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Sorry for the heart-rending beginning, but when I started buying first-growth Bordeaux 30 years ago this month, Mouton 1970 was £80 a case and so-called "super seconds" such as Cos or Pichon-Lalande were around £45. It was possible in Paris to buy the greatest Bordeaux from the 1928 vintage for as little as £15 a bottle. I remember getting hold of a 1961 Ducru for £8 and wasting it on a snotty Frenchwoman who knew nothing about great wine. She wasn’t especially adept at life in general - a few years later she was sectioned for attacking her husband with an axe.)

The 1982 vintage put an end to this idyll. Opening prices for first growths hit £300 and for super seconds just under £100. John Armit shocked people by suggesting he would open Petrus '82 at £450 a case—nearly double the '81, though now, of course, it seems ridiculously reasonable, given that the '82 vintage sells for upwards of £35,000.

The 2005 opening prices also set new records. Most were unable to get their hands on first growths for less than £4,000 a case, and super seconds upwards of £800 to £1600. The first growths have nearly doubled while the super seconds have not really gone anywhere—further evidence that at this level wine buyers are either millionaires or billionaires.

There was some interesting gossip from a meal this week at The Square, one of London's greatest restaurants. One of the leading wine brokers gave a tenth-anniversary dinner for top clients, and invited Pierre Lurton, manager of Cheval Blanc and Yquem, as the wine provider.  read more »

A few years back a British member of parliament called Neil Hamilton got into hot water when it was alleged he accepted brown-paper envelopes stuffed with cash from Mohammed Fayed, a tycoon who wanted Mr Hamilton ask questions sympathetic to his interests in the House of Commons.

That was bad enough, but what did it for many people was the incidental disclosure that the then-MP and his wife had stayed at the Ritz in Paris (owned by Mr Fayed) for five days or so on an “FC” basis—shorthand in the trade for “fully complimentary”. They ate every meal at L’Espadon, the Ritz's two-star restaurant, aways with Champagne. I suppose this lack of imagination shocked me even more. Not that I don’t like L’Espadon, it is first-rate—but it showed the Hamiltons had zero interest in what Paris had to offer, apart from free bed and board.

Around that time I was travel editor for -----*. I almost wrote a letter to The Times saying that, whereas the Hamiltons had been lambasted for not paying a fat hotel bill, I, as travel editor of -----, would have been sacked if I had paid one.

Anyway, Fay Maschler, the Evening Standard’s reliable restaurant critic, has just produced her list of 50 London restaurants where she would happily spend her own money if required to. It is invaluable both for residents and visitors. It contains not only the usual expensive suspects, but also such gems as the Pakistani kebab place New Tayyabs in Whitechapel, and Patio, a charming Polish place in Shepherd’s Bush. It should be downloaded and carried about for ready reference.

* Here, Bruce names a well-known publication. I have expunged the name out of sheer timidity. (RC)

Tuesday might have been the day of the government's mini-budget, or the start of the Frieze Art Fair, for some Londoners, but for me it was occasion of something far more personally significant—a master class in some of the world's greatest Burgundy, including three of the finest vintages of the past couple of decades. We all should know by now that great Burgundy is made in minuscule amounts compared with say, Bordeaux's Chateau Lafite, which regularly turns out 20,000 cases in a typical vintage. Musigny Vieilles Vignes, easily the equivalent of Lafite in the Burgundian world, produces less than a thousand cases in a good vintage. And that is their largest production. Their white Burgundy is produced in thimblefuls. There are only 100 cases of that and we drank half a case of it last night.

Since the death of Henri Jayer, (see my obit of him in The Independent), Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé is the only domaine that can be spoken of in the same breath as Romanée-Conti. Created in the mid-15th century, its 30 acres surround the original house and outbuildings, which have been lived in by descendants of the same owners since 1528.

Jean-Luc Pépin, the sales director, presented three flights of his tiny crops in the reception room of the Caledonian Club, an improbable establishment just opposite the Halkin hotel in Belgravia. Wine merchants Corney and Barrow, who hold the UK agency, had 50 clients all lined up at long tables facing the front like eager school children, complete with half a dozen Riedel glasses with little circular labels slipped over the stems advising of their wares. This was the first time the fabled 2005 vintage had been tasted outside of France—a generous gesture, given that Corney's allocation sold out months ago.

