As summer fades and our social and dining habits adapt to the cooling weather, so, too, should the white wine we drink. Here are some options best-suited to the season

The wine world is full of clubs, and I’m a member of the Just-Drink-What-You-Bloody-Like club, which makes even the thought of white wines for autumn and winter feel uncomfortably prescriptive. But, for me, as the nights draw in, there’s less standing, more sitting; less chugging, more swirling; fewer sprightly aperitifs, more wine with seasonal food that demands a little more body and complexity. After months of saying yes to rosé, I’m choosing wine with more intention – it’s time to hunker down.

I’m looking for whites that are like a good cardigan, at once coddling and breathable. I want ripeness, body and freshness, and the Atlantic-influenced wines of Galicia in northern Spain – a place that’s no stranger to wind and rain – deliver. Expressive, with a saline edge, albariño from the Rías Baixas appellation has become ubiquitous in supermarkets and rarely disappoints (try Aldi’s Specially Selected one at £8.99), neither does the fuller-bodied godello from nearby Valdeorras (the Wine Society’s Exhibition range offers a good one for £14.95), while the blend of both those grapes and other local varieties from Galicia’s Ribeiro DO in today’s pick is a cool-climate humdinger for the colder months.

After the death of my beloved dog, I’m thinking a lot about the role food plays in all of life’s big events – be they happy or sad

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I lost my beloved cairn terrier Wilf a couple of weeks ago, and when I say lost, sadly, I don’t mean I mislaid him yet again on Hampstead Heath. Rather, after 13 and a half years of (mostly) civil disobedience, we had to make the tough but ultimately kind decision to say a final goodbye. Since then, I have been bombarded with kindness. Friends and family have rallied round to take me out for breakfast, lunch, dinner and coffee, clearly worried that the bereavement might affect my appetite – well, apart from the one who responded by having a baby a week early, and who now requires me to provide for her.

It got me thinking about the part food plays in big life events. We so often cook, or otherwise provide for people in the aftermath of such shocks, be they happy or sad, as a way both to offer practical help and to show them how much we love them. Such tokens of affection tend to fall into two camps. The first is high-energy food that can be easily eaten with one hand while the other is holding a baby or clutching a sodden handkerchief, or simply when you’re just too busy to sit down. Just this morning, I received a picture of the new mother tucking into my extremely wholesome fruit and nut-packed granola with her daughter sleeping on her arm, but Melissa Hemsley’s five-ingredient flapjacks (pictured top) would fall into this category, as would Meera Sodha’s chaat masala popcorn and Thomasina Miers’ dark chocolate and toasted walnut banana bread. Like Anna Jones’s chocolate chip cookie power bites, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s spiced nuts or my own kale chips, they’re full of good things, and tempting enough to compete with the less nutritious options that are so easy to reach for instead. (That said, no one should judge anyone for the choices they make at times of stress.)

It turns out all that time spent peeling and paring was entirely wasted. Now I’m gobbling them like apples and putting the extra fibre to good use

Every day’s a school day, honestly. How on earth did I get to just short of my 60th birthday before finding out that you could eat the skin of kiwifruit? Astounding, just astounding. What a revelation. It’s odd, because of all fruit skins, it’s probably the one that looks least appetising. Nice clean oranges and bananas almost beg to be troughed, skins and all, yet we know this is a no-no. But it turns out that all of this small, hairy, boringly coloured object can go down the hatch. Admittedly, I have been slicing the ends off first, but I might start eating them, too.

The first time is the hardest. You need to set aside years of prejudice against that hairy skin that you’ve been so painstakingly removing. Mind over matter. Initially, I sliced my kiwis longways and then each half into four. Now, I’m just eating them like apples. Sometimes three bites, usually two, occasionally just the one. I promise you, a lifetime’s fear of the fur evaporates in an instant. At least, for me it did. I have to report that when I talked my mum into giving it a try, she gagged alarmingly and swore at me with some venom as she fought to expel bits of skin from her mouth. Perhaps it’s not for everyone, after all.

These highly crunchable cheesy bread balls are a great way to use up odds and ends

Sadly, I’m never going to be able to recreate the cheese and bread balls I made a few weeks ago, because, of the four cheeses used, I recognised only two of them: a bit of gorgonzola and a slice of precious Montgomery cheddar, bought from Da Corrado, a stall on Testaccio market. The other two lumps of cheese, both wrapped in white waxed paper and both quite dry, were, I think, a piece of grana padano and the end of the pecorino we brought back from Umbria. But I can’t be sure, because I didn’t really examine them. Even if I had, it would have been hard to guess; the description “heels of cheese” is appropriate here. What I do know, however, is that the combination of those four grated cheeses with two eggs and enough breadcrumbs to turn the mix into a soft, malleable dough made for fantastic deep-fried balls.

The inspiration for using up the uncertain contents of the cheese box was pallotte cacio e ova, which translates as “little cheese and egg balls”, a typical and much-loved thing in both Molise and Abruzzo, which were, in fact, one region until 1964. Pallotte are resourceful, and were surely invented as a way of using up scraps of cheese (almost certainly local pecorino) and bread. Whatever combination of cheese you use, though, the important thing is to add enough soft white breadcrumbs – anything from 80g to 120g – to turn the mixture into a soft dough that you can then mould into balls, but not so compactly that the tenderness is lost. Like meatballs, cheese balls benefit from a rest in the fridge, so they can firm up before frying. The rest in the fridge also ensures that they are cold, which is important, because the thermal shock of the cold surface meeting the hot oil helps create a crisp shell.

It used to be quite normal to pop next door for a coffee or invite friends over for dinner. But not any more. What’s behind this change – and just how damaging is it?

‘I really loved hosting at home years ago, before I had kids, when my house wasn’t filled with toys and I had lots of time to plan and shop,” says Rehanna, 41, from Birmingham. Now, if she’s catching up with friends, she would rather go out. “I can’t host and cook at the same time, so if I have people over it will usually be a cold buffet I have made earlier. There are so many really nice restaurants where I live that I’d prefer to go out and try something new than make an old favourite at home.”

Personally, I’d never say no to a cold buffet – but Rehanna’s story is not unusual. In the US, the number of people who regularly host friends or family fell from 42% in 1975 to 12% in 2026 – a 70% drop over the last 50 years. In the UK, the numbers are not much better: last year, a poll of 2,000 adults found that more than four in 10 British people avoid hosting at home due to the clean-up it requires. And while chef Nigella Lawson is back on TV screens demonstrating her culinary prowess on The Great British Bake Off, it wasn’t long ago that the self-proclaimed domestic goddess revealed even she had “got out of the habit” of hosting formal dinner parties.

A landmark report reveals that the world must change the way it produces food to avoid a biodiversity collapse

Conservation comebacks for wild tigers, tuna and green​ sea turtles prove that global nature loss can be reversed, ​scientists have said. ​But a report warns food production must be the next ​“positive tipping point​” if the world is to avert biodiversity collapse.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) analysed nearly 36,000 animal populations and more than 5,000 species, producing the largest ever database of vertebrate wildlife. Scientists found populations had declined by an average of 73% since 1970, showing that “nature continues to be degraded at an alarming scale”, with “no sign of losses slowing”.