To Champagne ... and a meeting with 00Fizz!

To Champagne this week. To the French wine region with the fewest problems. Their only problem is they just cannot make enough. The region is all fully planted up and there still isn't enough to go round. Bordeaux would really love to have that problem. So Champagne prices look likely to rise. There are already shortages of vintage wines and the newly fashionable pinks.

In fact the Champagne authorities are seriously considering expanding the region. That's not a bad idea at all - the historic region was larger. And when they came to draw up the appellation boundaries in 1927, the usual oddities cropped up in the mapping. Some village 'Maires' were too slow to get their applications in, or just not bothered or too lazy. And they didn't use geologists or geographers back then. So if you wander around the edges of Champagne today you see some very nice slopes which you would expect to be covered in vines but which are now just grass.

No question there's a lot of land outside the district that could produce good Champagne to everyone's advantage. But how to do it is the problem. Growing grapes for Champagne is hugely profitable. Redrawing the boundaries would create millionaires with just one quick signature. Land worth nothing would suddenly be worth a fortune. Can you imagine the dramas? As one wise old Champenois said to me "there'll be murder done"!

We were at Taittinger which has the finest old cellars (dug by the Romans) which is celebrating coming back into family ownership (well, family plus a bank) and keen to get better known. Well, I assume that's why they were so friendly and in Champagne they do 'friendly' with style. Great style. And no-one does style better than my friend Bruno Paillard.

If Bond were French he'd be Bruno.

Bruno just IS style. Throw him into a cowshed, he would come out elegant. I met Bruno when he was just starting out. His father was a rare thing; a Champagne broker who helped me find several unknown, small producers or 'récoltants-manipulants' as they are known (farmers who make and sell their own wine rather than just selling grapes to the Champagne 'Houses').

Today, you can't meet the original Bollinger, Krug, Moet or Clicquot, but you can still share an elegant glass with Bruno P. He's only 53. Not content with his own House he has also put together with a couple of friends a Champagne group - Boizel Chanoine - which, with the recent acquisition of Lanson has suddenly become the second largest group in Champagne. That is amazing. He is amazing. He is also President of the Champagne Producers Association. They tell me I am successful but Bruno has done more. He holds these lunches at his house in Reims and gets a retired 3-star Michelin chef to come and cook them. Is that style or what? Keep an eye on Bruno.

I've had my own brand of Champagne made since 1978, and worked with sparkling winemakers all over. Though actually I'm not the real sparkling expert in the family. My wife looks after two sparkling-wine vineyards; one with a friend in our Oxfordshire village and another with her sister in Australia at Moonah at the bottom wind-swept end of Mornington Peninsula.

All the pruning, tying, netting and harvesting keeps these ladies very busy and fit. They haven't produced any bottles for sale yet. But I live in hopes and the expectation that in my twilight years my daily task will be to drink my way through my wife's fizz. The odd thing I've learnt lately is that to make a really delicious sparkling wine you must start by making as bland and plain a still wine as you can. It's the champagnization process itself which delivers the flavours we love.

Table-gripping stuff: a silk purse from a sow's ear ...

Bruno and his chums won't thank me for saying it but up until the invention of the sparkling process, Champagne made dreadful wine. Green, table-gripping stuff. Now it's the most successful wine in the world. So perhaps you can, after all, make very nice silk purses ... if you get your ears from just the right sows.

By the way, if you go to Champagne, be careful never to ask for 'Moay' (et Chandon). They can be very crushing with their put-downs in Champagne. Moët is pronounced 'Mwett' because it's not a French but a Dutch word. Most of the big Champagne houses have German names in fact.

However, just to complicate it the full name is Frenchified by running the two names and the 'et' together as one; 'Mwetayshondon'. Getting these name right is a nightmare. Stick to Krug. That's an easy one.