Yes, champagne at New Year’s has gotten a bit tiresome, but don’t switch to controlled substances just yet—Veuve Cliquot has hit on a way to brighten things up.

We’ve always loved the mandarin orange label on the bottles, which the company calls yellow for some reason; they’re so damned natty. Someone we know (cough, cough) once even had his dining room painted to match. To celebrate the House of Cliquot’s 130th anniversary they’ve just released a limited edition 3-liter “Yellowboam” (a play on Jeroboam), equivalent to four regular bottles.

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The ice bucket, long a staple of high-class living, is often a bore to look at. Recently, however, we stumbled across an accessory that impressed.

Classy drinks, namely champagne, now have an equally classy partner in which to cool their boots. Designed by Marc Newson, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, this super-chic champagne cooler was made exclusively for Dom Perignon, but we figure you can use it for just about anything, despite the blatant labeling on the front.

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Talk about vintage champagne - some lucky bastard just found the world’s oldest bottle of Veuve Clicquot lying around his Scottish castle in a dusty cabinet that’d been locked up for the last 100 years.

Chris James, the current owner of Torosay Castle on the Isle of Mull off Scotland’s west coast told the London Telegraph he’d long been meaning to have a peek inside the cupboard, for which he had no key. After finally enlisting the help of a locksmith, James discovered the original owner’s personal booze stash, including bottles of claret and brandy, a decanter of port, and an unopened bottle of 1893 Veuve yellow label in mint condition, thanks to the cellar-like conditions that prevail in old Scottish castles. He contacted the company who informed him the ancient bubbly was literally priceless.

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With sponsored mini-films becoming increasingly popular, it’s worth taking notice when one really works.

Our pick would be The Key To Reserva, a short for Friexe Champagne directed by Martin Scorcese and written by the typically meta-textual Ted Griffin, previously responsible for 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven. The short has been around for a while, but it didn’t get as much notice as it deserved, and it’s past due for another look.

As you might expect from his AmEx commercials, Scorcese steals the show by playing a slightly more jittery and nonsensical version of himself. As he explains to Griffin (also playing himself), he’s stumbled on three and a half pages of a lost Hitchcock movie called The Key to Reserva, and he’s planning of filming it as an act of film preservation. If you’ve ever wondered what three minutes of out-of-context suspense looks like, you’re about to find out.

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