"Daddy. This is very nice but is it legal?"

Wineoftheweek finds itself on holiday in Cornwall this week and we’ve taken the opportunity to introduce Wineoftheweek Junior to his first vineyard.

The little man is a mere 6 months old but he’s already showing signs of a sophisticated palette. In fact, only this morning he devoured a combination of banana and camomile with real distinction.

So we picked up a hire bike in Wadebridge, attached a baby trailer and headed off down the Camel Trail in the direction of Bodmin. The trail is an eleven mile stretch of disused railway that runs alongside the meandering River Camel linking Padstow to Bodmin along the way.

The vineyard is about 2 miles down the track and you turn directly off the path into the Camel Valley vines. The vineyard is owned and run by the Lindo family. Bob and Annie planted their first vines here in 1989 and over the subsequent two decades have picked up too many plaudits and awards to list. Son Sam is now the chief winemaker.

WineOfTheWeek is no fan of  wine awards given out by industry bodies but we must take our cycle clips off to Camel Valley for playing with the big boys and winning big (if you are interested in awards then look here).

WOTW Junior contributed very little to the ascent to the vineyard but once we’d got there he thoroughly enjoyed working through the full range of wines with his dad. Camel Valley is best known for its fizz (it provides the bubbles for Fortnam & Mason’s own label English Sparkler) but has won recognition for it’s Cornish Bacchus. The wines are stocked in Waitrose and you can read all about them here from people who know better.

A cracking shop/tasting room overlooks the vines and you can sip fizz on the terrace until your legs tell you better.

Visit the Camel Valley website

Stick with me son, you'll go far. Well, as far as this bike will take us.

Nobody pours it better

Have you ever asked yourself this question:

“Since dissolved CO2 is known to be of great importance in champagne and sparkling wine tasting, would not it be pertinent to revisit the way champagne should be served?”

No? Well if your Dr Liger-Belair and colleagues you’ve been thinking of nothing else recently. To such an extent that they conducted a series of lab experiments measuring the loss of CO2 gas from champagne as it was poured.

Having nothing better to do with their time, Dr Liber-Belair and his chums compared three champagne temperatures and two different ways of serving. They then measured the loss of CO2 using infrared imagery which showed the gaseous clouds disappearing as the fizz was poured.

Still awake? Then let’s continue. They concluded that the traditional method of serving – pouring the drink vertically so it hit the bottom of the flute – generated a thick head of foam and was less effective in retaining bubbles than the ‘beer pouring method’ where the champagne flowed along an inclined flute wall.

The findings were published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry. The scientists are now working towards a mathematical model to describe their findings.

Now I’ve no wish to sound like George Osborne, but if this research was publicly funded then god help us all. Oh hang on, it was conducted by the French. That explains everything.

WineOfTheWeek has been slurping on about the lack of innovation in the SmartPhone sector when it comes to wine brands for some time now.

Just as we were planning on opening up the iPhone SDK to create our own Frankenwine’s monster, along comes this super concept from Veuve Clicquot.

The idea is simple. If you are attending an event sponsored by Veuve you can use your iPhone to order champagne and have it delivered to your exact location.

You enter the type of fizz and the number of bottles you require and GPS does the rest. Within minutes, a Veuve branded golf buggy bounces it’s way to your destination and a lovely lady hands you your Champagne.

They call it their ‘concierge’ service and WineOfTheWeek witnessed it’s debut at the Gold Cup Polo finals last Sunday.

Yes, ok. You read that correctly. In what can only be described as a complete betrayal of our value system WOTW attended a Polo event. Can I offer up ‘we go to these events so that you don’t have to’ as a justification? Someone help me out here!!!

Putting my class prejudices aside, the concierge service is a good example of how to use the iPhone’s geo-location services to good effect during event marketing so we’ll give them a thumbs up.

The app also contains an events calender and invite friends function however the latter requires friends to also have the app installed for it to make it any use.

And the Polo? Didn’t understand a single minute of it. Although some bloke told me that, just as in football, there aren’t any decent English players. Very reassuring.

Now, where did I leave the latest edition of Tatler? Is that it there underneath my Boden catalogue…?

The iPhone4 may be a cr*p phone but it takes nice pictures

Champagne house Krug has teamed up with a gourmet London pub to offer the magnificent combination of Champagne and Fish & Chips.

I was first introduced to the phenomenon of Fizz and Chips when I worked at The Wine Society. Invited to an impromptu lunch with the Society’s wine buyers I was taken aback to see a box full of fish and chips portions arrive in the tasting room just as champagne corks were being popped to the left and right of me. Twenty minutes later I had indeed experienced the perfect food and wine match. Nothing beats it.

The ‘Thank Krug It’s Friday’ initiative will run at The Punch Bowl in Mayfair throughout the summer and the offer consists of a half bottle of Krug Grande Cuvée with two gourmet Fish & Chips meals. This ain’t no ordinary meal deal folks – put Mayfair, Gourmet Pub and Krug in the luxury pricing model and you get your experience for a whopping £75.

The price may not be for everybody but it is for me. I’ll be there on the 16th July for all those who want to join me.

I’ve just returned from the village shop carrying a bag of coal on my shoulder and a bottle of Shiraz under my arm. Shoreham is covered in snow. And it looks simply stunning.

