Our village does seem to work on the collective momentum generated by birthdays, I’m never sure why but that’s seems to be the village MO. My son was 6 last week and as this coincided with a bank holiday weekend and a half decent weather forecast the impromptu BGCCC (Broughton Gifford Caravan and Camping Club) was formed for it’s inaugural mission – destination Devon.

On the Friday night the convoy started to leave the sleepy village, with a section breaking away to collect me en route at Yapp HQ. The advance party arrived on site and started to set up. As the evening progressed more arrived and set up base camp – by dusk we’d assembled 8 adults and 9 children – all ready for a shot at al fresco wine tasting the next evening.

A great day on the beach (after finally managing to find car parking for 3 cars and a van in Lyme Regis) meant we could start on a few rosé Yapp staples – the Côtes du Luberon rosé from Château la Canorgue really hit the spot having been chilled all day – organic and fruity and showing the age of the assembled adults triggered a comment about Opal Fruits – even my children know they are called Starburst these days – but it was a great way to start the evening.

As the light began to fade, we moved in under canvas – the two universal stand outs of the night were the Beaumes de Venise: Vielles Vignes Domaine de Durban 2010 (most oenophiles know the sweet white Beaumes de Venise but not this delicious red incarnation) and the Bandol: Mas de la Rouvière Rouge 2007 was as blockbusting as ever! Also, it’s not every camping trip when you can try a Côtes du Rhône made by Jean Louis Chave! The ‘Mon Coeur’ 2010 was as silky and slick as you could have hoped for.

So, I’m now back at Yapp HQ having picked up my car from here on the way back – now reflecting on the weekend, this was the first hopefully of many BGCCC weekends away – we’ll look forward to the next excuse birthday to head off and drink wine by the sea – and maybe a few Devon Teas along the way to boot!

Every now and then, there’s a collective momentum in the sleepy backwaters of Broughton Gifford and what seems like half the village manages to get out for the night. My wife’s birthday lands on the 5th April and another village friend lands her birthday a few days later – so there was enough fair warning and planning to get 12 of us out to the Fox for a meal with all the associated trimmings!

Broughton Gifford boasts no shops but two pubs – the Fox (http://www.thefox-broughtongifford.co.uk/) is my preferred venue as the wine list is pretty decent, the atmosphere routinely relaxed and well, I can walk there in less than five minutes.

I started with a great Wiltshire Ham Hock Salad, moved onto a fine pork belly – all the meat and vegetables are sourced locally – and judging by the pigs, hens and vegetable plots just to the back of the pub there’s little doubting the provenance of the supplies.

Working in the world of French Wine, it’s always worth a foray into other countries when I get a chance – I’ve always been a fan of Malbec and the wine list at the Fox had a great sounding 100% Malbec hiding in the list. The perfect foil to pork belly it has to be said!

We all finally left at 1am, rescued various baby sitters from their duties and retired – sated, happy and content. The Malbec was spot on – and next time I’m there I’ll drop a Yapp list in – the wine list was good – but there’s always room for a few more French gems on any decent wine list!

Barcelona makes a great location for a city break at the tail-end of a seemingly interminable British winter. To feel the sun on ones face and sand between the toes after months being enshrouded in coats, scarves and gloves is truly uplifting. The Ciutat Comtal offers a mine of cultural diversions from the fabulous Museo Picasso and Gaudi’s unmissable architectural legacy to the hustle and bustle of the Ramblas and the inimitable Boqueria market. It is a vibrant, visitor-friendly city and if you tire of sight-seeing you can make up a picnic, hire a bike and cycle out along the revitalised seafront. Don’t forget to pack one of Manuel Vásquez Montalaban’s ‘Pepé Carvalho’ mysteries if you want to get a passionate and insightful account of Catalonian cooking that will give you ample gastronomic inspiration.

Spain has justifiably garnered numerous accolades for its contemporary cuisine, spear-headed by Ferran Adrià’s ground-breaking El Bulli, but it would be criminal to overlook the simpler more traditional tapas which provides such versatile and rewarding epicurean enjoyment. Friends, colleagues, guide books and the lady whose apartment we rented all came up with the same recommendation – Cal Pep. So with a degree of inevitability we hot-footed it to number 8, Plaça des Olles as soon as we’d collected our keys.

