My birthday falls in January, along with the Yapp staff Christmas party (like much of the food and drinks industry, it’s just too busy to down tools and party during December). So I have at least two occasions to brighten up an otherwise bleak month.

Over the years, I have managed to find some terrific bottles with which to celebrate my year of birth. A trio of Château Lascombes 1970 jeroboams (bought at auction) considerably enhanced proceedings at my 30th, 35th and 40th; in fact I wish I had saved one for my 50th! 1970 also happens to be an excellent year in Port, Piedmont, Hermitage, Rioja and California.

Very good in wine, but historic in Pop music where 1970 was the wine equivalent of ‘82’ or ’61; album releases ‘Let it Be’, ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’, Jackson 5’s ‘ABC’, JB’s ‘Sex Machine’ and eponymous albums for Elton John, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin III, Supertramp, Hawkwind, Eric Clapton, Kraftwerk, Isaac Hayes, Wishbone Ash, T-Rex and Kris Kristofferson!

For those of you born in trickier vintages, there’s usually somewhere you can find a Whole Lotta Love – last year we drank a perfectly decent 1972 Châteauneuf-du-Pape (bizarrely bottled in Aloxe-Corton) for a friend’s 40th. This year, those celebrating 18th, 30th and 60th birthdays are likely to find treasure hunting (for 1995, 1983 and 1953) easier than those enjoying 21st, 40th or 50th parties!

If the New Age nutters currently camped-out on top of the Pic de Bugarach, near the vineyards of Limoux, who believe the Mayan myth that world is going to end on 21st December 2012 are correct you won’t be reading this and I might as well not have bothered writing it. If, as seems more likely, they are erroneous they can always console themselves with a cheering glass of the local fizz. Sparkling wine has been produced here for centuries and the local winemakers fiercely avow that Benedictine monks were knocking it out well before the arriviste Champenois got in on the act in the 17th Century. They’re much sketchier as to what extent they perfected the all-important process of ditching the spent yeasts by dégorgement but there is more than a kernel of truth in their claim so one can see why they are chippy about it.

Quite what view Philippe Collin, a native of the Champagne region who set up shop here outside the village of Toureilles in 1980, takes when the well-worn bar room arguments about who first put the bubbles in Bubbly start is uncertain, as we have diplomatically avoided soliciting his opinion. Perhaps predictably, Philippe eschews the local grape, Mauzac, in favour of a classic Champagne blend of 20% Chardonnay and 80% Pinot Noir. His cracking ‘Cuvée Selection’ has a lively mousse (not ‘mouse’ as my predictive text asserts), fresh, zesty bouquet and whistle-clean, dry palate. We broach it for all-manner of small celebrations and with a dash of Gabriel Boudier’s peerless Crème de Cassis it makes a very potable (minor) Kir Royale. Just the thing to see in the New Year or to take your mind off imminent Armageddon!

The village social scene seems to have picked up this summer and I can’t help but feel that now my wife has become a school governor we’re picking up invites that maybe would have passed us by last year, however we’re still getting out more than we used to which has to be a good thing. Ann, our now-retired local vicar, is married to a man very well connected in the wine trade (incidentally a friend of Robin Yapp from the 1970s) and has invited us for supper a few times but we had never quiet made it. Finally this Saturday we’d managed to sort out babysitters and the such like so we were off.

When visiting oenophiles it’s always fun to think ahead and think a little left field as this is sure to ignite discussion. Yapp Brothers has recently shipped a delicious Moroccan Syrah grown by Alain Graillot, who normally focuses on world-renowned red Crozes Hermitage so this was left field enough for the evening – or so I thought. Wine ‘Top Trumps’ was soon the entertaining game of the evening – my 2009 Moroccan Syrah was trumped by a 2008 Syrah from Virginia! As we coasted through a number of interesting wines that kept us thoroughly entertained we’d arrived at the “What’s the most unusual wine you’ve got to hand?” moment of the evening. Our host just couldn’t resist the challenge and a bottle was duly produced to blind taste.

So, should you ever be shown this bottle be prepared. I’d spotted the Vigneron Independent logo on the foil so had a small advantage knowing it was French and at 12 percent ABV I was thinking of the Loire – but it didn’t taste, well, like a Loire red really should. I’d guessed Cabernet Franc, however our host was genuinely delighted when he’d unearthed this Malbec from the Loire Valley. All rather cunning but great fun!

Now I need to think very carefully about the return leg…

Some people are enraged by florid taste descriptions, but the wine business would be a pretty soulless place without gooseberries, saddle leather and wet dogs.

There has been quite a bit of comment in the press recently resulting from research undertaken by a Professor John Hayes at Pennsylvania State University’s Sensory Evaluation Centre that concluded that professional wine tasters were likely to have heightened powers of smell and taste (not unlike Spiderman or Daredevil) compared with Joe Public and that their fruity references to gooseberries and mangoes were largely irrelevant to consumers.

Apparently your typical wine buyer just wants basic pointers as to whether a wine is light, dry, medium or full-bodied and doesn’t want to be befuddled by a load of verbose clap-trap from pretentious oenophiles.

The most famous exponent of the florid wine description was probably Jilly Goolden who achieved infamy alongside Oz Clarke on the BBC’s ‘Food and Drink’ programme in the 1990s with her baffling references to the likes of wet dogs, toasted teacakes and barge bilges.

Although Jilly’s over-the-top descriptions induced much hilarity one cannot fault her enthusiasm for her subject or her keenness to convey it to a wider public.

The reason all of this is resonant for me at the moment is that I have just been berated by a Guardian-reading, octogenarian, wine-lover from Winchester (which is a niche demographic – I thought you had to read the Telegraph in Winchester) for referring to an Alsace Riesling’s “classic kerosene scents” and (I admit this is worse) describing a Pommard as having “a bouquet of violets, turned earth, liquorice and saddle leather”. Ouch!

