Like a good Beaujolais, MacLean's vinous peregrination is light, easily consumed but delivers a surprising amount. A gung-ho enthusiast who uses grape shears to snip her fringe during a Monterey harvest, MacLean draws a graphic parallel between drinking wine at a tasting and later at dinner: "It's like meeting a person in a noisy bar who seems interesting, but when you bring him home he doesn't get quieter or shut up." From decapitating champagne with a sword to the life-changing effect of Chateau Latour, MacLean reminds us that wine writing should be as pleasurable as its topic.

Nothing about Robert Mondavi was small except his physical stature. As one of the driving forces of the 20th-century California wine industry, he was a towering figure with an influence that extended well beyond the United States.

Bill Baker, country wine merchant extraordinaire, was a rare blend of gourmet and gourmand. In his outsize pinstripe suit and trademark red braces, he was a regular and idiosyncratic fixture of the London wine tasting scene. Visible from afar, his ample figure was so well known by the wine trade that if he was nowhere to be seen at one of the London trade tastings, he was conspicuous by his absence. Yet there was a lot more to the proverbial legend in his own lunchtime than an ever-expanding girth.

By Anthony Rose

What I liked

Hull Kingston Rovers made the sort of start to life in the Super League that can only give them confidence for the struggles that lie ahead.

The most famous robotics dance routine in English football was given a royal seal of approval yesterday when Peter Crouch put on an impromptu performance for Prince William during training after, he said, being "goaded" into it by his team-mates. The new president of the Football Association was most amused, although when England got down to the serious business of tactical formations, Crouch was not involved.

Royal Bank of Scotland became the latest in a string of major UK companies to shut its final-salary pension scheme to new employees yesterday.

Eat your heart out, Stirling Moss. A UK company is producing this hi-tech near-replica of the Ferraris and Vanwalls of the 1950s. And it's road-legal, says a breathless Sean O'Grady

All along the empty, pretty lanes of Saint-Emilion, small, claret- coloured signs point the way to Chateau This and Chateau That. One chateau name is missing. No one has bothered to erect a sign to Chateau Cheval Blanc. Does an Oscar-winning actress put her number in the phone book? Does royalty advertise? You know you have arrived when you see the modest, carved sign at the entrance. Between the public road and the first of the Cheval Blanc vines, standing in gnarled rows like hunched old ladies at this time of year, there is a shallow ditch. That is all.