There are just four days left to taste Britain's most expensive mulled wine, though you'll need to visit the Grand Terrace Champagne bar at St Pancras International in London.

Cinnamoney is made from a fairly basic Bordeaux rouge, calvados, champagne and the usual festive spices such as cinnamon. It's all yours for £60, and according to the Evening Standard it's worth every penny.

It sounds like Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney is back in London, a place that grows more absurd by the day, at least at the posh end of the Monopoly board. Unable to expand their mansions upwards because of planning constraints, today's tycoons simply dig down to install their underground pool, cinema and gym. You can't expect them to go to the local Odeon, can you?

Apparently there are now up to a 1000 JCBs buried under London's streets because it is cheaper to let them dig their own graves than lift them out with a crane. And as the rich retreat behind their security gates for fear of the mob, one can almost picture the day of reckoning: starving masses on one side, and the elite fending them off with a barrage of champagne corks.

Naturally we are talking magnums, the "in" bottle size whose sales at Waitrose have soared 120 per cent since January. Tesco went one better by selling six-litre methuselahs of Lanson Champagne at Christmas for £499 in its top four London stores.

Before long even methuselahs will be passe. When it comes to champagne in biblical proportions, nothing beats a good midas or melchizedek, which holds a mighty 40 bottles. The St Pancras champagne bar will sell you one for £10,000, not that you'd want to run for a train after drinking it.

Scotch whisky has tended to super-size in value more than volume, although Macallan did both last January when its methuselah-sized decanter called M sold for a world record of $628,000 - more than £400,000 - at auction in Hong Kong. My request for a sample went unheeded, but I did get to taste a 50-year-old Balvenie this year, priced at a ridiculous £26,000.

So how should we react to all this? Should we turn green with envy, or self-inflate with indignation like some Channel 4 documentary on the rich and their obscene extravagance? No, the only suitable response is laughter. Happy New Year.