"Hello Birmingham, this is Kate Adie reporting from some horrifying war-torn land"...Oh no, wait, that's not right...

This is in fact Nikki Aaron coming to you from Beijing. Differences? Many. Similarities? Also many. For those are not bomb blasts, machines guns and screams of horror upon the streets of China - they're fireworks, firecrackers, and squeals of excitement, as the nation welcomes the almighty Year of the Dragon.

A great many people these days resort to buying wine in supermarkets. With our ever increasingly hectic lifestyles it's a convenient way of going about wine buying, but it's also easy to fall into the trap of buying wines which are reduced in dubious discounts, or to just end up drinking relatively uninspiring wines produced at a price imposed by the supermarkets and made by winemakers who are not exactly inspired to produce their best work.

There is of course another way; that of the online wine store or online wine clubs. I've set out below some that I'd recommend.

Every wine has a time and a place. I'm not particularly into Rosé wine but every now and then on a hot summer day I end up quite fancying a glass. At this time of year however with the wind battering the door and your car windscreen under an inch of ice there is only one option; a big hearty glass of red!

My New Year resolution is to try harder to believe the public statements of government ministers and others to whom environmental regulation and protection is a bane. The trouble is that they do so much which appears to go against their pronouncements that it will be a very difficult resolution to keep.

The Government for instance said that it would be 'the greenest Government ever', and its members continue to claim environmental credentials. This is whilst, amongst other things, denigrating and threatening the planning system, watering down every initiative which might help nature (such as the provision of Marine Conservation Zones) changing the rules on solar power generation and setting up badger culls against all available scientific advice. It has also apparently provided trillions of pounds to the banks' begging bowls, but cut and cut and cut again the infrastructure for nature conservation and environmental protection and enhancement, an infrastructure which only cost a few tens of millions in the first place.

As for house builders and developers, well, they are past masters at presenting a less than balanced view. One of their favourite complaints is that the planning system is too slow, and causes too much delay. Ask any ecological consultant and you will hear tales of developers working hard to comply with whatever regulations affect their project - except those relating to environmental or wildlife protection. When this oversight is revealed, often late in the process, suddenly it's the 'fault of the system' and something must be changed. They are right: their approach to compliance must be changed.

Things became about as extreme as they can get just before Christmas. A spokesperson for house builders blamed the nation's housing shortage on wildlife protection legislation. I had to check that I had not hibernated and woken up on the first of April. This person seemed unaware of the recession, a generation of policies against building council houses, and the extreme difficulty first-time buyers have securing mortgages. These seemingly count for nothing, the problems are apparently all down to people trying to protect our dwindling wildlife.

There is a saying that if you think training is expensive, try costing ignorance. We could have no clearer example of that than the current approaches to the twin economic and environmental crises that face us. Wealth is ultimately created by adding value to natural resources. Until the economists become ecologically literate enough to understand this the problems will multiply, especially if we continue to move money from where it is needed (the natural environment) to where it may be frittered away (so-called economic development).

I would love to get to the end of the year with my resolution intact, but I suspect that it may be broken by the time you are reading this.