Jen, Coz, Leo and some wonderful wines

Mark and I spent Sunday with our friends Coz and Jen, and their new baby, Leo. We hadn't met Leo before – he was born less than a month ago – so I took a bottle of Champagne with us to celebrate.

It was 'just' basic Bolly – one of my favourite of the big brand non-vintage Champagnes. I like its richness – I've never been a big fan of over-priced battery acid, which (to my mind) some Champagnes seem to taste like. I'd decided in advance to allow myself to have a glass (maybe even a glass and a half) of wine. After all, we were celebrating and even though I'm on a diet, there are certain occasions (like celebrating the birth of a baby) when it would just be wrong to stick to the rules too closely (the knack lies in recognising these occasions while not making excuses to indulge too often on some spurious pretext).

We arrived, wielding our bottle of Champagne, and I'd no sooner handed it over than Coz (who is incredibly generous with his wines) said: 'That'll keep – I was planning on opening a bottle I brought back from Champagne last year,' and popped the cork on a truly delicious bottle of Pierre Gimmonet Oenophile vintage fizz. Gimmonet, for anyone who hasn't heard of him, is a talented producer who makes his own wines in the Champagne region rather than selling his grapes to a big company like Moet, Bollinger or Mumm (which is what most growers do). These 'growers' Champagnes' are increasingly trendy in hard-core wine circles, and I think they're often really good wines sold at (relatively) reasonable prices.

So I sipped delicately at my half flute of Gimmonet, then had a mouthful or two of the Bolly. But I'd been quite cunning. Knowing how persuasive Coz can be when he starts opening interesting bottles of wine (and how I have a professional weakness for tasting them), I'd set myself up as the designated driver for our return journey. This certainly curbed my enthusiasm, and much as I'd have loved to hoe into the Champagnes (or any of the other wines that followed), I knew I couldn't – and so did everyone else.

I'd told Coz and Jen that I was going to cook them lunch – they hadn't had the time or energy to cook properly since Leo was born – and I'd come prepared. Or rather, my quails had been prepared, and all I needed to do was to shove them in the oven. They'd been marinating since the previous evening in a mixture of Ras el Hanout (a blend of Moroccan spices that includes cumin, coriander, cinnamon and rose petals) and some olive oil. I'd stirred about three tablespoons of spice into a couple of tablespoons of oil, then rubbed all that yummy spiciness into eight quail, crammed them into a tupperware container and put them in the fridge overnight. When I got to Coz and Jen's, I put them in a pre-heated oven at about 200C for around 40 minutes, then served them with a simple salad enhanced with a few chopped walnuts.

I happened to mention to Coz that I was thinking of using the recipe for a tasting I'm planning to do at the end of the month: an investigation into which kinds of dishes work best with German Riesling. Inevitably, Coz insisted on opening a bottle of Josmeyer's Les Pierrets Riesling from the 2001 vintage – a wine he'd bought on a trip we all took to Alsace two or three years ago. It was lovely with the quail – but I'm still interested to see how a slightly lighter, slightly sweeter German Riesling will work with the dish.

Dessert was even simpler than the main course: a salad of peeled, sliced blood oranges with some chopped dates, all sprinkled with a teaspoon of rosewater (go easy on the stuff – it's very fragrant). Coz opened another bottle to go with this, a Beaume de Venise from a co-operative in the Rhône. It was just right with the pudding: light, fresh and not too sweet.

Then, to round things off, he brought out another bottle of wine, a Schloss Gobelsberg Gruner Veltliner – just because we happened to be talking about Austria. If you've never tasted Gruner Veltliner before, I urge you to track down a bottle of this marvellous grape – it's one of the most food-friendly white wines in the world, and the hallmark grape of the Austrian vineyards, in the same way that Malbec has come to be associated with Argentina or Shiraz with South Australia.

The Schloss Gobelsberg wine was outstanding – but, as I did with the Riesling and the dessert wine, I did no more than sip at it to taste it. The same can't be said for Mark, who snored loudly all the way home...