The brilliantly-staged annual Bordeaux press and trade tasting week is now a gravy train resulting in the serious boosting of the coffers of the greatest châteaux. Despite staggering prices for their pre-release 2009 vintage, they made hay because the vintage was rated as one of the true greats.

It's deathless prose: 52 per cent cabernet sauvignon, 45 per cent merlot and 3 per cent petit verdot. The label tells you everything and nothing about the 2007 Château Brown, Pessac-Léognan, £25.99, Soho Wine Supply (020-7636 8490), an enticingly spicy Bordeaux. It's the 3 per cent petit verdot that's intriguing.

If you stick to buying your wine in supermarkets, chances are you haven't yet tripped over a great Burgundy. Burgundy is not something supermarkets tend to excel at. Its small-scale, artisan products can be pricey, infuriatingly inconsistent and difficult to pin down, but the idea that you have to be on a city slicker's bonus to afford it is wide of the mark.

Blackburn now have two Olssons on their books after manager Steve Kean today completed the signing of Martin's twin brother Marcus.

Blackburn have completed the loan signing of Anthony Modeste from Bordeaux.

Blackburn boss Steve Kean has held talks with Christopher Samba and told the unsettled defender he will not be sold.

Imagine it's a year from now. The turbulent events of 2012 seem so obvious with the benefit of a rear-view mirror. True, we'd already seen wine sales starting to spiral downwards, but isolation from Europe coupled with yet another above-inflation tax hike brought gloom if not quite doom to what was left of the high street. The new Oddbins and Wine Racks clung on. George Osborne riffled greedily through our pocket but failed to spot the gaping hole in it.

Oil, gold and fine wine outstripped the FTSE in 2011, the index of the 100 most valuable companies having fallen 5.6 per cent over the year.

One of the keys to the dramatic expansion of wine in China was the result of Hong Kong's new-found status as a global wine hub. On 27 February 2008, John Tsang, the Chief Financial Secretary of Hong Kong's Treasury, announced the scrapping of the tax on wine in Hong Kong. With an estimated 350 importers today, and the proliferation of air-conditioned warehouses, Hong Kong has become a major supplier of fine wine, both legally and illicitly (China's duty is 48 per cent to Hong Kong's zero) to China.

Eyebrows were raised heavenwards this autumn when the trophy for a Bordeaux blend over £10 was snatched by a Chinese red from beneath the noses of Argentina, Australia and California. Sneering journalists questioned the integrity of the Decanter World Wine Awards. Then they queried the authenticity of the wine itself. How could China possibly make a wine capable of taking on and beating the world? D Loh commented in the China Daily: "If the wine is good, connoisseurs query if it has been secretly imported and then placed in a Chinese bottle."

Heiress's family dropped complaint against Banier but state prosecutor has pursued case regardless

Q&A travel unravelled

Sharp-suited bankers wondering about groups of unusual-looking tourists in Docklands may have come across a new tour being organised by the Occupy London protesters. It offers an historical guide to financial sites in the capital. The tone for the tour is rather set by the promotional blurb: "Canary Wharf is situated in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, the local authority with the second highest rate of severe child poverty in the UK. This year, Barclays Bank announced pay and bonuses for its top five staff of £110m".

Bordeaux, Burgundy, Beaujolais. My first editor assumed, and so therefore did I, that this was the holy trinity of Bs at whose altar the Indy wine reader would sip and worship. And so it was until the New World cocked a snook at the French, using the same grapes but undercutting them on price. It worked as a boot up the derrière and while the three French Bs are now required to take their place alongside cabernet sauvignon and pinot noir (less so gamay) from the unlikeliest nooks and crannies, remembrance of things past has rekindled a new love-in with today's Bordeaux.