To describe the white wine as Bourgogne Blanc is about as useful as calling a short wheelbase Ferrari 250 GTO a car. The vines are sited on the sole location designated Musigny Blanc Grand Cru, but the Domaine says that, since the vines are only 15 years old on average, it should wait for a few more years before claiming that honour. The real problem with this wine is that it is so enjoyable now that I doubt if many bottles will last the requisite 10 to 15 years to let its potential shine through. The tannins are concealed under the beautifully balanced fruit while the overall effect is something like a cross between a great Corton-Charlemagne and a Chablis from Raveneau. Pépin mentioned there is also a Poire Wilhelm taste in the centre, which was a shorthand way of describing the immense depth and strength of the fruit.

The genuine modesty of the Domaine does not end there. Their Premier Cru Chambolle-Musigny is actually made entirely from vines on the actual Musigny estate, but again, at around 25 years old, the vines are considered too adolescent to qualify as the real thing. This must be the grandest "second wine" in existence with an amazing ski slope like plunge of tastes before emerging high in the air after liftoff (don't know any other way of describing the joy of this stuff).

The so-called straight village wine they produce (which typically includes some tiny amounts of neighbouring Premier Cru grapes too) was to me too much like raspberry juice compared to these other magnificent wines. I know this is unfair as I have tasted wonderful older ones. There is also 160 cases of Chambolle-Musigny Premier Cru Les Amoureuses, which is far more lacy and ethereal than the others. It, too, was extraordinary at this early juncture, but was obviously capable of far more expressiveness with time. After that, the Bonnes-Mares (400 cases) was a bit like a Page Three Sun bimbo—a massive hearty experience best left for those who like their pleasures straight up and down the wicket.

The pinnacle was the Musigny Vieilles Vignes 05 (900 cases). This was as powerful as the Bonnes-Mares but far more inchoate and slightly rambling—not because it was inferior in any way, but simply getting its act together, along with an undercurrent of tannins to help it on its long journey. The aftertaste went on for nearly a minute. Allen Meadows, a top Burgundy critic, reckons the 2005 to be on a par with the legendary 1990, 1949 or even the 1919. Getting hold of a bottle could be a bit tricky until it comes out on the grey market later this year as the original allocations went in hours.

After this amazing tasting, I was left worrying that SlavChavs, PlebCelebs and other boors would find the 05s so attractive now that they could easily be drunk up well before their prime, once they hit the three-star Michelin restaurants of this world.

The remainder of the evening was almost an anticlimax. This is of course ridiculous, given that we were tasting the 02s and 99s—also stellar vintages. Pépin said he had never before given a class with these three top vintages.

What made it so valuable is that by the end of the evening, with little in the way of nourishment save the occasional water biscuit, it was wonderful to be able to line up all three Vieilles Vignes or Bonnes-Mares or Premier Crus and just compare and contrast them. What became apparent to me at least was how much more I preferred the 02s to the 99s. To me the 99s suffered from a bit too much heat which gave the wines a slightly uniform tropical tinge, while the 02s had more black fruit (as opposed to red) and more centre.

Still, it is easy to fall flat on your face when you are dealing with wines that really shouldn't be approached until well into the next decade. I know how vital this is from opening a 2001 Villages de Vogue in September and finding it tasteless until it had been decanted for more than two hours. Even then, it was really only hinting at its potential.

I forgot to add that we were given as a special treat, an 88 Amoureuses at the end of the tasting. It certainly had great charm and delicacy but the problem is that when you have tasted sublime examples of wines, you tend to be harsh in your judgement of relatively light wine that will not vastly improve.

Overall, it was a true education for someone who until recently tended to feel that Burgundy was merely Mozart to Bordeaux's Bach. The next dilemma is to consider if the 05s will be showing their best in time for me to appreciate them, as, after the age of 80, ones taste buds begin to fade. I will simply have to take the chance—or spoil my greedy children.

