Cloudy bay has a reputation. A good one. If a bottle comes your way you may feel a little tingle of anticipation before opening it. The price tag of around £17 to £28 certainly talks the contents up, and sets your palate on high alert, maximum sensitivity, so as not to miss each ephemeral aroma molecule as it bounces around your olfactory system.

It sounds like Cloudy Bay should be a modest boutique wine maker, nestled in a beautifully named place on the South Island in New Zealand. But this idyllic vision is somewhat ruined as it is actually owned by a corporate beast called LVMH (Moet Hennessy,Louis Vuitton). Booze and fashion all under one roof. It has a mass market feeling about is suddenly. According to Victoria Moore Cloudy Bay produces around 1.2 million bottles of their sauvignon blanc per year (they also have other varietals). Not so special now.

I can make a good spaghetti bolognese, but if a supermarket bought my recipe and scaled it up I am sure it would never taste quite the same.

Do I like it? Well I am not a huge New World sauvignon blanc fan. The big tropical flavours are in my view too much. I normally stick with the Loire for that grape.

But there is more to Cloudy Bay than one varietal.

I had some friends to dinner the other evening and I knew they loved their wine, so I made a special trip to my local wine merchant to source something interesting. I purchased a gamay from the Touraine as we were eating fish, along with a sauvignon.

They however outgunned me and brought some delicious bottles, one of which was Cloudy Bay Pinot Noir 2009, at about £28 a pop. A very generous gift which I was looking forward to drinking.. The bringer of the bottle discussed how he loved the wine, and he grabbed the bottle in a pre- opening excited fondle. Suddenly without warning he fumbled and it began to fall towards my hard tiled kitchen floor.

Crash!

In an instant the bottle exploded, shards of glass flying everywhere, the contents splattered across the floor, looking thin and lifeless. Disbelief was the first reaction. Now I sort of know what it must be like to launch a ship, except this was a bottle of red not champagne (although Moet is the holding company), and I was only launching a dinner party.

I mopped up the mess. I now literally had bucket loads of bouquet, but tainted with general floor detritus. I looked for a sieve.....not not really, it was the end of the journey for that bottle.

If anyone out there has ever tasted Cloudy Bay 2009 Pinot Noir, please let me know if I should hang onto my sense of loss, or move on with life.

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