My father was recently given a very nice looking bottle of wine. The sort of gift from a relative stranger that frankly would be rather embarrassing to receive due to its obvious seniority and provenance. An old peeling label wrapped around a bottle of Bordeaux with a thick foil cap so firmly attached that you may well need a can opener to get to the cork. Longevity and gradual maturity were the obvious designs when bottling this wine.

So what is it?

Chateau La Lagune, Haut Medoc. 1978 is the vintage. I was eight years old then. Jaws 2 was on at the cinema, there were no mobile phones, no Internet, Jim Rockford was in the middle of discovering new cases, the Boomtown Rats were at their height, polar bears were a happier bunch....and this little wine was being born.

According to Berry Bros and Rudd

"1978 has turned out to be a very good wine vintage especially in Pauillac and St Julien. Weather conditions were challenging with a very late spring followed by a torrid and erratic summer. The vintage was saved by perfect early autumn weather and as a consequence some very good to excellent wines were produced. It would be wise to select the better Châteaux in this vintage purely because some of the lesser estates are over the hill. The best will continue to drink until 2010-2012. Lafite Rothschild is the wine of the vintage."

The bottle looks wizened and wise, the strain of holding a secret for 32 years. Older in fact than my recent tennis doubles partner, who would probably benefit from substituting me for a well placed bottle of claret (I am still struggling with the game). It is staggering imagine what this bottle must have seen over the years, the journeys it has made, the cellars it has graced, the deals it has been part of. I just hope it was treated with care.

It is probably most impolite to find out the value of a gift, but I could not resist. This bottle of 1978 sunshine is worth in the region of £45 according to wine-searcher.com.

This is where the research irritations begin when using the Internet. I have a major bugbear when it comes to winery websites. Have you noticed that a large amount of them seem to have been infected with over complexity and creativity? You hit the homepage and immediately every link is a moving target, as some artistic rendition of the brand moves across the page in a Flash driven web engine. Loading times take an age, and navigation is appalling. I don't know about you, but I just want information, not a half baked whim of a web designer.

Here is the website for Chateau Lagune. See what I mean? Believe me that is not too bad compared with some.

All you need to know about this bottle is that it is Third Growth (Troisièmes Crus) in the Médoc classification of 1855. Ask Emperor Napoleon III (probably a website called that already for all I know) for details , but there are a total of five growths, and the first growth (Premier Crus) is better than the fifth. The word 'growth' is just confusing as it is really only a category, for lack of a better word, a way of ranking the wines.

The only problem is that this is my father's bottle, not mine. I will have to persuade him to open it while I am visiting, as I am excited to sample a window from so far in the past.

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