2005-10-18 - 10:52 p.m.

Cognac, France

If you�re going to swank around the west coast of France, you may as well do it in the private chateau of one of the world�s biggest cognac producers. Although my job is occasionally vaguely perky, I don�t� often get to sample the jolly-boy jaunts that wine and spirits writers get to on a regular basis, courted as they are by the big old money-swilling booze jockeys of this world. Having seen the kind of treatment they get, I�m half sorry I didn�t go into this line myself, though drinking heavily for a living might not be the kind of alcoholic encouragement I really need at this stage.

The two days were mostly endless rounds of tasting more and more outlandishly priced cognacs. I, of course, know nothing about the finer points of the distillation process or ways of parsing the various aromas. Luckily, though, the company are fairly keen to tell you what to think and how much you are supposed to be enjoying what�s in your glass.

My inarticulate bumbling wasn�t really a problem until we were handed a thimble-sized glass of a cognac from 1848 and asked to ruminate on its magnificence. I vaguely got the sense of sipping stale mildew, but confined myself to an incisive �It�s, uh., great�� I�m not sure you should ever be putting anything a century and a half old into your mouth.

We were also given samples of many of their competitors� equivalent offerings, mostly so it could be pointed out that these alternatives were vile filth that shouldn�t even be allowed on the market, let alone sipped at dinner parties by urbane sophisticates.

By dinner time, I had had more cognac than I had had in the rest of my life put together. There was only one option, really. And that was to lay off. And switch to red wine, of course.

We had the chateaux to ourselves for the night, which sounds great until you discover there�s not actually THAT much to do besides steal cigars and raid random oddly-coloured decanters. Luckily, I was at that point of inebriation where you are magnificent with a cue, and saw off all-comers at the French version of billiards, which is played on a weird table with no pockets. One of the journos was so sloshed that he had to have the rules explained to him (�like showing a card trick to a dog�) on every single on of his shots.

This morning I learned more about barrel making than is strictly necessary for modern living, and mostly concentrated on not ejecting 150 year and one day old cognac anywhere inappropriate.