One minute he's banging on about the slider and the flipper, the next minute he's talking about "cab-sav-merlot" blends. Please welcome the new Shane Warne: wine drinker. The Shane Warne Collection, launched in Melbourne at the end of October, sounds as preposterous an idea as Darren Gough endorsing Harrod's hampers. It just does not seem right. Warne, to his credit, concedes the incongruity of him having his own wine label – not that it bothers him. His opportunism, on and off the field, knows no bounds and the chance to cash in on his reinvented self-image was too good to miss. The wine will be marketed in England next summer when Warne returns to county cricket to captain Hampshire. "I've always been more of a beer man but I've been off the beer over the last 12 months while I went on a fitness campaign," Warne says, though the change in chosen tipple seems not to have dimmed a predilection for intoxication. "Over the last year, I've got stuck into a few too many bottles of white ... a few too many bottles of red and started to develop a taste for it."

Warne reckons he has lost the best part of two stone over the past year after surveying the size of the international schedule for the next 12 months. Giving up the beer was one of the prerequisites but going teetotal was clearly never an option.

The cheekiness of Warne's venture into viticulture is not lost on team-mates. The genuine wine-drinkers in the team, such as Adam Gilchrist, struggle to take it seriously. Quite what Stuart MacGill, rival leg-spinner and pukka wine expert, makes of it is anyone's guess.

Warne was more than happy to talk about his wines though the depth of knowledge will not be giving Oz Clarke sleepless nights. "The white is a chardonnay," said Warne (pronounced with emphasis on the -ay) with certainty. But he was less sure about the red. "It's a mixture between "cab-sav" and, er, merlot, I think, and, er, maybe a shiraz." Two out of three ain't bad. The Zilzie Wines website reveals that the red is a cabernet-merlot-petit-verdot blend that has "a velvety palate".

English cricket writers got the chance to taste the collection during the Adelaide Test and the fact that few took up the offer says as much about their sobriety as the wine. Like most Australian wine, it is drunk very young. The red and the white are the 2002 vintage, which is good but not yet. Derek Pringle, who knows a thing or two about wine, remarked that the chardonnay was "not very structured and a bit flabby". Christopher Martin-Jenkins detected a faint metallic aftertaste; Mike Atherton said it went right through him, perhaps like the slider. In the interests of investigative journalism WCM editor Stephen Fay drank the red blend of cabernet-merlot-petit-verdot. It was also young and unstructured and not as fruity as the advertising suggests. As for "the long, soft finish", Shane had left it in the nets.

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