With grapes and bronze, artists bring the world together

In between the two starry dinners of the last entry came the Caviste game night and wine tasting.

Wine is a highly personal thing, with an almost infinite variety of choice. The ideal is to have a trusted vendor who combines knowledge of their stock with an understanding of your tastes, thus being able to match you with interesting options. We undoubtably have this at Berry's warehouse shop, where we've bought most of our decent stuff since moving to Basingstoke. But Berry's is unashamedly a French specialist. I've always felt we were missing new world options there, and though they offer great deals on fine wines you almost feel embarrassed buying too much that's under a tenner. Enter, quite possibly, Caviste.

This little store within a store is effectively the wine counter at Newlyn's farm shop, so we've bought bottles sporadically from them over the past couple of years. But it's thanks to their union with Newlyn's cooking school ... first at the Spanish tapas night, and last Thursday night over game ... I'm getting the idea they may become our go-to consultants and providers in the future.

Mark Bedford, who ran the tapas tasting, was on hand again but this time for a more formal matching of food and beverage.

We started with a cremant de Bourgogne from Domaine Deliance which, in common with most of its Burgundian cousins, is a head-to-head competitor to really good champagnes for about half the price.  An excellent consideration for holiday tippling at £14.95 a bottle.

On to dinner, prepared by head chef Hannah who's appeared in these pages before as chief instructor at the cooking school.  First course, a game bird terrine with dense layers of partridge, pheasant and grouse bound together in minced pork with pistachio and cranberry, bound tightly in prosciutto.  Vegetarians need not apply.  We tried two whites with this, first a South African chenin blanc (AA Badenhorst Secateurs 2011), then the Domaine Cheveau Pouilly-Fuisse Trois Terrois 2010.  The first was a great deal at £9.95, with a depth and richness you don't normally get in bottles under a tenner.  But the second ... at just under double the price ... was a knockout, with rich fruits to stand up to strong flavours cut with a minerality that kept things clean and not too heavy.  Six bottles joined the Bencard cellar, for very special dinners.

Second course a venison stew draped over Hannah's silky, creamy mash.  The pungent flavours needed a bold wine for balance.  Mark's first option won a smile with its Sicilian origin, but the high tannins made the Gran Feudo Paradiso Rosso 2010 too astringent for me.  That contrast, possibly, made the New Zealand Pinot Noir that followed all the better.  A magnificent glass exploding with berries, big, bold, smooth; just the kind of thing I'm always going for.  The equivalent of a really fine, old Burgundy, Mark pointed out, but at half the price.  (£17.95)  So six of those came home, too.

With all the week's food and drink I needed some exercise.  Sadly, the most I got was walking around the Bronze exhibit at the Royal Academy.  But if brain waves trigger any caloric use, it was the equivalent of a big workout.

This is the first exhibition catalogue I've bought in more than a decade, because the show was so fantastic I wanted to bring it home with me to live over.  It's only on 'til the 9th of December, but if you can fit it into this busy season you really should.  It's one of the finest exhibits to hit London in years.

The concept is unique.  Rather than focusing on one artist, time period or movement, the RA picks a medium:  bronze.  Something that most cultures have worked in.  A material that has infinite variety and an almost spooky ability to convey movement and life.  It wasn't much of a stretch to imagine most of the beings in this exhibit giving a good stretch and climbing off their plinths for a party when the punters go home.

And what an eclectic group that would be.  Renaissance Christian saints, greek youths, Roman senators, Hindu gods and American cowboys, joined by a whole zoo of lions, elephants, horses, dogs and one particularly impressive Roman ram.  Familiar icons of Western civilisation are here.  In fact, any fan of Florence will feel in such familiar surroundings you'll swear you can feel the sun on your shoulders and the taste of pistachio gelato on your tongue.  There's Ghiberti's St. Stephen, liberated from his niche on Orsanmichele; Giambologna's Mercury and his quirky turkey from the Bargello; il Porcellino, the magnificent wild boar whose snout you've stroked before shopping the central market; the Medici Riccardi horse and Cellini's Perseus and Medusa, which you've probably lounged beneath while shaking off tourist exhaustion in the Loggia dei Lanzi.  And that's just the tip of the classical iceberg.  This is one of those exhibitions where, at every turn, you see something familiar and famous.

But it's the unfamiliar that's perhaps most memorable.  A 19th century Japanese incense burner held aloft by three almost-life-sized demons of terrifying but compelling fury.  One of Remington's famous slices of the wild west, with four cowboys and their horses galloping toward you at full tilt.  An elegant and streamlined horse pulling a cart with an intricately engraved gold and bronze disk from prehistoric Denmark, more than 3,400 years old!  A 17th century Dutch pug, so lifelike you instinctively stand back to prevent the spray of drool you might get when he shakes his noble jowls.  The beguiling dignity of the heads of African nobles of the Benin tribe.  A hindu god and goddess, their multiple limbs entwined in a sensuous dance and their bodies polished to a golden sheen.

Taken together, this is a testimony to man's ability to create beauty.  Through thousands of years, over multiple continents, in radically different cultures, artists have taken the same base metal and made magic.  Drink it in.  And then, maybe, kick back with some nice wine.  The story of the grape isn't so different.