If you seek an entrée into the appreciation of Champagne, I can’t recommend a better exercise than a tasting with a grower.

We’re all grateful for having a variety of excellent wines available to us at very reasonable prices, much of it from Chile – but the price we pay for a bottle of wine determines, to a large degree, how much we talk about it. (Photo: Andres Caballero by Jacqui Skeete)

If you ask me what my favourite wine is I will want to give you the name of some old world red, to demonstrate my appreciation for well-structured, complex, age-worthy and, well, let’s be honest, expensive wines. But eventually I will admit that it is Viognier.

Celebrities and wine are in the news recently, but is it a new thing? Is it even a thing, for that matter? In my first wine review I chat a bit about the non-issue and write a non-review of Brangelina’s new rosé, opting instead to put a Californian red blend on deck for a spin.

If ginger beer is beer, why doesn’t it contain alcohol? The answer is that it does, if you brew it right. Plus: keeping the names of your Guinness-based bar concoctions straight, and how to invite ridicule (and possibly physical abuse) in an Irish pub.

We finally seized the opportunity to visit Prince Edward County on the occasion of the annual Wassail event coinciding with a gala in aid of the region’s Slow Food convivium. Our singing and tasting tour took us to seven wineries in one afternoon.

I was accosted by a huge sale bin of these attractively packaged cookie bars on the way in to the grocery store the other day. I was feeling a bit under the weather and they ended up in the bag with some jarred hot and sour soup and frozen garlic bread. I mustered the restraint necessary to wait until dessert before opening them.

Today I wrap another wine course, and assuming all goes well with next week’s exam I will be 3/8ths of the way to earning my Wine Specialist certification. Here’s a glimpse at the impressive selection of not-entirely-reasonably-priced wines we tasted in our final class.

I’m a bit of a classicist and hard to please, and my preference for drinks being simple and straightforward often leaves me at a loss when selecting from a nearly limitless array of increasingly complex beverages. I have only created a couple of original cocktails myself, and the most recent is, I think, my most successful. It’s called the Gainsbourg.

I first heard the word petrichor in the recent Doctor Who episode The Doctor’s Wife and assumed it was an invention of the author Neil Gaiman. As it turns out it is a favourite word of his, but its origins can be traced back to two Australian botanists who coined the term in an article for the journal Nature in 1964.