A new cognac created to be sipped specifically on the rocks was launched this week and is described as a flavour journey that will take the drinker through aromas of white peach, lemon sorbet and iced mint as the temperature of the elixir drops.

Produced in the hillsides of Claix, France, near Grenoble, Ice Cognac by ABK6 is said to develop its distinct aromas as it progressively comes into contact with cold temperatures and water.

The limited edition cognac made its debut at Vinexpo, the world’s largest wine trade fair, in Bordeaux this week.

At 18 C (64F)  for instance, the cognac begins softly and smoothly, giving off aromas of vanilla and evolving into white peach. At 12 C (54F) aromas of orange blossom are detected, before merging into lemon sorbet. And when the mercury dips to about 5 C (41), the cognac emits notes of iced mint.

The cognac is made from the Ugni blanc grape, the most widely planted white grape in France, and is best served in a tumbler glass over several ice cubes.

The suggested retail price is €37.

Though the maker of Ice Cognac, Domaines ABK6, claims they created the first eau de vie for sipping on ice, Cognac Godet was also created with ice-cold temperatures in mind.

Jean-Jacques Godet created Antarctica as a tribute to an expedition he undertook to the South Pole in 2008. The white cognac is described as having a flowery nose and a pure and smooth finish without tannins.

It is also to be served cold on ice.

Vinexpo, the largest wine trade fair in the world, wrapped up Thursday and attracted about 50,000 attendees.

A Norwegian beverage company has bottled the legend of Marilyn Monroe in an effervescent bubbly to be served in a curvy, voluptuous champagne flute in her honour.

Champagne Marilyn Monroe Premier Cru Brut debuts at the world’s largest wine trade fair in Bordeaux this week, where 50,000 attendees from 47 countries are expected to converge.

The bottle of sparkling bubbly was created to help commemorate the 50th anniversary of the blonde bombshell’s death which will be observed next summer. Monroe died August 5 at the age of 36.

Produced by the French champagne house JM Gobillard & Fils for Norwegian company Rosmersholm, the Marilyn Monroe champagne is 50 percent Chardonnay, 25 percent Pinot Noir and 25 percent Pinot Meunier and is produced in the Hautvillers, Cumières and Dizy areas of Champagne.

Described as fruity, silky and delicate, the champagne has an elegant nose and has been cellar-aged for three years.

It’s expected to retail for about €65. The champagne also comes with a set of six curvaceous flutes that retail for €159 alone.

Almost 50 years after her death, the blonde icon continues to make headlines. Over the weekend, the ivory-colored dress Monroe wore while standing over a subway grate in the filmThe Seven Year Itch fetched a cool $4.6 million at a Beverly Hills auction.

Monroe isn’t the only Hollywood diva to get her own bottle of bubbly. After delivering a loopy, champagne-fueled acceptance speech at the Palm Springs International Film Festival last year, Mariah Carey launched her own line of the sparkling stuff called Angel, blended and cellared in Reims, France.

Vinexpo is the world’s largest wine trade event and is commonly used as the launching pad for wine and champagne makers.

Champagne Baron Fuenté, for example, launches its Ecocert-certified champagne les Galipettes at Vinexpo.

Bailly Lapierre will also be showcasing its white and rosé Vive-la-Joie Crémants or sparkling wine made from Burgundy’s hallmark grapes Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

http://champagnemarilynmonroe.com

London’s luxurious Claridge’s Hotel is the winner of the Tea Guild’s Top London Afternoon Tea 2011 Award.

Claridge’s has seen a recent shift in afternoon tea clientele as the hotel is frequented more and more by business men and women from the art, fashion and media world who book afternoon tea for their meeting as an alternative to lunch and breakfast.

“As a proud member of The Tea Guild we are delighted and honoured to receive this hugely prestigious award,” stated Claridge’s General Manager, Thomas Kochs.

The Tea Guild event, now in its 26th year, is considered the ‘Oscar’ of the tea world, with London hotels and tea rooms competing for the highly coveted honour.

A team of Tea Guild experts take tea in the hotels and tearooms of London and across Britain in order to find the finest tea experiences.

All visits are anonymous in order to ensure that the declared results are completely fair and accurate.

Judges awarded points for the variety, flavour and knowledge of the teas offered, together with the quality of food, service, décor, ambience, and presentation.

With 125 points to be lost or gained on the judge’s scorecard, only those tea establishments achieving the very highest standards across a number of categories make it to the top.

Claridge’s was voted into the top spot after its tea room, The Foyer, gained a near perfect score from The Tea Guild’s inspectors.

Claridge’s award-winning afternoon tea is a mouth-watering and utterly English meal of pastries and savouries, light, crusty scones and rich clotted cream.

Patrons indulge in a choice of 30 teas from all over the world a delicious array of finger sandwiches, a selection of sweet pastries, freshly baked raisin and apple scones with tea-infused jam and Devonshire clotted cream.