You can book a table in the small restaurant at the rear of the establishment that Josep ‘Pep’ Manubens first opened in 1977 but the real action is out the front where a small file of diners, often accompanied by a phalanx of aspirant diners, sit at the bar and enjoy what must be on any aficionados short-list of the world’s tastiest tapas. There is a heavy emphasis on seafood and the service is frenetic and enthusiastic in equal measure. There are no menus and waiters serve you what you have spotted other people eating and admired or what they think you would like. There is nothing not to like. A bowl of baby squid with chickpeas was delicious. Ditto shavings of flash fried artichoke in the lightest of batters. Steamed razor clams with lemon wedges and olive oil – divine. And so it goes on: the tenderest calamari precede the most mouth-watering Ibérico ham followed by the sweetest scallops with a garlic dressing to die for. Nor must you overlook the tuna tartare. Everything is super-fresh and cooked before your eyes so you can enjoy the theatre of the preparation of your next dish while consuming its predecessor. Thirty six years on Pep is still at the forefront of proceedings rattling off instructions ten to the dozen pausing only to greet regulars and intervene when he thinks a dish needs tweaking.

Research divulged that there is an aspirational wine list studded with resonant vinous references but locals, almost exclusively, opt for the house white wine a zesty, citrus-edged Sumarroca Penedès Blanc de Blancs that weighs in at just 11.5% and is served by the glass at a very reasonable 1.95 euros.

There are only really two caveats to recommending this gem of restaurant. One is that you will, almost certainly, have to queue for quite some time before you are fed as its popularity outweighs the number of covers available. The other is that despite the modest wine prices a family of four foodies with healthy appetites can rack up a hell of a bill with alarming alacrity. That said, I can’t wait to go back. We had a brilliant time in Barcelona but Cal Pep was the highlight of the trip.

The Works Canteen (http://www.theworkscanteen.co.uk) is an exciting new addition to my home town of Frome’s gastronomic firmament so I was delighted to be invited by its entrepreneurial owners Phil and Liz to host a wine tasting and dinner there last Saturday evening. The Works Canteen is an upmarket café by day and sometime restaurant by night and its’ minimalist, urbane, interior, with long refectory tables and industrial lighting is a refreshing departure from the chintzy West Country tea-shops of yesteryear.

We didn’t have enough lead time in arranging this event for it to feature in an official Yapp mailing so we were reliant on our website and Twitter to promote it. Fortunately the denizens of Frome and its environs are switched on to social media and we were soon over-subscribed. Head chef Laura Bolt devised a mouth-watering menu to accompany selected wines from the tasting which we diligently and dutifully road-tested together the previous week.

Playing to a full house of 50 people I rattled through a whistle-stop ‘Tour de France’ tasting of some of my favourite wines kicking off with a zesty, sparkling Vouvray and winding up with a rich, unctuous, sweet Monbazillac. Having got the formal part of the evening out of the way (and belatedly remembered to order our ‘home alone’ kids a take away pizza) it was time to relax, chat to friends and enjoy the Works Canteen’s terrific cuisine. Our starter was a terrine of sole served with a herb pancake and chilli dressing that was paired with a Viognier de l’Ardèche 2011 from the ever reliable Vignerons Ardéchois Co-operative. The heat of the chilli married brilliantly with the tropical fruit notes and silky texture of the Viognier so we were off to a great start. Our main course was a warming stew of venison and chestnuts which went down really well with Jean-Pierre Boisson’s crowd-pleasing red Vin de Pays ‘Petit Caboche’ – a classic Southern Rhône blend of Grenache and Syrah with oodles of ripe garrique berry fruit and spicy undertones. We were then served a Beenleigh Blue cheese with some delicious home-made oatcakes and quince paste followed by a divine panna cotta with spiced, poached pears. To keep things simple we partnered both of these dishes with the aforementioned, rich, honeyed Monbazillac: Domaine de l’Ancienne Cure 2010. It would be remiss of me not to mention 2 things on which many establishments fall down – bread and coffee. The Works Canteen excels at both which is unusual and reassuring – not least because I live a short walk away.