Many of us manage to spend at least a couple of weeks in Italy each year, usually congregating in Tuscany, Umbria, Rome and Venice, not just for the food and wine but they certainly assist in the choice of destination. Our recent stay in southern Umbria this summer was especially notable for all of the consistently good quality meals—usually for around US$120 for four hungry people. The wines too were for once of a higher standard than I am used to from regular forays into Venice.

Nancy Jenkins is an old foodie friend of mine who has lived in Tuscany for more than 30 years and written several books on the Mediterranean diet as well as spending time as a staff writer for the New York Times on food. We met through her former husband, the Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent Loren Jenkins, when they were based in a magnificent Cortini Palazzo in central Rome. I still have the image etched on my mind from then of their barefoot 12 year-old daughter Sarah (who has since become a highly regarded chef in New York). She was ambling away from the refrigerator idly eating great spoonfuls of Beluga from a recently arrived kilo that Loren had bought from Tehran.

Nancy wrote a number of food books and was for a time a big cheese in the CIA ( in this case it stands for the Culinary Institute of America). Her latest book, "Cucina del Sole: a celebration of southern Italian cooking", was published this summer. Now she has branched out from her literary pursuits based near Cortona and takes small groups on food tours, not just in central Italy but also in Sicily and Turkey. They are arranged through The Viking Life (an arm of the Viking kitchenware company), and the next one is Flavors of Tuscany and Umbria: Green Oil, White Truffles, and Brown Mushrooms from October 20-29, 2007. The cost for guests is around US$5,000 per person, which includes most but not all meals.

What makes tours like this so worthwhile is that it gives participants the opportunity to meet not only top Brunello wine producers but small scale artisans who create pecorino not to mention local butchers and bakers. There are also informal cooking courses and trips to witness the olive oil harvest.

When I said to her that my only fear is that the usual age of participants hovers around post retirement age, she assured me that on her last one people ranged from 17 to 85. Although there will be hunts for white truffles on the itinerary, Nancy is not so optimistic on that front. It has been one of the worst seasons in recent memory for them in Italy. Some of the suppliers are even putting aside their usual prejudices and going as far afield as Croatia to source them.

One street-food post leads to another. Late last month, the Dosa Man (Thiru Kumar) won the Vendy Awards, which recognise the best street-food vendor in New York. Mr Kumar sells Sri Lankan-style dosas in Washington Square Park (take that, Henry James, you vast, sallow old bigot!). Mr Kumar's food is the only one of the five finalists for which I can personally vouch, and I rate it quite highly. The range of foods on offer among the five (do check out the short video of all five finalists) is inspiring. New York is not quite Singapore, but it's come a long way from hot dogs and pretzels.

Great and manifold are the ways in which my home city of Washington, DC is misunderstood: let us restrict ourselves here to the slander that the city lacks an indigenous food. Chicago has Italian beef and hot dogs; New York has pizza; Philadelphia has cheesesteaks; Washington has chain restaurants and pleated-front khakis. Washington's signature food is in fact the half-smoke, a sausage whose name and origin are shrouded in mystery that this excellent article plumbs. The article is worth reading even if you have no interest in sausage (and what an unimaginably tragic condition that would be): it is a shining example of how popularity can destroy and stubborn pride can sustain and revive the same product. For my money, to get a good one skip the lunch carts and head for The Shrine.

We haven’t heard much about the state of the 07 vintage since the earlier reports about near continual rain from May to August, but the more honest insiders are basically saying it is a disaster for the growers.

It was the same all over France (except in the Northern Rhone) with Burgundy being hit by bad storms in the early summer and no miraculous months of hot weather to redress the stunted growing season.

The 06 Bordeaux vintage was saved somewhat by the heat in September and by drastic crop reduction by the top few score of chateaux, but fundamentally I believe that miraculous saved vintages and unashamed rained on ones suffer from trauma. I have yet to have any 98 left-bank wine that didn’t taste lean and mean.

The 2005 was truly as great as the pundits said. In fact, I predict that once the grander 05s are in bottle next April, it will be spoken of in the same breath as 61, except there is a lot more of it produced.