Claridge’s Afternoon tea is served daily at 3.00, 3.30, 5.00 or 5.30pm.

www.claridges.co.uk

Bombay Sapphire Imagination Installation, the newest global ad campaign pays tribute to the heritage and the origin of the luxury spirits brand. The Infused with Imagination campaign consists of an art installation designed by London based illustrator Yehrin Tong.

Imagion Installation is a huge 3-dimensional piece meticulously crafted using more than 75,000 sparking crystals that took more than 2,500 hours to put together. Consisted by a series of illustrated panels, which have been hand crafted based on Tong’s original designs, the piece reveals its true beauty only when seen from the correct position.

The Bombay Sapphire bottle represents a source of imagination, bringing the different characters on the illustrated panels to life. The dazzling array of crystals illuminates each character, when viewed from different angles; the artwork reveals each magnificent piece of the Bombay Sapphire story. The characters represent varying aspects of the intriguing Bombay sapphire story: the lion and panther represent an unwavering sense of pride, luxury and of course, strong sensuality. The peacock duly represents exuberance, elegance and the exotic while the phoenix represents imagination, forward-thinking and innovation.

Renowned photographer Richard Foster worked closely with the designer to bring to life the brand’s luxurious essence and magical vision. Gin is one of the most popular drinks in the world, and this particular one by Bombay Sapphire is admired throughout the world.

Whisky connoisseurs can rejoice as the world’s only exclusively prestige Scotch whisky range, Royal Salute, have taken their art a notch higher, by crafting a blend so rare, so sumptuous that only one man in the world has tasted it – creator and Master Blender, Colin Scott. Called the ‘Tribute to Honour’, the whisky was introduced to pay homage to the oldest crown jewels of the British Isles: The Honours of Scotland; that comprises glorious legends and intrigue and remains a powerful and inscrutable ode to Scottish history. The Royal Salute Tribute to Honour marks a historical pinnacle in whisky making. These whiskies have been carefully selected from the Royal Salute Vault at Strathisla and blended by Colin Scott. Only 21 bottles of Tribute to Honour have been created, which also marks Colin’s 21 years of expertise in whisky-blending. The whisky will be presented in a spectacular bejeweled bottle, dressed by renowned jeweller Garrard, in flawless diamonds and shimmering gold, an honour only the finest aged whiskies – at least 45 years old are given. Garrard has embellished the Royal Salute Tribute to Honour flagon in a hand cast black porcelain with 413 flawless white and black diamonds.

Some of these exquisite jewels form the shape of the Sword of State: one of the trilogy of treasures that are The Honours of Scotland. Set in gold and silver, 22 carats of gemstone adorn the decorative collar and stunning flagon’s visage. Golden lions sit either side of the diamond encrusted sword, a symbol of valiancy, and patriotism, of battles fought and won.

Yes, they are available for all you whiskey connoisseurs out there from September 2011. Each of the flagon of Royal Salute Tribute to Honour come in individually numbered bottles and are priced at £125,000 (US $200,000) excluding taxes. One of the 21 bottles will be kept in the Royal Salute Vault. Interested?

Honey is the most vital and nourishing of all gathered foods, ready-made and unimprovable from the hive. Mixed with water and left for a couple of days, the solution begins to ferment, and soon enough you get mead. From it and other intoxicants sprang myths, rituals and religions and the sputtering births of what, for better or worse, we call civilisation.

As a natural product, honey retains the qualities of its parent, the nectar of flowers. When a bee delves into a flower, the plant dusts the bee’s knees with pollen, which the insect carries to further flowers, fertilising them. It’s a remarkable and beautiful symbiosis. Most commercial honey is made from clover flowers and their cousins in the bean family. Expensive honey will trumpet its “monofloral” status – that is, it’s made mainly from the flowers of a single species. I carry a jingoistic fondness for heather honey, but I was sent some really delicious stuff from New Zealand the other day made from manuka.

Bees appeared in Asia after the end of the dinosaurs, and they seem to have developed their complicated social structures around 25m years ago. Even chimpanzees gather honey using sticks, so it seems likely we’ve been eating it for a very long time indeed. The earliest representation of honey-collecting dates to around 13,000BC, a crude but tantalising cave painting from Valencia.

Honey is fantastically labour-intensive: a single worker bee can carry just 0.06g of nectar – which is nonetheless about half of her body weight – and will make around 20 trips in a day to flowers a mile or so’s radius from the hive. Nectar is 75% water and honey just 17%: back at the hive, “house” bees remove some of that moisture by a complex procedure of repeated regurgitation and evaporation. Then they squeeze it into the familiar hexagonal wax combs. Over about three weeks, as the air in the hive circulates from the beating of the bees’ wings, the nectar dries further until it’s sufficiently concentrated to resist bacteria and mould. For every eight pounds of honey the hive produces to feed its members and larvae, just a single pound will be available for harvesting. A bee would need to travel a distance equivalent to three times the circumference of the earth to produce an ordinary jar of honey.

