James Crowden joins a mystery tasting afternoon at Devon Wine School

IT WAS the last Saturday in August and the M5 was jam-packed with holidaymakers wending their weary way home. So to get to the Devon Wine School near Crediton, I drove on the lanes from Somerset across the Blackdowns. From time to time I studied the detailed instructions and finally, just when I needed it most, I saw a small sign saying Devon Wine School. I had arrived.

Set up by Alastair Peebles and his wife Carol, this is one of Devon's most interesting hideaways. The farmhouse has been restored and is now also run as a five-star B&B. In previous lives Carol has run a restaurant and Alastair worked as a wine buyer for Berry and Rudd and ran his own wine business for 40 years. He is a master of wine and is currently one of the three UK finalists for the CIVC Champagne ambassadors competition. And that is very much what he is, an ambassador for wine. I had the feeling the farmhouse was the embassy for the Champagne region of France and we were about to be granted special tourist visas.

The short course entitled Champagne versus UK Sparkling was a wonderful opportunity to test-drive nine different champagnes and English sparkling wines with a tutored blind tasting.

The small group came from Barnstaple and Somerset and included a Royal Marine, an engineer who works for a firm that specialises in making filters, many of which are used in the wine trade, and three women all working in education. Sadly another couple never turned up at all, they were caught in the traffic on the M5.

Upon arrival we sat in the sun overlooking the lawns, sipping an introductory glass of sparkling Cremant de Limoux. This was just to whet our appetites, to put us in the right frame of mind and very pleasant it was too. But then we went indoors for the serious business. At each place there were nine glasses on numbered settings so you didn't get them mixed up. We discussed the Limoux and Alastair ran us through the basics of champagne and sparkling wine etiquette, the methode champenoise, methode traditionelle and methode rurale. Then a brief summary of the political and economic powerhouse of the Champagne region and a word about terroir, climate, geology, geography and then the grape varieties: Pinot Noir, Meunier and Chardonnay. The Grand Crus, the Premier Crus, pressing, primary fermentation, bottling, the secondary fermentation, remouage, riddling, degorgement, and the various vintages. The quirky details were endless and it took a while to go through it.

However all the time we were being topped up from fine-looking bottles disguised with white cloths. Our job was to fill in the forms in front of us and to give marks for appearance, nose, palate and give a final score out of ten for each bottle.

Not an easy job. Then we had to determine whether we were drinking real champagne or an English sparkling wine. The colours varied from pale yellow to a pinky bronze. We looked for the size of the bubbles, the mousse, the nose, whether there was a fragrant, fruity nose or an earthy more mature nose, then the sips, the testing for acidity, yeast, balance, the long or short finish. It required all the grey cells of Inspector Poirot as the mystery deepened, but Carol plied us with gougeres – very tasty small, lightweight cheese puffs.

Alastair was not giving the wine salesman's spiel, quite the opposite in fact. This was a laid- back but intelligent, down-to-earth evaluation of each wine. It was like driving down a winding lane and at each gate coming across a different view, another landscape, another set of bubbles and a mystery to solve. Alastair encouraged us to use any words we wanted to describe the wines, then run the wine round our mouths to feel the real underlying taste and texture, to see if the wine had legs and where it would run. The other members of the group really got into the swing of it and enjoyed it immensely.

To cut a long story short we were given a list at the end and it made very interesting reading indeed. Voila! as Poirot would say. The best champagne was a 1999 Bollinger Grande Annee, Ay, which had a brioche, bready flavour and a very complex length to it. Yeast autolysis is what gives the champagne depth, the time the wine sits on the lees its length – and this is what you are paying for. That bottle of Bollinger cost £65 – the cost of storage in miles and miles of chalk tunnels in the Champagne region. A very close second was a 2001 Nyetimber Classic Cuvee for only £28.95 from West Sussex. Third was Moet et Chandon's non-vintage Brut Imperial, closely followed by a Champagne Jacqueson Cuvee 732 from Dizy. After that came Champagne Robert Desbrosse Tradition Brut from Cogny, followed by the three other English sparkling wines, all with six points; Camel Valley Cornwall Brut from Cornwall, Grosvenor Brut, Blanc de Blancs Chardonnay from the Ridgeview Estate in Sussex and Chapel Down's Rose Brut from Kent.

It was worrying after all that to hear Alastair's comment that most of the champagne drunk in the world is swilled down at weddings and parties with people hardly ever tasting it after the first gulp, and certainly not comparing one good champagne or sparkling wine against another.

The session was followed by some excellent nibbles from Carol that included terrines, smoked salmon roulades, crab cakes, thai prawns, leek and gruyere tart and a strawberry mousse to finish.

This was a wonderful experience and I can commend it to anyone. The school also runs many other wine courses and, while at £60 a head it was not cheap, when you consider that one bottle alone cost £65 it seemed like very good value indeed.

Visit www.devonwineschool.co.uk