Despite this depressing latest news for the growers, drinkers and investors are not going to be too upset, especially because greedy Bordelaise producers refused to drastically reduce the 06 prices. (Anyone who was foolish enough to buy any 06 Bordeaux en primeur will probably have to wait until the following decade to see a return). Be warned that any time soon we will see reports of how 07 was saved by relatively benign weather around harvest time and that the great wine-makers have created really quite excellent wines given the prevailing conditions etc etc. Last time I looked at the weather in Bordeaux it said either thunder storms or unsettled weather. So ignore the lot of them and don’t bother buying anything en primeur next spring, even if the prices are down by a third or more.

Instead, remember there is the undervalued 04 to buy—and drink; the 03s for those who like New World power; and, quite soon, a huge range of minor 05s will be on the market, which will be great for the medium- to-long term.

My rule is that a £10 wine from an awesome vintage such as 2000 or 2005 will always outclass even a £100 wine from rubbish one such as 1991, 1992, 1993.

Going slightly further back in the current century, the 2001 Bordeaux vintage is being reappraised, as it was always in the shadow of the superb 2000. There are no bargains at the very very top, as the likes of Lafite have doubled in recent months but look out for non-first-growth 01—and 04—Graves and Pomerols, as most of them have yet to creep in price compared with 2000 and 2003.

Talking of 03, the one top wine that is not infanticide to enjoy right now is Domaine de Chevalier, a red Graves that is back on form. This is amazingly vigorous exciting stuff—and is still available at top brokers or merchants like Farr Vintners or Corney and Barrow for £200 a case in bond. And don’t forget virtually every other 2005 French vintage for extraordinary wines—I particularly adore top of the range Beaujolais such as Fleurie, Moulin á Vent and Brouilly for current drinking, while the minor white Burgundies are delicious too.

An old friend of mine, when asked where he wanted to go for dinner, used to reply, "I know this lovely little Irish restaurant just down the street." The establishment in question, of course, is neither lovely, little, nor Irish (and it is only just barely a restaurant). It is predictable and convenient: a known quantity. I happen to live in the vicinity of an actual lovely little Irish restaurant; nobody would ever confuse the two. But what if the relationship between a chain restaurant and an individual one were closer?

I thought of this last night over dinner at Malaysia Kopitiam, a Mom-and-Pop restaurant that has been churning out first-rate Malaysian fare for a good decade or so, and now finds itself just around the corner from an outpost of a growing chain of Malaysian restaurants. The relationship between Penang and MK is a good deal more intimate than one between, say, a neighbourhood Italian restaurant and Olive Garden (or, needless to say, between the two LLIRs above), both because Malaysian food is less familiar to Americans than Italian, and because, iconographically, a "neighbourhood Malaysian" does not exist in the same way as a "neighbourhood Italian."

That having been said, though, the differences between the two restaurants is vast. Walking past Penang, I saw a gaggle of suit-wearing westerners on cell phones outside, and I imagine the crowd inside was much the same, if only because it has been at the Soho branch, where I have eaten twice. Penang presents itself as a "fun" restaurant with "fun" drinks and a "lively" atmosphere. Outside MK, by contrast, were a pair of east Asian men smoking furiously. A burnished wood, faux-rustic archway tops Penang's door; a tattered red awning hangs over MK's. At Penang a broad staircase leads up to the restaurant; MK's stairs lead down, into a rather dreary, linoleum-floored basement space with Formica tabletop and red naugahyde banquettes. Penang's bar offers (or at least it did offer, when I was last there) an array of flavoured martinis. At MK I was brought a glass of gin on the rocks.

The real difference, though, was in the eating. All four of the dishes my companion and I ordered had the messiness and savour of homemade food. Filling spilled out of the lobak, but it was the single best example of this dish I have ever had. The stuffed lotus root did not quite hold together, but it was none the worse for it. Admittedly, it is hard to go wrong with nasi lemak, but it is equally hard to go noticeably right, and MK did: the chicken for the curry was obviously cut by hand rather than a machine (and it was made from dark meat, rather than the cheaper and less flavourful white meat), the pickles had the soft fizz of home fermentation, and the fried shallots on top had real spark.