Now that I’m home and the fire is starting to roar I really fancy some  ice cream. Cold and snow do that for me – just makes me want to eat tubs of the stuff. However, ice cream is almost impossible to match with wine and the Shiraz is now open. What to do?

Well, if I was living in New York or New Jersey then I’d now exactly what to do. I’d have a freezer full of these Wine Cellar Sorbets. There are six flavours: Sangria Rojo, Riesling, Champagne, Pino Noir, Rose, and Cabernet Sauvignon. Sangria Rojo and they contain about 5% alcohol content.

Alas, they are currently only available in the US.

Bloke is running to catch his train. He makes it to the train, just in time. He sits opposite a Hitchcockian Blonde. Train conductor asks for his ticket, but wait, bloke can’t find his ticket. He panics. Blonde nods towards Bloke’s penguin classic, now resting on the table. Bloke looks befuddled. Blonde nods again. Eureka! Bloke realises his ticket is being used as a bookmark. Bloke and Blonde share a bottle of Veuve Du Vernay. To a sound track of Le Mer by Charles Aznavour.

Yes folks, this is how fizz was marketed to us in the 1980′s.

The recent UK release of the movie ‘Me and Orson Welles’ provides WOTW with the perfect excuse to post the infamous drunken out-takes from Orson’s ill-fated promotion of Paul Masson Champagne.

Watch as the world famous director, actor, writer and impresario struggles to keep hold of both his words and his champagne flute. And then watch again as the whole episode is parodied with real elan. Can you tell which is the real Orson Welles?

Dom Pérignon have paid “tribute” to Claudia Schiffer’s bosom in the form of a breast shaped bowl. Yes, folks, the “boob-bowl” is the latest creation by German designer Karl Lagerfeld and apparently it’s supposed to be a modern version of the bowl from a dining service made especially for Queen Marie Antoinette back in 1787.

According to legend, the original bowl was the exact size of one of cake loving Marie’s breasts (not sure which one). In turn, it is said the bowl was used to model the well-known coupe-shaped Champagne glass. This of course makes one wonder what the modern day flute is modelled on. Lagerfeld’s intepretation rests upon a stand comprising three porcelain replicas of Dom Pérignon and a platter bearing the signatures of the designer and his favourite top model.

The creation is to be sold along with a bottle of 1995 Dom Pérignon Oenothèque, at a mere $3,150 a go. What a cheery tale for these austere times. It’s good to know the rich continue to pursue their own vanity trips while global capitalism continues it’s inexorable decline.

I was flicking through the channels the other night and stumbled across Silence of the Lambs just as Sir Anphoney Ham-it-up-kins was doing his “ate his liver with some fava beans and a glass of Chianti” speech.

It got me thinking. What are the best wine references in film? So, here’s my Top Five -

1 – Intolerable Cruelty – Margaux ’54

George Clooney is waiting for Catherine Zeta Jones to arrive for dinner and is obsessively polishing his teeth. She arrives, and in turn so does the waiter and the following exchange occurs:

Waiter: Something to start. Some wines perhaps
MILES: Red
MARILYN: French
MILES: Bordeaux
MARILYN: Chateau Margaux
MILES: 57?
MARILYN: 59?
MILES: 54
MARILYN: Oh, Mr Massey

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYDb9O8EWDM]

2 -”The Muppet Movie” (1979) – Sparkling Muscatel from Idaho

Steve Martin plays a haughty sommelier in what must be the best wine moment in a children’s wine film – how many can there be? Kermit is out to dinner with Miss Piggy and orders a bottle of bubbly – hilarity ensues!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiGAAHG0O1A]

3 – Notorious” (1946) – Champagne

In which Alfred Hitchcock makes it nerve-racking to watch people drink Champagne. Cary Grant suspects that the Nazis are hiding a substance used to make radioactive weapons in wine bottles – I’ve had a few bottles that have tasted like uranium but that’s another story.

He and Ingrid Bergman poke around in the wine cellar of a mansion, opening bottles, while the Nazis throw a big party. If they are caught, they will be killed!!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFcm4mTaOlc]

4 – Sideways – Cheval Blanc ’61

Much of the films post publicity centred on the increased sales of Pinot Noir attributed to Virginia Madsen’s extraordinary speech in the middle of the film (quite frankly she could soliloquise about beetroot and I’d buy it off her).

However it is Miles’ relationship with his prized bottle of Cheval Blanc ’61 that is central to our appreciation of the film. A lovelorn and broken Miles, who has been saving his most prized possession for the most special of days ends up drinking the bottle in a fast food outlet with nothing more than a greasy burger and a brown paper bag. Tragic

5 – Manhattan Murder Mystery – Mouton Rothschild ’45

Diane Keaton and Alan Alda, take in a wine tasting, providing Woody Allen an opportunity to take a pop at wine snobs:

TED: That Mouton 45. That was . . .
CAROL: Didn’t you love it?
TED: Oh, that was-was like, sublime, you know?
CAROL: Yeah.
TED: And the inexpensive Spanish one. Wasn’t that . . . wasn’t that a nice surprise?
CAROL: It was very, very . . .
TED: Wasn’t that great?
CAROL: Yeah.