It all started with a sparkling champagne reception, the noise of excited chatter escalating in volume as the scope of the evening hit home. It was the 2012 Action Against Hunger’s Too Many Critics event – and our critic Joanna Biddolph is still waiting for the exclusve blend of coffee that the critics-turned-chefs never delivered to her table …

A clear blue sky, shirt sleeves and a well-poured pint of Dorset Nectar are hardly conducive to the Great Indoors. But that indeed is where I find myself, struggling to be heard by my mate over the thumping Afrobeat constrained and concentrated by the bare brick interior of Village Underground in Shoreditch.

Over-ebullient, self-obsessed, braggy, ill-informed, pompous, irritating … these are the mildest of the uncomplimentary epithets we chuck at food critics. And many readers would like to see them well and truly stuffed. This April, Action Against Hunger is giving you the opportunity to see the critics being humiliated by top chefs, in the professional kitchen at Hawksmoor Guildhall. Revenge will definitely be on the menu.

Georgia is the oldest wine-growing country on the planet, it is also producing some of the most exciting examples of natural wine anywhere in the world. I traveled to Kakheti in the heart of Georgian wine country to find out what was behind this recent viticultural resurgence.

Wagyu, the world’s most expensive beef, will be hitting butchers’ slabs in five Asda stores later this year, making Asda the first UK supermarket to sell Wagyu. And it will be available at a price we can afford. How is it possible? And why Asda? Joanna Biddolph explains …

A London café specialising in sweet treats was transformed into a Catalan home kitchen for one night only. Courtesy of Cava producer, Codorníu, ‘Bea’s of Bloomsbury’ was decorated with Bacchanalia.

Dynamic Rheingau restaurateur turned hotelier, turned riesling producer, Balthasar Ress is not shy of courting publicity. In June, ostensibly believing it would optimise the maturation of their top cuvée, they buried 18 magnums and one Balthazar of ‘RESSpekt’ 18m below the surface of a flooded quarry. Barring visits from thirsty, thieving divers, there it will rest until 2013.

I found myself returning to my motherland of Yorkshire to eat at two eateries owned by Matthew Jones, a local lad who makes encouraging noises about fresh food and local produce in all the marketing material. Voda, promoted as a bar & grill, is a stone’s throw from Huddersfield railway station, while Bar 166 is a bistro in Horsforth, a town north west of Leeds.

With ecoffee you get a choice and the chance to feel morally comfortable too. The ‘e’ in ecoffee doesn’t mean it’s delivered via the interweb but stands for environmentally conscious. The coffee is grown on bio-diverse farms under the rain forest canopy and the coffee plants grow amongst trees and other foliage so that they are a natural part of the eco-system.