Penang's food, in my experience, emphasises sweetness, and this is hardly surprising: it is an easy taste to like, and can cover up a multitude of sins. MK's exhibited the breadth and balance that makes Malaysian food endlessly interesting. Leslie and Penny Phoon, MK's owners, do great work: I was glad to see them doing great business (on a Tuesday, no less) as well.

This is one of the classic futile urban rivalries way up there alongside Sydney (“whattaraya worth?”) vs. Melbourne (“what school did yagoto?”) or even LA vs. SF. Most of Glasgow’s glories seemed to have long floated down the Clyde while Edinburgh still manages to have the sheen of a well-maintained classical city (helped no doubt by being the second home of key hedge-fund players in Europe).

We went to Glasgow last weekend to attend our first gay wedding and thought it would be amusing to have Friday lunch at whatever passes for the best place in town. The fun begins when we booked into the Corinthian, the top Michelin place in town. Admittedly the Serbian telephonist's grasp on English was not exactly Black Belt, but even this did not prepare us for a restaurant with its chairs upended and heavy cleaning proceeding rather than actual cooking. They had taken a lunch booking but in fact they only opened for dinner.

Perhaps we were lucky, as The Observer’s critic said some time back that it was “gaudy, ghastly and over-elaborate. And that's just the clientele”. So we started calling the other likely suspects without getting anywhere and jumped into a cab heading towards the West End, where there are a smattering of good local places.

Five minutes into this process we noticed another abandoned financial institution now transformed into a restaurant called 78 St Vincent. I genuinely cannot recall what we ate except that it was unmemorable and that the wine was an execrable New World Ozzie berry blend at 14%. The only other punters were a table full of slack tied businessmen rapidly demolishing the remainder of the day. (A word of warning: try not to venture downtown after 10pm as you are liable to be deafened by the ambulance sirens or inconvenienced by the vomit puddles. Curious when you see how large the local inhabitants are.)

The wedding was a two pronged affair (timing wise) so rather than endure two nights in between in Glasgow we fled to Edinburgh, where I am pleased to say, things turned up for the better.

New York may have Dean and De Luca and San Sebastian the fish markets but Edinburgh trumps them all with Valvona & Crolla. This vast Italian food and wine store was started in the Thirties but was given a huge boost because Scotland was a popular place for Italian Prisoners of War so they had a captive audience so to speak. It is easily the best Italian provisions store north of the Alps as well as having an amazingly diverse range of Italian wine from Sicilian scorchers to the grandest Gajas and Barolos. Not only that but if you pay £6 corkage you can purchase their wine and take it to the simple restaurant just up the steps.

Now this is the sort of place I can manage on a regular basis. Noisy, three rows of wooden tables under what looks like a converted storage shed and completely packed with families and their wide eyed babies happily slurping down scraps from their contented parents while other groups have their signature pizzas.

I went for the Bucatoni Ametriciana (slightly larger than spaghetti with a hollow centre with a pancetta and other anonymous meat in a tomato ragu) which had a divine stinky, sweaty drainy odour (how offal!) Then Tagliere di Bistecca, a huge rare rib eye with the customary rocket and Reggiano shavings with olive oil (pictured, right). This was good enough for the River Café in London but for a fraction of the price and washed down with a whole bottle of Barolo Paesi Tuoi 03. Now Barolo is not the sort of wine that drinks well young and this was no exception but it’s pure steely class occasionally peeped over the rather tannic parapet.

The final course was a slight mistake—a selection of cheeses along with figs, jam and biscuits. Sadly it had only been released from a refrigerator seconds before so the sustaining flavour of the cheeses was cloaked by the chill.

I never fail to go to this pleasure palace whenever I am in Edinburgh—if only it was replicated in London as you can eat stupendously well for £20 a person and then spend the £80 you saved on a Brunello or Barolo 97.

Valvona & Crolla, 19 Elm Row, Edinburgh EH7 4AA Tel. 0131 556 6066