getting grapes to ripen in less than ideal conditions. Luckily newer cross-bred grape varieties make it easier to produce an end product surpassing New World competitors.

Many wine experts predicted the extinction of the three pound bottle from Britain's supermarket wine aisles following the Chancellor's recent duty increases. But rummage among the expensive named chateau in the 'French' wine aisle of your nearest Somerfield supermarket and you'll find a great bargain hiding behind a sepia monstrosity of a wine label. Mont Tauch Corbières 2006 may not look much from the outside but the young and vibrant wine inside will get you excited.