To reach Corney & Barrow’s city offices for their tasting of the 2005 vintage burgundies from Burgundy’s Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, you have to walk past a city watering hole called The Mint. Minted is what you need to be to lay your hands on just one bottle of Romanée-Conti, which was on the Corney list for £6,795 for a case of six. Was is the operative word because even though the tasting took place only last month, your chances of buying a bottle of Romanée-Conti or any of its five less expensive siblings are as remote as flying in a microlite to Mars.

It’s that time of the year when the rule against chocolate dissolves like a Flake on Joss Stone’s tongue. A wine to go with it, sir / madam, or is wine and chocolate too much of a good thing? A friend who attended a chocolate and wine tasting recently found each match, to her dismay, worse than the preceding one as the presenter struggled to convince a sweet-toothed and willing audience that matching the two was as easy as falling off a chocolate log.

Sitting in the lofty Peak Lounge of the Park Hyatt where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson cosy up in Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, you can just about make out the distant pyramid of Mount Fuji beyond the panorama of Tokyo’s skyline. From one spectacular peak to another a couple of hours drive away, I found myself standing at the foot of the sacred volcano itself, in a vineyard planted with tender shoots of the native koshu grape.

Is it because France’s wine producers are trying to have their gâteau and eat it that like Dr.Doolittle’s pushme-pullyu, French wine seems to be trying to pull in at least two different directions at once? On the one hand French Customs tells us that France is shifting shedloads of wine with exports that have leapt to over nine billion euros (£7b), or the equivalent of sales of 180 Airbus aircraft. We in the UK did our bit by taking French wine worth eight per cent more last year.

John Cossart, head of the Madeira house Henriques & Henriques, was the last Englishman still fully involved in the wine trade in Madeira. Thanks to his unrivalled grasp of the Madeira wine trade, its tortuous relationships and the complexities of the Madeira-making process, he made an invaluable contribution to the revival of one of the world’s most distinctive and indestructibly long-lived wines.

There’s a harmless little prank I like to play at wine tastings to illustrate a point. I ask a person in the audience to come up and tell me which of two wine bottles is the heavier. After one bottle is found to be marginally heavier than the other, I remove its capsule, tip the bottle upside down and ‘pour’ the contents over the ‘victim’. To everyone’s surprise, and the ‘victim’s’ relief, they stay nice and dry. The bottle, empty of course, is the horrendous dark green 1.2 kilo affair which weighs more when empty than a light bottle full of wine.

Maybe it was because the Harveys Bristol Cream van used to draw up outside our headmaster, Coot’s, house, that I grew up to think of sherry as fit only for vicars, aunts and schoolmasters. It never occurred to me at the time that that sherry might re-invent itself as one of the world’s great appetite whetters.

Those for whom every day is Valentine’s Day may be interested in a new range of wines aimed at women developed by a French wine merchant. To capture a slice of the lucrative female wine market, wineSight has selected nearly 30 French wines under the label Sublimelle, ‘parce que la femme est Sublimelle’. It boasts ‘no need for images of lingerie’, so the fact that a French lingerie label of the same name adorns such fine et sexy brands as Forplay (sic) and Leg Avenue, is presumably a coincidence.

‘Should we be concentrating on sauvignon blanc or putting our eggs in different baskets?’ Stumbling off the plane at 6.30 am in Auckland after the longest flight of my life (30 hours, since you ask), I wasn’t ready for the question exercising the mind of Terry Dunleavy, then heading up the New Zealand Wine Institute. Muttering some platitude on the lines of ‘if I ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, all I could think of was bed. That was in 1991 when sauvignon blanc was nearing its zenith as New Zealand’s unique selling point.

This is your captain speaking. Fasten your seatbelts ladies and gentlemen please as we’re anticipating a degree of turbulence and we’re not sure how long it will last. So it was that before Christmas a small panel of us took a bumpy ride without even reaching an airport by tasting our way though 229 airlines wines from 26 business and first class airline lists for the Business Traveller Cellars in the Sky Awards, in association with Wine & Spirit, announced this week.