Until the middle ages, with the exception of the odd curio like pulped dates, honey was the only sweetener in Eurasia. Its uniqueness brought it remarkable privilege in every society that enjoyed it. Because it keeps more or less for centuries it has survived in the tombs of great since the stone age. The Aryans, Sumerians, Babylonians, Cretans and Egyptians were all buried with honey – as an offering to the dead or to sustain them on their journeys in the afterlife.

For the Israelites, it was half the promised menu of the promised land. The Hebrew word for honey comes from the same root as its word for “word”: as in, “In the beginning … “. Honey represented this divine truth because it did not deteriorate or cede its perfection to nature, because humans could not improve on it, and – until “reed honey”, aka sugar, came along – it had no substitute. Bees supposedly settled on the lips of Plato, Pindar and St Ambrose when they were babies, endowing them with holy revelation and with truth.

Honey is a complex substance and cooking tends to destroy its subtleties into a sweet, sticky smear. But sometimes that’s the flavour called for, and I love it baked in gingerbread or a madeleine, and also with meat, particularly ham and duck. It goes superbly with a lot of cheeses. A crème caramel made with honey is delicious, and nothing beats it on toast. People continue to make extravagant claims for its health benefits, and here and there they may have a point. But honey’s true triumphs are surely its exquisite floral fragrance and the sweetened gold of its taste.

A CHEF has created the most expensive kebab in the world.

The dish has moved on from being a humble doner to include saffron-infused flat bread, milk-fed lamb from the Pyrenees and even edible GOLD.

The aptly titled ‘King of Kebabs’ uses gold leaf for a finishing flourish and champagne-infused mint and cucumber yoghurt completes the luxury — no wonder it costs a whopping £750.

Chef Andy Bates created the kebab to mark the launch of The Great Food Truck Race TV show, celebrating street food.

Andy said: “It took a fair bit of time to source the best possible ingredients to ensure that this kebab was the most exclusive one out there but I loved every minute.”

The breakdown in full for the ultimate doner is:

£84.00 - Shoulder of milk-fed lamb

£20.00 - Coeur de Boeuf tomatoes

£11.95 - Micro Cress and Bibb Salad

£35.00 - Chilli Peppers

£54.20 - Barrel Aged Feta Cheese

£26.95 - Laudemio Extra Virgin Olive Oil

£15.00 - Purple violet potatoes

£130.00 - Edible gold leaf and platinum

£138.00 - Saffron

£195.00 - Krug Champagne -

£40.00 - Other ingredients (garlic, lemon, salsa, mint, cucumber, yoghurt)

£750.10 – TOTAL

One of 600 bottles of Romanée-Conti Wine from 1945 that were produced during the end of World War II, set a new world record price for a 750ml bottle of red burgundy at Christie’s auction sale in Geneva on May 17.

The legendary vintage of the bottle was estimated between £35,000 to £48,000 (US $56,000 to $78,000), and was sold to a private U.S. collector for a whopping £76,132 (US $123,919).

The newest initiative from Absolut Vodka is developed in collaboration with Family Business, the agency behind previous launches such as Absolut Disco, Absolut Rock and Absolut Glimmer. The idea behind the design is to engage the consumer in “embracing the unexpected”. To embrace a degree of uncertainty, rather than planning every detail. We wanted the design is to both be engaging and put a smile on consumers faces but on a deeper level we want to challenge people to look beyond face value.

More images and video of this mind-bending design below!

– “The amazing thing with illusions is that when you can’t believe what you see, its up to your character to decide what’s real”, says John Lagerqvist, CD at Family Business.

Cycling fans will soon be able to get on their bikes at hotels from luxury chain Morgans Hotel Group, the latest name to add bicycles as a hotel amenity.

Morgans, which runs several high-profile properties including London’s Sanderson Hotel and St Martins Lane Hotel and Mondrian properties in Miami and SoHo, announced a new bicycle program this week, which will be rolled out across its properties.

Guests will be able to use Public J7 bicycles, a Dutch-inspired design destined for city cycling that features high handlebars to aid sightseeing.

The program will kick off in London, where a new cycle scheme has seen new cycle lanes popping up all over the city, at the Sanderson and St Martins Lane hotels.

Later, the service will be rolled out to Morgans Hotel Group’s property other properties, which include Ames in Boston, Clift, in San Francisco, Delano, Shore Club and Mondrian South Beach in Miami, and Hudson and the Mondrian SoHo in New York City.

Bikes are fast becoming the must-have hotel amenity, as tourists seek new ways of exploring cities while keeping their environmental footprint low.

Last year, Fairmont rolled out bikes from BMW across all of its hotels in North America, complete with miniature models for children, locks and helmets.

Scandinavian chain Scandic also offers bikes to rent at many of its properties, as does Four Seasons, while larger chains such as Marriott and Holiday Inn are increasing the numbers available at their properties.