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.

Couch potato

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."

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.

After the calm comes the storm in a wine glass. Between the tasting of the new 2010 Bordeaux vintage before Easter and a second showing of the wines at Vinexpo a couple of weeks back, three things happened. The majority of critics came out with their scores and tasting notes. Bordeaux responded by setting prices for the wines. And the wine trade is now offering those wines for sale en primeur (ie, before bottling and delivery in 2013) to consumers.

Occasionally, a wine has an impact that takes it into the realm of legend. The 1977 Cavas de Weinert Malbec is such a wine. Three years after Juan Domingo Péron's death, the volume of cheap wine drunk in Argentina rivalled that of France and the notion of quality was as alien a concept as political stability. Made from old malbec vines, in large new oak barrels, this wine was impressively powerful. It was the creation of Raúl de la Mota, then in the twilight of an illustrious career. Born in 1918, de la Mota was strongly influenced by Bordeaux's eminent Professor Émile Peynaud after the latter's visit to Argentina for the French wine company Calvet. In the 1980s, the American critic Robert Parker called Weinert South America's only outstanding wine.

Late for Lafite. I swing into the gravel driveway of the Pauillac first-growth château at half past noon. The place is a morgue. All week, elbow room in Bordeaux is at a premium thanks to the thousands of trade and press visitors thronging from around the globe to taste the new vintage. Lafite, though, along with the global travelling circus, is out to lunch.

On Wednesday, Patrick Cockburn wrote about Libya: "Forays to and fro by a few pick-ups with machine-guns in the back are reported as if they were German and British divisions fighting in the same area 70 years ago."