Attention to detail.

Byline: By Bill Oldfield

Some things are so outside your everyday experiences that when you do come across them you just can't assimilate them.

Take, for example, some of the mind-boggling facts that come from studies of science.

I've been reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything (super stuff, a sort of comprehensive rough guide to science) which includes the brain-bending information that the known, or visible, universe is a million million million million (that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles across. So that's useful everyday information, then.

He then goes on to say commonly-accepted theories suggest the wider, meta-universe is much, much bigger still. But if I can't grasp a 1 followed by 24 zeros, what does bigger mean?

Then you go down from macro to micro level. Bryson tells us a proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom and that the dot on this letter `i' can hold about 500,000,000,000 of them. Hmm.

So you'd think an ancient practice such as wine making would not hold facts so difficult to grasp. Now I'm not going to start treading on our resident wine expert's toes. Helen Savage is the fount of all things to do with wine in The Journal. But on a recent trip to the Champagne region with our wine merchants, Corney and Barrow, we visited, among others, the Champagne house of Moet & Chandon.

Champagne production is fascinating and steeped in tradition and history and I'd recommend a trip to the region as an education, if nothing else. After the initial fermentation, champagne is stored in its bottles for some years to allow the minute amount of sediment in it to settle out. This has to be done at a constant temperature and the chalky ground of the region around Reims and Epernay is ideal for building cellars in which to keep the wine just right.

I knew Moet & Chandon was a big company but I nearly fell over when they told us they had 18 miles of cellars on three levels in which to store their liquid gold. That's approximately 31,680 average paces of tunnels big enough through which to drive a train.

Never mind the number of protons on a pinhead, I can't get my own head round that much tunneling. I walked a few hundred yards of them with our hosts. I just couldn't grasp 18 miles of champagne. But I knew it would be a great place to hold a party!

Once our feet were back on the ground, so to speak, we had a meal at the Foch Restaurant on Boulevard Foch in Reims. The restaurant has a much-coveted Michelin star and, as I've found with many such restaurants, it has a particular style ( possibly dictated by the Michelin organisation itself. It was very formal with the waiting staff very well trained but also very impersonal.

To me, eating, wherever you are, while being rewarding should also be a relaxing experience where you don't have to worry too much about the rules of that particular establishment.

But if you accept the formality, and the fact the surroundings seemed stuck in the 1970s, it was a great experience. And the food was fantastic, in the true sense of fantasy. Incredibly detailed, fussy, often rich; more a demonstration of imagination than a meal.

I love food that's had care, love and thought applied to it and that's what we aim for at Oldfields. But with this much detail it somehow loses its identity. However, like a visit to the Champagne region, I'd recommend visits to such restaurants every now and then, if only, again, as an education. As in the same way that I can't imagine 18 miles of wine cellars, I can't imagine eating food such as this every day. But, as a once in a while special, it was a real treat.

This week's recipe is a variation on the Italian dessert which, in the last few years, every chef seemed to want to produce. The classic tiramisu is made with a raw egg yolk but this is different and is a bit of a play on our own trifle. It serves two.