With the World Gourmet Summit looming on the calendar and every highly strung Michelin star-laden chef imaginable about to descend on the city, the food athletes of Singapore are flexing their muscles and sharpening their adjectives in preparation for the annual food bonanza.

I am a dead ringer for stories about circumstances which change small businesses for the better and one of my favorites is the day we decided to bring Majella Cabernet 2004 to our database.

The race to $1000 per bottle for the commercial release of an Australian wine is on - with some pundits calling the Penfolds Grange 2008 worthy of the price in light of the recent Wine Advocate rating of 100/100.

Its one of lifes' little curve balls - that a really good sticky is never actually sticky. Instead one looks for wine which is sweet but never cloying or syrupy. To move to the top of the class - the acid of a good dessert wine should balance the sweetness in total harmony.

The food scene was rocked recently with the news of a food poisoning scare at a certain #1 rated restaurant in Europe. The whole culture of the place is environmentally responsible and comitted to using ingrediants sourced from local areas. I caught a recent television piece which included the same executive chef doing a showcase dinner in Japan. It was tremendous fun watching 30 egos - each the size of Manhatten - crammed into one kitchen the size of a couple of car packing spaces, but thing that I remember the most about it was I am sure I saw him foraging greens from what seemed to be a very "rustic" ditch for his particular dish.

There are still loads of Australian shiraz producers who - along with the producers of Geordie Shore - ought to be dragged up in front of the International Court of the Hague and held accountable for their crimes against humanity.

It used to be that if ever you wanted to annoy an Australian all you did was talk about their cricket team or remind them that Nicole Kidman was actually born in Hawaii. These days its discussions about New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc being the most widely consumed wine in Australia that really gets the sabres rattling and the teeth grinding...

The famed "Judgement of Paris" wine event was about as earth-shattering for wine-heads as it was for the rest of the world when Archimedes dipped his bits into the bath and discovered the scientific principle of displacement.

As the global press lurches from one scandal to the next - every day yielding a fresh revelation of some kind - it has to be said that the local press has been handling a few hot potatoes themselves - with the star witness of the "Contracts for Sex" trial appearing before the Singapore court this week.

I reckon that Angelina Jolie`s bucket list has to be a fairly well-thumbed and exhaustive one. At the beginning as Billy-Bob Thornton`s squeeze she was a Hollywood "wild child" - complete with "his and hers" vials of blood and a play-room allegedly lined with velcro - leaving me saddled forever with feelings of defeat and ineptitude...

I like to collect friends who live in Cape Town - especially the ones who enjoy accomodating guests during the summer, when rental prices skyrocket to accomodate the tourists in their dinky safari hats and hybiscus print Muu-Muus. I guess that like the Parisians - Capetonians find the whole idea of choosing not to live there a complete mystery, and I have a hard time blaming them for that sentiment.

The recent offering of Grange 2008 was something of a juggernaut. In addition to the usual mania surrounding this wine's annual release, we had the additional sizzle of a "perfect" score from Wine Advocate to deal with.

A winemaker once patiently spent a whole evening and a bath-full of Pinot - explaining the principles of how people react differently to wines on different days according to the cycles of the moon. Given that we were bundled up amongst her vines at about 2 am on a freezing Central Otago night after a lengthy yet fabulous dinner, and were sharing a lengthy yet equally fabulous cigar at the time all helped convert me to the principles of viticulture according to the cycles of nature - rather than mankind.
 

Every wine-head with an email address will have woken up today to an inbox jam-packed with breathlessly urgent sales pitches about the amazing value attributed to the newly upgraded 2010 Bordeaux.
 

Shake a tree on the average Saturday afternoon here in Singapore and more than a few wine event invites are sure to fall into your lap. I have a few wine-head zealot mates who encounter real levels of stress trying to work out which to go to  on a given weekend in order to get the most daylight out of their drinking day...