A 19th-century mine, millions of bottles, and a rescue carried out in stages while the city above it was fought over street by street.

Everyone knows the beer. Belgium also quietly makes genuinely good cool-climate wine, and has done for long enough now to have its own appellations.

Vintage versus non-vintage, the sweetness scale nobody explains, and what you are actually paying for at the top end.

Same chalk, same grapes, same method as Champagne — just a few hundred miles north, and only ripening properly since the climate warmed up.

You would not call all red wine Burgundy. Stop calling all sparkling wine Champagne — six styles, one gas, six genuinely different drinks.

A name on a wine label is a legal claim, not a marketing flourish. Here is what it actually promises, from 1907 French riots to the loophole that created Super Tuscans.