‘When you make rum just to make rum, you make Ron Zacapa.”Those would be famous last words if they weren’t the first thing that Master Blender Lorena Vasquez tells Qin Xie about Ron Zacapa, the Guatemalan rum brand established in 1976 to celebrate the centenary of the city of Zacapa. Qin Xie met Lorena at Rumfest to learn more about the rum, which although hasn’t officially been launched in the UK, has been growing in popularity amongst bartenders and now the public.

De Bortoli Wines is a third generation family company established in Australia back in 1928 after Vittorio and Guiseppina De Bortoli emigrated there from Northern Italy. The family continue to produce some wines that were made when the winery started up all those years ago, whilst developing new varieties through the generations. We tried three of the De Bortoli range recently and excellent wines they were too.

This is an excellent, very pale, white that’s great to drink either on its own or with food. As you pour the wine and lift it to your nose you get clean grassy and delicate floral notes, giving the impression that it’s quite light, but nothing could be further from the truth.

They say the devil has the best tunes, does he have the best wines though and will they all be red? Nick Harman ascends from the cellar to the top floor of Soho’s Gautier to meet the devil’s right hand man Marcelo Papa and pair his wines with Gauthier’s food.

‘It’s probably not going to make me a millionaire,’ said Shabani as the barman charged our glasses for the third time before we decamped to another Mayfair stockist. ‘In fact it’s going to take three years to break even,’ he added. Douglas Blyde hears a tail of Konik’s Vodka.

When invited to the wine tasting that Laithwaites put on recently, at Altitude 360, I was hardly going to turn down the opportunity, some excellent wines and a stunning venue at the top of one of the south bank’s tallest buildings. I just had to go.

Because of his website’s dim catchphrase, ‘It’s just booze – drink it!’ I anticipate Washington State winemaker Charles Smith might seem loutish. Rather than produce and promote anaesthetics, I believe his resolute coolness is actually his way of disarming drinkers paralysed by European jargon and pretensions…

Tim Adams has the kind of face that looks like it should be located due south of a hat with corks dangling from it. It’s an Australian face, to be frank. It’s a face that speaks of working outside in the fresh air and doing an honest day’s toil for an honest day’s pay. And his ears stick out a bit, as if the tops are normally compressed by comedy headgear. Tim is a winemaker from the Clare Valley. His wines win medals and hearts. At the end of our lunch tasting a range of his products I’m ready to invest my small savings in a cellar full of his wines, they are that delicious.

How’s this for something beautiful. The Little Beauty range of wines from New Zealand have a special offer for Foodepedia readers – an initial discount of 15% on their first order. First though we went to Claridges to have a tasting of these new wines from the the new world

When invited to an event, celebrating 700 years of Armagnac production, I thought how bizarre – well who wouldn’t when the theme was pairing Armagnac with Indian cuisine from the Moghul region in the north west of India? It was absolutely an invitation I wasn’t going to turn down and I was glad I didn’t.