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When you’ve been the driving force behind bars that have earned the title of best in the world, where do you go from there?

When you’ve been the driving force behind bars that have earned the title of best in the world, where do you go from there?

Sitting at the dining table in his north Belfast home, Frank McKee flicks through the pages of a faded ledger. “No computers in those days,” he says, pointing to the neatly handwritten names of Scotch whiskies among the columns of figures. Bowmore… Balvenie… Glenfarclas… Glenlivet… it’s like a roll-call of Scotland’s most famous distilleries. Then he stops at an entry at the bottom of a page. The date is September 1964, the place is a bonded warehouse in Belfast, and it’s the beginning of a story about a unique whisky that can command prices today as high as £50,000.

When wine in cans started appearing in shops here around 50 years ago, it was pretty dreadful stuff. The wine used was of the lowest quality, and it got even worse in the can, changing colour, reacting with the metal, and in some of the foulest cases, taking on the smell of rotten eggs. If anyone bought canned wine, they rarely drank it. Instead, they tipped it into sauces and stews. Not that it was any good for cooking. Even in the 1970s.

The popping of Champagne corks is as much a part of the soundtrack for New Year’s Eve as the bongs of Big Ben or renditions of Auld Lang Syne flatter than leftover bubbly. No midnight celebration is complete, it seems, without a glass of fizz in hand. But does it always need to be Champagne? The answer, simply, is no. There’s a whole world of quality sparkling wines out there to help you transit from one year to the next – and a lot of them are just as French as Champagne.