We left feeling sated and contented and as Victoria Moore observed recently in the Telegraph: “That is the whole point of good wines, isn’t it? Good evenings, and good company.”

I first became aware of Jonathan Meades back in 1993 – I was an undergraduate at the time, studying in Portsmouth. With what could be seen as a high degree of resonance, I spotted his book ‘Pompey’ in a book shop beneath the Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth’s original contribution to Brutalist architecture which received a commendation from the Civic Trust in the Sixties, condemnation as one of the ugliest buildings in the UK in the Eighties, and finally a wrecking ball in 2004.

Being typically skint, I didn’t buy the book there and then. I returned later to make the purchase, but it had gone – all copies sold out. There were no more available to order, the print run exhausted. Knowing that the book had received rave reviews, I kept an eye out for a copy in second hand bookshops with no luck. The one friend who I knew had a copy moved to Malaysia to avoid lending it to me. Several years passed until I found a dog-eared copy, which I replaced with new when it was finally re-printed.

Moving forward into the new millennium, hunting down a printed book in second hand shops seems bizarre. With the advent of the internet, within seconds I can find a title via Google, purchase it with one click from Amazon, or buy a copy of dubious origin cheaply from Ebay, and have it delivered to my door next day for a quid.

Whilst the potential to discover any product or piece of knowledge via the internet immediately is an amazing gift, one consequence is a decrease in direct purchases from their creative sources. The ease with which books can now be purchased, read, and subsequently sold on means fewer people are buying books new – hence lower royalties for the author. If a used book purchased online is out of print, then the author would not be receiving an income from this sale anyway. But a second-hand purchase of a book still in print is a sale lost to the author. Traditional publishing is also a changing business – Amazon report sales of electronic versions of books now outstrip paper copies, and the rise of self-publishing electronic books negates the need for a publishing house or printer. The result – a glut of dross. ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ has now out-sold ‘Harry Potter’, a statement which fills me with despair on multiple levels.

So it was interesting to see the method with which Jonathan Meades’ new book ‘Museum Without Walls’ has been published, via the Unbound publishing house. They have revived a system popular in the nineteenth century where a group of subscribers pledge support to an author, to enable a book to be written. In return for early payment, subscribers receive both a mention in, and a signed copy of, the book when it is finally published. In the case of Unbound, the copy of the book was also packaged with a raft of Meades-based ephemera, including a pair of dark glasses so that we subscribers can pretend to be Meades himself, albeit briefly and in private before we are caught and shamed.

Is the book any good? Given that I had nearly a decade of anticipation before I finally managed to read ‘Pompey’, I think I’ll leave it on my desk a bit longer yet before starting. If it’s not on Ebay in a couple of weeks, then I loved it.

I spent last Saturday evening holed up in room 34 of the Cardiff M4 Travelodge with several other grown men dressed in lycra. Now, I acknowledge that for some readers this might be a fairly run-of the-mill night out, but it was a first for me. We had headed West for an early start on the infamous Dragon Ride, 130 miles through the Black mountains and Brecon Beacons. Spectacular countryside, unpronounceable place names and brutal climbs. They may call it ‘The Valleys’ but we didn’t seem to spend much time in them. I believe the course had been designed by The Grand Old Duke of York. Team Yapp limped home in around 10 hours.

Breakfast and Tea with our friends, Claude the Butler.

Pleasingly, it was the second outing for our new Yapp custom kit that had made its debut on the Tour of Wessex a week earlier. In contrast to ‘the Dragon’, the Tour of Wessex had been an enjoyable frolic through the rolling hills of Somerset, Dorset and (briefly, but importantly) Wiltshire. In fact the route took us straight past Yapp HQ and necessitated a pit stop for a glass of Champagne. On the subsequent (and final) 20 mile section of the 106 mile day, we averaged 20mph which says everything you need to know about the performance-enhancing qualities of Dumangin & Fils!

Team Yapp enjoying a spot of Dumangin Champagne instead of electrolyte sports drink