If you like great Pinot, or great Champagne, let me tell you about an event I will be helping animate in Singapore on the 7th, 8th and 9th of April. I’d love to meet up with any Asia-based readers or wine friends then. Might it even justify a return ticket from Australia or New Zealand? Judge for yourself.

The major events are a tasting and a dinner on the evening of Friday 8th April which will give you (and me) a chance to taste – blind -- the wines of the Domaine de la Romanée Conti against some world-class opposition. Tasting and dinner are separate events, but thematically linked. Both would be a great Pinot treat, though there’s nothing stopping you attending one but not the other. The tasting will give us a chance to look at three flights of five Pinots each. All that we know is that one wine in each flight will be a DRC wine. Will it stand out like a lighthouse? Or will the picture be less clear-cut than reputation suggests? That’s the joy of blind tasting. It will all be down to you, your nose, your mouth … and the naked wines.

Great wine is meant for food, of course. At the dinner that follows, we will have a chance to taste four flights of five Pinots each, and those four flights will include one of the flights from the tasting – so, yes, there will be at least one DRC burgundy with dinner. Again, everything will be served blind, giving us the chance to rate other burgundies … and other world-class Pinots. It will be a hugely educational evening, and a sensually alluring one, too.

If you like Champagne, I’ll be hosting four Champagne Masterclasses the following day, Saturday April 9th, within the context of a day-long walk-round tasting. Subjects are being confirmed at present, but it looks like one of those will be Krug and another Roederer’s Cristal. A close look at the terroir of Le Mesnil is the probable subject of the third, while the fourth will feature some of Champagne’s excitingly avant-garde smaller producers – again, terroir to the fore. Some of the growers and producers will be present, giving us the benefit of their intimate knowledge of soils, techniques and blends.

And on the evening of the 9th April, I will help present a dinner with some of New Zealand’s startlingly impressive Pinots, including the wonderfully assured Felton Road as well as Seresin, Schubert, Prophet’s Rock – and Sam Neill’s Two Paddocks, with Sam himself in attendance.

There are a number of other events, lunches and masterclasses at this three-day event which has been organised around a visit to Singapore by Allen Meadows, better known as Burghound – for details of Allen’s performance schedule, see http://www.burghoundinasia.com/burghound-in-asia-event/. The event has been put together by Curtis Marsh (http://www.thewanderingpalate.com/ and Asia Symphony of Wines and Flavours) in conjuction with Hermitage Wine. You can see the full list of participating wineries at http://www.burghoundinasia.com/news-and-updates/burghound-in-asia-partic....

It promises to be a heady few days – then it’s back to London to chair my usual Languedoc-Roussillon panels at the Decanter World Wine Awards 2011.