Perhaps I wasn’t concentrating hard enough at wine school, but I never really understood how the bubbles in Champagne worked. There always seemed a little bit of alchemy in there somewhere.

Winston Churchill’s Champagne habit is well known – at 11am he enjoyed his first drink of the day, an Imperial Pint of Pol Roger’s Winston Churchill. That’s two thirds

With my 60th birthday approaching I was thinking about the best deal I ever did. During the mid-seventies I was the unofficial agent for Louis Roederer in Paraguay. 500 cases of Cristal

I had managed to blank it from my memory, but was reminded the other day that I once sold Gary Glitter ten cases of Krug 1943. At least he had good taste in Champagne.

Dozens of new producers have been awarded the right to produce champagne under the first substantial expansion of the tightly controlled wine region since 1927.

Thirty eight communes (village districts) were named after decades of lobbying and feuding among councils and growers who are excluded from the official boundaries of champagne country.