Highest Bidder (BBC2): HOW much would you pay for a bottle of wine - £5? £10 if it was a special occasion?

How about £105,000? It sounds ridiculous but that's what the oldest intact bottle of wine fetched at auction in 1985.

The bottle had been found in a bricked-up Paris cellar and was believed to belong to Thomas Jefferson.

Once it was sold, doubt was cast over whether it was actually from the 1700s or a fake from as late as 1950.

The new owner called in Michael Broadbent - the Christies auction house wine expert.

He pulled out the cork and tasted the ancient wine, declaring it was the genuine article and despite lying in a cellar for hundreds of years, was still drinkable.

But however old the wine, could it really be worth that kind of money?

What do you get for your extra pounds - a better class of hangover?

There was a lot of pretentious nonsense spouted to try and convince us that thousands of pounds is money well spent on a bottle of plonk.

We were told that wine is like women, so drinking a vintage is like having an interesting conversation with an old lady whereas a new wine is more fun and sexy like a young mistress.

We were instructed on tasting - a very complex process involving staring at your glass for ages and smelling the wine before letting it pass your lips.

The real wine critics had none of Jilly Goolden's fun descriptions of what they were drinking - instead of talk of petrol fumes and woodlands, they waffled on about layers of taste and rolling flavours.

Not that the ancient bottles that come up at auction will have any of those great qualities - we heard that white wine often survives being stuck in a bottle for years but red (my personal favourite) often becomes corked.

This hasn't put the wine collectors off though, with frantic bidding for bottles of claret that can never be drunk.

But the wine connoisseurs don't deal in just red and white. They talk of wines being cult (up-and-coming and trendy), icon (the must-haves) and trophy (the dream drink that can be showed off).

So it all comes down to snob value and that very common pastime of keeping up with the Jones's.

It's not about buying a drink you'll enjoy with your Friday night take-away but having the right bottle on show when the neighbours pop round.

Published: 08/08/2003