Call me a snob if you like. Call me a fool if it makes you feel better. But the fact is that the first thing I do whenever I am offered a glass of fizzy white wine is to look at the label.

Why do I do this? If the difference in quality, taste, body and bubble were even half as much as my friends in Champagne claim, there would be no need. But the fact is that my tastebuds are not as quick as they once were, and my brain cells are as slow as you would expect in an old age pensioner.
But there is another reason – unconnected with tastebuds and brain cells – which makes me look at the label. It is simply because I (like the rest of the drinking world) have been brainwashed and bewitched by the finest exercise in marketing the world of wine has ever seen. All of which explains why, if I see the word “champagne” on the label, I immediately relax and a big smile illuminates my world-weary features. For some explicable reason (it’s called “marketing”) if I see the words “Cava”, “Cremant” or “Prosecco” I just I feel a tiny bit less happy and less relaxed.

I would be being less than honest with you – indeed I would be being downright dishonest – if I could claim that I could always tell the difference between champagne and cremant (the fizzy white wine which is made in Burgundy) in a blind tasting. But don’t blame me for this admission of guilt. I remember asking one of England’s most famous wine connoisseurs, a man named Harry Waugh, if he had ever mistaken white wine for red wine in a blind tasting. “Not since lunchtime” was his reply.

But back to champagne. The first step towards true happiness is, as I have explained, seeing the word “Champagne” on the label. But there are other stages on the road to total nirvana, each of which heightens my senses and makes the hairs on my neck become progressively stiffer. If, for example, I see the year printed on the label, which tells me that this bottle was produced in an especially good year and is thus vintage champagne, I become profoundly cheerful. And finally, of course, there is the name of the champagne house itself which is certainly the single greatest contributor to my rather private ecstasy.

All of which will explain why I was so supremely excited when the editor of LUSSO instructed me to make my way to the small town of Ay twenty miles south of Reims across some vine-bespattered chalk hills. Here, he told me, the good people, of Bollinger would be waiting for me one sunny afternoon.

Bollinger. The name alone makes me short of breath. It may, incidentally, surprise champagne addicts to know that Bollinger was originally a German family. Anyway, forget Patsy and Eddy in “Absolutely Fabulous”, they slurped “Bolly” and were faintly naff. If you want real class you must go back to the postwar period in France when Madame Jacques Bollinger (usually known as “Aunt Lily”) was running the business. Her advice was impeccable. “I drink Bollinger,” she said, “when I’m happy and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I’m not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it – unless I’m thirsty.” I’ll drink to Aunt Lily.