I think most people who write about wine for a living do try and curb their inner Jilly but wine is an emotive subject and occasionally one gets carried away. I think there has to be some poetic licence here. I don’t want to live in a world without Keat’s “blushful Hippocrene, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim” or Rabelais’ Vouvray like “taffeta” or Pliny’s pitchy “pictatum” from the sun-kissed slopes of Côte Rôtie. How can you evoke the magic and mystery of the fruit of the vine without trying to paint a picture in words?

Parker points and cold eyed analytics are all very well for hedge fund managers and soul-less super-market buyers but where is the pleasure and where is the passion? People writing about wine are bound to get caught offside occasionally in flights of fancy but at least they are giving us some insight into what they think about a wine and whether it merits our attention.

I say charge the glasses and bring on the purple prose. I want chest-thumping reds from the South, rip-roaring Rhônes and bodice-ripping Bordeaux. The Inuit apocryphally have many words for snow but we only have a limited stock of adjectives to describe tastes so slightly abstract references to struck matches and wet pebbles (both deployed by the great Jancis Robinson MW OBE) can be helpful. If you can’t bear flamboyant wine descriptions (and some people like my correspondent from Winchester just can’t) don’t read them unless, of course, you enjoy getting wound-up by them.

Perhaps we need to introduce an annual prize for the most torturous wine description in print – I’m sure I could be a contender!

(This post first appeared in The Wine Merchant Magazine, May 2012)

When friends and relations celebrate birthdays and anniversaries I often amuse myself by investigating the vintage in question and finding out what type of wine, if any, it was good for. If the research is fruitful you can then have more fun trying to source a bottle from that year as a topical gift. The first part of this task is made relatively easy by my indispensable “Pocket Guide to Wine Vintages” by Michael Broadbent. The second part is budget dependent and normally involves calls to specialist merchants or a thorough browse on the internet: www.wine-searcher.com is a useful and user-friendly web-site for locating rare bottles.

Some people, like my godson (1990 great for just about everything), sister-in-law (1970 a classic Claret vintage) and elder son (1998 terrific in the Rhône, especially the South) have the sense to be born in indisputably good years where decent bottles are readily available albeit at a price. Others, like myself, (1967 widely indifferent) are less lucky but there is nearly always something of merit somewhere, provided one is prepared to delve and diversify. In my own instance, although ’67 was a so-so vintage in Bordeaux, the sweet wines of Sauternes were uncommonly good. The astronomical sum I paid for a half-bottle (still undrunk) of the peerless Château d’Yquem 1967 is still a source of bitter argument in the Yapp household!

If one is unlucky enough to be born in a truly dire vintage – 1984 is the most recent real stinker (being bad for Bordeaux, Rhône, Burgundy, Champagne, Port, Italy, California and just about everything else with the possible exception of Australia) – then an ability to think laterally is useful. Anyone celebrating a fiftieth birthday this year will have to dig deep to buy any 1961 Claret as it was one of the best vintages of the 20th Century. Two bottles from the prolific (and underrated) 1986 vintage, totalling 50 years together, might make for a more affordable alternative.

If you’re really stuck, as those celebrating eighteenth birthday’s this year might be (1993 I’m afraid), spirits such as malt whisky or Armagnac often age well, while being less vintage sensitive. Alternatively one can buy Tawny Ports, brandies and even rums that have been aged 10, 15 or 20+ years in barrel but don’t actually state a year of production. For the truly aged, fortified wines like Port and Madeira are more likely to retain some youthful vigour in the long-term.

A few years ago I was privileged to meet Anthony Barton of Château Léoville-Barton in Saint Julien, a wine-making hero of mine. We tasted through several recent vintages and he told me he was born in 1930, a notoriously poor year in Bordeaux – of which Michael Broadbent says simply: “Bad weather, bad times, bad wines”! He then explained to me with a mischievous twinkle that he always chooses to celebrate with the vintage of his conception – 1929 was a very good year.

As a self confessed oenophile and melomane this time of year throws many a swerve ball – the wine that I both know and love is flying out of the doors here at Yapp HQ and the staples that I habitually imbibe during the year are getting thin on the ground or await re-stocking from France.

Shops do unusual things at this time of year, for some reason best known to the outlets, they feel a need to play, on rotation, Christmas tunes that no one really seems to audit – I used to live in the middle of Bath and a ‘bad’ busker outside with a one song repertoire would wear equally thin on the ground by 10.00am on a Saturday. I always thought variety was supposed to be the spice of life? I do know that Slade wrote their Christmas Song to be overly cheering (and noisy) in 1973 as an antidote to power cuts and the 3 day week – but we’re still playing it 38 years later and that just can’t be good for your musical health.

Some swerve balls however are great and unexpected, I saw my son in his Primary School nativity play last week dressed as a sheep singing ‘rock around the flock’ and there’s always some good news if you look for it – we’ve still got good stocks of the delicious Vacqueyras: Cuvée Spéciale 2003 and the Pogues wrote a Fairytale of New York with the late and great Kirsty MacColl – so that’ll be enough to get me through to the New Year – well that and a few bottles of Yapp Champagne and Bellet: Domaine de la Source Rouge 2006.

And if variety is the spice of life – I may well be taking home our Christmas variety pack (the infamous Degustation Dozen) to see me through to new year.. as anyone who has worked at a Wine Merchant in December will know what it’s like – so much so we’ve booked our Christmas meal and night out – for 21st January 2012!

PS Our shop here in Mere is very festive, has some great wines open to taste, is open 9-6pm this week (even on Christmas Eve) – and there’s no playing of “That’s what I call Christmas 42” or whatever it may be called this year!